There has been discussion lately concerning the rate of new cases of COVID-19 in the U.S. The daily rate of new cases reached a peak of 31,564 on April 10, dropped to 20,658 by May 28, but has leveled off and risen slightly to 21,084 through June 9, according to data compiled by the Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering. However, this doesn’t begin to tell the whole story, as states are in different phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. Comparing state-level data over time shows that there are actually many broad similarities to how the pandemic progresses in each state. The few exceptions to these common characteristics are also interesting.
For the analysis, new-case-per-day data from the Johns Hopkins CSSE database is used, and 7-day moving averages for each state (and D.C.) are taken to smooth out the data, which goesthrough June 9. Most states follow a pattern of a rise to a peak, followed by a less-steep decline. The plots below show the percent decline from the peak versus the number of days since the peak occurred. Note that the absolute rates or rates per capita are not considered, only the progression of new case rates following a peak. (I put that in bold so people won’t complain about it – that would be a different article.) Also, most states have increased their rate of testing over the last month or so, while at the same time the corresponding fraction of tests that are positive rates has gone down; we don’t attempt to correct for these factors in this simple analysis.
The Johns Hopkins data can be divided into geographic regions (Northeast, Midwest, South, and West), which is done here to keep the plots from being too crowded. Interestingly, states within each region for the most part tend to have similar characteristics.
For the northeast region, most states are at least six weeks past their peak, and the current number of cases is a small fraction of what occurred at the peak. The dashed lines show the general path that most states follow, from upper left to lower right; the other plots will have the same dashed lines to guide the eye.
New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania reached their peaksnearly two months ago, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut roughly a month and a half ago, while New Hampshire and especially Maine had their peaks more recently. Note, however, that they all do follow the same general path.
Vermont is an outlier here, having reached very reduced levels of new cases somewhat earlier, with a resurgence over the last few weeks (shown by the arrow), although that still puts them on par with Pennsylvania after 60 days. Sometimes media outlets will claim a surge where that is a gross overstatement, but this case may qualify as one.
In the Midwest region, most states are in the middle area, similar to New Hampshire, but they are still are following the same basic path. Minnesota and Wisconsin had their peaks more recently. North Dakota has had a slightly faster drop from the peak.
There are two outliers: Michigan and Missouri. Michigan had been very similar to northeast states, but has had a recent surge in cases, shown by the arrow; average cases has increased nearly five-fold. However, it could be that a large number of older cases were added to the database or there is a spurious data point; I believe the CSSE database counts cases when they are recorded, not when they were actually diagnosed, and the increase in the average was due to a very large, single-day spike.Missouri is unusual in that they had a peak a longer time agocompared to most Midwest states, but the drop-off has been much slower than in most other states.
In the south region, most of the peaks have been within the last three weeks or so, but for the most part as a group they still follow the same path. Florida, North Carolina, and South Carolina are at their all-time highs. Louisiana is more like Pennsylvania, D.C. is more similar to many midwest states, and Delaware is similar to Connecticut. West Virginia has had a much steeper decline than most, while Georgia and Oklahoma are more like Missouri, with a very slow drop-off.
In the west region, we see a wide variety of situations. The states in the upper left have had very recent peaks, with California and Utah, at their peak; these are similar to many southern states.Colorado and Wyoming are slightly more advanced than most Midwest states, but not as much as most northeast states.
There were many more cases of resurgences, as shown by the arrows. Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, and Washington were in various stages of decline before having a recent increase (still below their peaks of a month or more ago). Unlike Michigan, these all appear to be a real trend and not due to a few spurious data points, although the per capita rates are still very low for Hawaii and Montana.
Alaska had reduced case rates as low as 10% of their peak, but then reached a new high a few days ago. Oregon was unusual in that they had peaked and then declined for only a couple of weeks before having their rate increase to new highs. Nevada is the real outlier in the west; they have almost returned to the highs reached nearly two months ago after having dropped by about 50%. Washington’s resurgence over the last three weeks has been similar to Nevada’s, except it started from a lower base.
Obviously these plots don’t capture all of the nuances of the data, including periods of time where there are minor deviations from a smooth rise and fall of the rates. But they do show a lot of the commonality among the progression of states’ new-case averages over time. Some states that have been more open all along or opened up earlier, like Georgia, Missouri, and Oklahoma, have seen a much slower decline in case rates, but nevertheless they have still declined. One wonders what will happen to states that have remained mostly closed until recently, and whether recent increased activity due to protests and riots will see more states with a resurgence in the future.
trends are pointless now. Everyone is already dead.
Especially in states that didn’t lock down. Those people are even more dead.
Nicely analyzed. What I see here is, It doesn’t matter if you closed or didn’t close the state, everyone was along for the ride. So the conclusion is that Either the closures were no good, _or_ they were too late, and not worth doing at that point. But i could be biased.
Too late is likely accurate. The history has already been rewritten, but the freak-out and sudden push to lock everything down in mid-March immediately followed “everything is fine, nothing to see here, hug a Chinaman” (something, something, preferred nomenclature). The whole thing was a farce: the disease was already spread too widely by the time the lockdowns were instituted.
I forgot all about that. There was a video and everything that went “viral”. Followed within 14 days by: “If you go to a park you want to kill grandma”
No. It’s contained in molecules. Even locked down still means you gotta go to the store. Everybody had to go to the store. You can’t hide good enough from a fucking molecule when everyone has to go to the same places. Little paper masks ain’t gonna stop it and neither is hiding at home. I’m convinced that the numbers are no different than they would have been if we’d have done nothing at all. I certainly have zero faith that the number of “confirmed cases” represents anything meaningful. Nobody tested me or anyone I know. I was at the airport when that was the only place that assuredly had a real infection in California. There’s no way to figure out how many people have/had this period. The entire exercise has been pure theater and likely was prompted by a desire to make Trump look bad, same with the phony polling and riots. Nothing this year has been related to it’s stated purpose.
I suspect that the surest route to infection is living with a large and/or multigenerational family. And yeah, most people have no control over that.
Fortunately, I do 🙂
I’m pretty sure I’ve already had it. I have a seven year old and he’s been out running around this whole time. About early May, I got a really bad sore throat. I felt the spot where it started and it worsened for 4 days until I couldn’t eat without pain. Then, I was sore/tired for a couple of weeks after. Might have been from my kid or from going to the store, dunno. It was remarkable because so many measures were in place to avoid transmission and I still got sick. That’s one of the reasons I think the lockdown didn’t really help stop this whole thing.
Introverts’ moment! I’d be pretty frustrated by now if I were an extrovert dependent on restaurants, bars, sports, and such.
I called barn door from the beginning, or near–.
I’m as introverted as the next introvert, and not being able to hit up my local drinker is making me miserable.
Having someplace other than my living room to kick back, drink a couple beers, and do the crossword, has been unexpectedly important to my mental state.
It’s OK; nobody wants to live with you either. :-p
“likely was prompted by a desire to make Trump look bad”
Perhaps a few weeks in. But I think early on it was standard politician thinking:
i) if a few people die I’m going to look bad and that can’t be allowed to happen.
ii) there is a crisis. We must do something. This is something, therefore we must do this.
No doubt there was a strong cost benefit analysis. I just know how happy they were to seize upon an emergency. The worse the better. If they loved the president ( if he was a D) they would have minimized it and carefully protected the economy, especially in an election year. The whole thing was amplified by a good measure in order to make Trump look bad and now, they’re pretending it worked for the same reason.
For sure. By locking down and only allowing people to go into grocery stores with limited hours, we ensured that everybody was crammed into a small space at the same time, which is a surefire way for preventing communicable disease. I mean, NORMALLY that would be a terrible idea. But in this case, the stores were deemed VIRUS-FREE ZONES, so it worked great. Or would have, if only we’d done it sooner! Like, in January 2017!
COVID-19 didn’t exist in January 2017. If the lockdowns were to have been effective, they would have had to be instituted in January 2020 and to have affected only those individuals who had recently traveled abroad (specifically, to China) or had been in contact with someone who had. But then it would have just been called quarantine. Locking down the entire population two months too late was a pointless gesture entirely about advancing political careers and appearing “smart”.
But Trump existed in JAN17, which is what really mattered.
they were too late
Too late.
Lockdowns started in March based on a death in Seattle in late February. Officials testing tissue sample found evidence of Lil Rona in California in early February. Work in Ohio shows cases in January.
Thats been my contention all along. I was sick as hell in December with something, and 3rd week of January Jugsy had it. She saw her doc, and he just shrugged and said “its some virus, not the flu. Its going around. Ill give you something for the cough.”
Im not saying correlation = causation, but all the symptoms matched up. The funny thing is, I was around 80 year old Tres Sr. a couple times, coughing & hacking and he didnt get so much as a sniffle. However, he’s been taking hydroxychloroquine (plaquenil) for a couple years now for rheumatoid arthritis. Again, purely anecdotal.
Pater Dean came down with a nasty cold in early March. He just tested positive for antibodies, and is pretty sure that was the ‘Vid. Which is great news.
My question – how the hell did a virus which supposedly arrived here in late February make its way to rural Texas (as in, 3 1/2 hours from Dallas) by early March?
It was here last year, and I’m pretty sure I caught it from someone from texas in early march.
Everyone in my office got sick in a three week period in January, and I brought it home to my Wife. One guy tested positive for the Flu, but at least five of us tested negative.
Some got lightly sick, and I got my ass handed to me for a week and took 3 weeks to fully recover.
I’ve always suspected it has been here since December.
I like seeing those news stories which come close to vindicating me.
Anecdotal things from GA:
– The perception at large here is that the testing rate has gone WAY up, identifying more cases. The state’s report on # of tests per day shows that by about early May, the number added per day went from mid-to-high 4-digits to low 5-digits, and the reported cases went up too.
– There are regularly drive-up testing lanes in the local Wal-Mart parking lot now, so lots of folks are doing it on their own out of curiosity.
– There are still special-cause events showing up in different localities. Where Iive, things had been slow until the local jail and one of the nursing homes ended up with big spikes. And when that happens, it becomes hard for the locals to tell whether there’s any actual spike outside of the special-cause events.
– A friend who’s a nurse in the hospital now reports that it’s very common (and wasn’t before) for people to test positive, to BE ADMITTED to the hospital, get some (sometimes very little) treatment and observation, and then be DISCHARGED THE SAME DAY. They thought it was odd. The guess is that the perverse payment incentives drive it.
I was over my sister’s place the other day (the nephews done crashed their computer to the point it wouldn’t boot), she commented that at the hospital she works at they were getting a lot of positive tests for kids who were admitted for other issues. They weren’t showing any COVID symptoms, but were still tested, and came in positive. If that’s because there’s a lot of asymptomatic cases, or there’s a lot of false positives is unknown.
Or it could be exactly what increasing herd immunity looks like.
Herd immunity acting by forcing the virus to evolve to a less virulent strain.
If they’re old enough to screw it up in that manner they’re old enough to fix it.
Nah. I blame my sister. The youngest’s account started having issues booting into Windows, so she logged him in under her account… which had Admin rights. I had to restore from a backup to get it back into a bootable state. I also suggested they update their backup routine (the backup was from February).
I’ve also got an image of the machine clean saved on one of the drives for them as well. I’ll be over there for a cookout in a week or so, and I’ll step them through making a restoration image as well.
That reminds me, anybody want a free desktop? I’m moving and I don’t really have the space for two full size towers, and I don’t want to just pitch it. It’s got one of maybe 5 stable fx9590 cpus in existence so it also doubles as a space heater.
Sure! I could definitely use it. What’re you thinking for price?
I already said did free, just cover the shipping. It’ll have a 500GB harddrive wiped in it, but I have the windows 8.1 install disc and the key for it. Monitor, keyboard, and mouse as well. Just need speakers for it.
CPU is a liquid cooled AMD fx9590
Motherboard is Asus sabertooth 990fx
32 GB of G Skill ripjaw for RAM
Corsair C70 vengeance case (looks like a giant military ammo box)
The graphics card is a mid range AMD, but I took it out to clean the dust and I don’t have it in front of me.
nevyn599 at hotmail
Email sent.
That’s pretty dope. / Slangin it with the cool kids.
My niece and nephew are down for the summer. They’re quite fond using ‘hella’ quite a bit. I try to throw in an occasional wicked, rad, fly, wizard or sweet to keep them on their toes.
Georgia’s positive rate has been relatively constant.
I appreciate the work that went into doing this, but it seems to me that there are so many confounding variables that none of this really tells us what’s going on. For example, are the numbers rising because of new cases or because of increases in testing? There doesn’t seem to be a consistent error rate (or a very wide one) for the tests being used, or even the same tests being used in different area. Finally, why is “new cases” even a metric? Do we measure the flu (or any similar virus) by “new cases”? Especially when the fatality rate is continuing to drop and tell us that – yes, indeed, it’s kinda like a bad flu (fatality-wise, anyway). Add to it that the % people who get this and simply never know it – because they’re asymptomatic – and I refuse to play their game and start using “number of people infected” as any kind of metric that is useful for anything.
IOW, Ozy’s tl;dr version is “don’t ever play their fucking game.” These numbers are being used to shitcan your freedoms – what few you have left. New cases means nothing – truly. It is scientifically meaningless at this point and only being used to claim a mandate for new impingements of rights.
Yeah, I just want to know about hospitalizations and deaths. And even hospitalizations sounds suspect if what Pine_Tree says up there is happening and they’re goosing the number.
Even deaths are suspect because of the way they are being counted, but it is the only number I look at.
The biggest thing I’ve paid attention to is deaths,the percentage of hospitalizations relative to the total positive tests( In AZ its at 9%), and available capacity. AZ seems to be peaking at under 2k cases per day with a bit under half being from the 22-44 yr age range that has accounted for all of 5% of the deaths.
75% of the deaths are 65+.
Even with deaths you still need to look at “excess” deaths compared to actuarial expectations. If Arizona is “normally” expected to have ~600 deaths per week, and they are seeing 602 deaths over the past week, then they aren’t really having any excess deaths so it doesn’t matter what someone decided the cause of death was. If 75% of those 600 expected deaths are age 65+, then there isn’t even any additional risk to the elderly population.
There haven’t been any US states nor metros reporting excess deaths for the past 3-4 weeks. And that includes a period of unusual violence.
In other words, things are back to normal in Chicago and you are more likely to be murdered than die of coronavirus.
Absolutely. I’m curious how the behavioral change will affect overall death figures. People are driving significantly less by working at home for example. We won’t know for another year or two.
Correct. But any good news that comes there will be hundreds of bureaucrats screaming to take credit and any bad news the bureaucrats will deflect blame and beg for more power.
It is very important to note that Excess Deaths are **extremely** unreliable for recent time series. It usually takes upwards of 4-6 weeks for all deaths in an area to get reported. And so it may look like you had very few excess deaths last week, but that is because a local hospice or clinic or whatever only reports this data monthly. I was blindsided when using this data a month back to do exactly this analysis.
I suspect civil liability drives a lot of all this, but IANAL.
How are cases being reported? Do they include both positive serum antibody tests and positive virus tests? Are they making any effort to make sure that people who were tested earlier for viral load and found positive and later tested positive for antibodies are not double counted? For instance, if I went to the hospital a month ago and tested positive, and then got tested for antibodies due to a different subesquent medical procedure (maybe in a different health care system, or in a battery of tests where the ordering physician didn’t see the original results, or as a result of policy that all blood work have a COVID test appended to it)?
How are cases being reported? Do they include both positive serum antibody tests and positive virus tests?
Positive virus tests.
When looking at new cases, the question I have, for which I can’t seem to find an answer easily for AZ, is the rate of positive tests against tests given. Haven’t looked that hard, either, as I have pretty much checked out of the COVID derp.
Even then, new cases is not a particularly useful metric, unless you can use it predict new hospital admissions. Which I doubt, because many-to-most hospital admit COVID cases are first identified at the hospital.
One confounding variable, as far as setting policy in AZ, is how many cases are actually from AZ and not Mexico. That is a number that you absolutely will not find, due to enthusiastic efforts not to obtain it. It matters, because Ducey (Idiot-AZ) just cut the cities loose to set their own policies in response to the rise in cases. That can only make sense if the rise in cases are actually people from AZ. It makes no sense to put in a mask policy if the rise in cases is people from somewhere else.
Of course, our immigration policy is now officially insane. Travel from Mexico is banned unless you are coming for essential business. Seeking medical care is essential business. So we are now barring healthy people, and letting people with infectious diseases in. Clown World.
The data I see for AZ test positivity is 17-18% over the last week or so. But AZ’s daily test count was actually going DOWN until recently, which tells me the state is still mostly testing people who report symptoms. But you would know that better than I being closer to the front lines.
Aw c’mon, you’re shitting me.
Interesting that Mexico is seeing a rapid rise in C19 deaths but no Central American countries are.
The border may have opened up more in recent days, but that was the policy for awhile.
But if the border has opened up, that means we still aren’t screening out people with infectious diseases.
One confounding variable, as far as setting policy in AZ, is how many cases are actually from AZ and not Mexico.
One thing I wish the state dashboard would do is break down the daily case rate by county rather than just show raw numbers, then we could actually quantify that by identifying a rise in Yuma, Pima, Santa Cruz and Cochise counties.
91-divoc has county data
Yup. Most of the growth is Santa Cruz (Nogales) and Yuma.
Mexico going through their C19 “first wave” right now.
Similar growth in New Mexico border counties compared to northern NM counties.
Thank you. 2753 over the past week from the border counties, out of 10,519 total.
When looking at new cases, the question I have, for which I can’t seem to find an answer easily for AZ, is the rate of positive tests against tests given.
The state publishes it daily. 7.8% are positive…assuming you believe the state’s data.
https://azdhs.gov/preparedness/epidemiology-disease-control/infectious-disease-epidemiology/covid-19/dashboards/index.php
LOL so I just got off a bus (doctor visit) and some ghetto white homeless looking bitch kept taking her mask off so the driver kicked everyone off. At my stop 🙂
God smiled upon you today. That or you are going to get the covid.
Rhywun definitely has the cooties now.
Y’all gonna riot?
Did you invite them in for drinks?
Ugh fuck no
It’s cool, the homeless bitch is used to drinking outside. Nice stoop you got here…
Just be circumspect about it.
Go buy a lottery ticket.
Beat the driver with a pipe.
He shouldn’t be spreading pointless panic like that, he’s threatening the safety of everyone on that diseasemobile.
MA: GOVERNOR BAKER SAYS INDOOR DINING CAN BEGIN MONDAY
Good deal. Now do VA and PA.
Some counties in PA can do indoor dining. You have to be in the “green phase”, but you’re still restricted. 50% capacity.
Fuck Gauleiter Wolf. I hope he gets impeached.
I must have occasional dyslexia – I read that as “I hope he gets impaled”. I re-read it and was disappointed.
Why not both?
Truly the benevolence of Chickenshit Charlie knows no bounds. A real man of the people, he is. He even took the Red Line that one time!
Gauleiter von Wolf is releasing the rest of us into the wild on June 26th. Except, of course, if you want to celebrate Juneteenth (actually Dec.6, 1865) today then the virus has consented to take the day off.
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2020/06/only-one-pa-county-is-not-given-approval-for-green-phase-lebanon-county.html
Everybody, but Lebanon county. He’s punishing them for defying him.
I’m staying away from the bars this weekend. It’s going to be like New Years and St. Patrick’s day rolled into one.
Nah. That’s scheduled for August 1st (and still on apparently).
It does appear he is punishing the local state reps. from Lebanon. I’m surprised York County isn’t staying yellow.
/looks upthread
Excellent. It appears I can start planning a bike ride.
“Green phase” still has restrictions.
I see there are no plans for removing all restrictions.
I’ll retell my questions from a few days ago.
Death density in TN continues perfectly linear with time. So was case density until a couple of weeks ago. We’ll see what happens.
Most states with high early death density have leveled off: the curves are concave down. However, most states with low early death density have increased; those curves are concave up. This implies some convergence to some long-run American death density; it would seem that factors and controls vary from state to state, but sooner or later the devil will have his due. This also implies that the formal controls don’t much matter in the long term: how people behave and interact and the nature of the contagion is wrought; it will be what it will be, and it is what it was going to be.
I’ll say that if I catch it, I want to catch it later rather than sooner.
I think like that.
The trick is to wait as long as you can to afford better medical efficacy but not to wait so long that you become a weak, worn-out bag of WormChow that medicine can’t save.
I think I’ve had it, but, if not, I’m guessing I don’t want it any later than 2023 because I’m no spring chicken.
sooner or later the devil will have his due.
Indeed. The only change the lockdowns could have made was reducing deaths because of hospital overload.
As it is, we have extended to COVID pandemic by flattening the curve. We will get to the same numbers as if we hadn’t. But extending the pandemic is placing its own stress on hospitals. Three months and counting of having COVID wards with full droplet precautions is beating the living hell out of the nursing staff.
By the way, why did I have to pass a Turing Test to log into Glibs.
:squints: You know who else complained about being tested for being a robot?
Deckard?
What’s a tortoise?
Leo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brion_James
Wow, this guy died in 1999 at 54 years old. The Ice Man. Leo, The horible accent guy from Tango and Cash. Basically every 80-90’s villain in action movies.
Oh wow I didn’t realize he was that general in The Fifth Element.
And Kehoe in “48 Hours”
“The Ice Man”
Vous m’accusez?
Peter Weller ?
DenverJ?
Juneteenth was June 19, 1965, when a general gave public notice in Galveston, TX, that the slaves in TX were free per the Emancipation Proclamation.
December 6, 1865 was the ratification of the 13th Amendment, which freed the slaves in states that had not joined the Confederacy and thus were unaffected by the Emancipation Proclamation. That is, the Civil War wasn’t being fought to end slavery, since they didn’t free slaves in Union states until after the end of the Civil War.
So black people will be thanking whites today for fighting the Civil War and freeing the slaves?
Any white guys that are 160 years old?
If there’s blood guilt, then there must be blood innocence.
That is, the Civil War wasn’t being fought to end slavery
And the proclamation E.O. only applied to areas not under federal control. Curious, that is…
Nuance isn’t useful to anyone.
Juneteenth is celebrated on different days in different parts of the country for obvious reasons.
Juneteenth was June 19, 1965,
So slavery existed until after I was born. Did not know that.
Jan 27 1973. Though the last one was release from servitude Nov 14 1974
Of course slavery wasn’t abolished, the practice just fell out of political favor, but still has it’s proponents in both parties of congress.
I treasured my draft card.
yup. Every Man in the country is reminded when he turns 18 that he could, at any time, be enslaved if the will of the people decide to do it. It’s part of living in a democracy.
Will of the people?
How about some war-boner congress-critters and a president?
I’ll cede that point.
Canadians are weird.
:Hover over link:
…. Yeah i’m gonna skip that one
Essential Protests, Non Essential Work
Awesome!
Not sure if its intentional, but both of them have the masks below their nose.
First the new coach says is ok for the players to engage in political protest while they are at their jobs and now this. They really don’t want me to watch them this year. Oh well, they suck anyway.
The Redskins have decided to remove the statue of former Owner George Preston Marshall at RFK Stadium. Under Marshall’s leadership, the Redskins were one of the last teams to integrate black players onto their roster. There have also been quotes attributed to him that have upset many.
Specifically, Marshall once reportedly said that he would “sign black players when the Harlem Globetrotters start playing white players.”
In the 1960’s the federal government threatened to boot him out of RFK Stadium if he didn’t sign black players. The Redskins decision to remove the statue comes on the same day that the Minnesota Twins decided to remove the statue of former Owner Calvin Griffith, due to racist ties.
I’m pretty well finished with pro sports. The games suck and everyone involved sucks.
What do you do for unwoke entertainment?
AMC.
Mel Brooks DVDs.
Conquer the world.
Crusader Kings 2, Europa Universalis 4, 80s anime, DVDs and Blu-Rays of classic movies, JRPGs.
I actually started playing my first campaign as a member of the Byzantine Empire, and not a lot of aggressive expansion but playing the marriage game.
It has become… Degenerate. My last character slept with his sister in-law (a titled duchess) to ensure a child because his brother wasn’t getting it on with her for… reasons. When the heir was a girl i had to then arrange a marriage between her and my son to make sure the title didn’t fall out of our hands.
Sounds about right. If you then followed up by arranging the assassination of the sister in law and your brother.
That goes without saying.
Both those games are excellent at turning you into a horrible human being without you even realizing it. CK2 on micro-level, EU4 on macro.
I honestly at one point got angry at an old guy, because I gave him a mosque with intent of knocking him off after a few years so I could get it back plus any treasury he accumulated.
Only he got a son, so I had to go kill the son first. Easy enough, children are bad at plotting.
But he had more and at one point, I swear I was furious at him for making me murder all these children.
I did get it and about 120 ducats at the end.
I’ve also gotten mad at positive events because they spoiled plans I’d had in motion for years.
I started a game as the Count of Worms, and was looking at creating the Dutchy of the Ehine, which required taking Mainze from the Eponymous Prince-Bishop thereof. I’d garnered a favor from the Duke of Upper Lorraine so I could make him support my claim when my chancillor fabricated one, and built up a treasury to finance mercenaries for the war.
Then the Emperor went and created the Duchy in question and gave it to me.
I was pissed. The favor was now worthless, and I had the hassle of having a Prince-Bishop as a vassal, and they’re had to get rid of.
The rest of that game became a comedy of errors. I was trying to acquire the territories to create a particular grand duchy, and failed to gain any of them, but ended up murdering my way through the family of my second wife while ending up as the preferred candidate to be the next Holy Roman Emperor – a title I really didn’t want because of the constraints and the mess of foreign wars the current one had gotten bogged down in.
I was playing a lot of Apex Legends (it’s free); then they sent out their woke message. League of legends, Civ 5 and Supreme commander 2 have been my go to’s this last month.
I’m in the process of buying a huge house of a project on 1.6 acres that’s going to be my default ‘entertainment’ for the next 6 months. I’m glad of it. Computer game sand most media has gotten really dull to me. Dare I say? Am I, growing up? Nah… the world has just gotten to PC soaked for my tastes.
I write.
*avoiding
damn typos
Does it end with Orinco sailing away?
I’m gonna smack ya in ya face
Also:
“restrained”
“mechanism”
“avoiding”
Alright, not also “avoiding”
USPSA, sporting clays, weekend backpacking trips, crossword puzzles, Metrovanias, and turn-based tactical combat games.
Supposedly I should know in two weeks whether or not I’ll be working the Factory Gun Nationals.
Nuts, I’m only doing the Race Gun Nationals this year. I gotta get around to getting a Carry Optics gun…
I’m fine watching the local high school and my kid’s college games.
I’m not counting on public schools and colleges to not virtue signal.
Sure – but I’m not paying for it – except tuition and taxes – dammit!
I can’t wait to see what happens when a play engages in political protest the chattering classes dislike.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez✔
@AOC
Happy #Juneteenth!
To celebrate, let’s pass legislation that makes Juneteenth a national holiday and enact H.R. 40, Rep @JacksonLeeTX18’s Commission on Reparations.
How are you honoring today?
Well, it’s a normal Friday so I am working at a job dedicated towards building things while your comrades dedicate themselves to destroying things.
Unfavorable opinion? I’m not totally unopen to the idea of reparations. I just don’t think my idea of what it would take would be very popular.
I am in favor of reparations for former slaves. As they are all dead, nevermind.
Sheila Jackson Lee should have a commission to study how someone so wholly stupid and as incompetent as her could have been elected.
Reparations on the table – looks like the Black vote will go 100% Dem.
I’ve said it several time over on Discord, but here I will put my prediction:
Amnesty in trade for Reparations.
Plugs the divide between two out of three pillars of Dem base, endless graft opportunities for the third.
Will it last? Obvious not. Will it last long enough? Probably.
Amnesty in trade for Reparations.
Amnesty from what?
For illegal immigrants, similar to 1986 but broader, with additional weakening of border controls.
So the Dems get amnesty to illegals, weaken the border, and shut up about reparations?
Or do do the Dems get amnesty and reparations?
What pillars? What divide?
Dems give Latinos amnesty, Blacks reparations and Whites get the cushy jobs disbursing the funds (and skimming). Those being the three pillars of Democratic party I currently perceive. Because usual argument about reparations is “but but what about those whose ancestors weren’t even americans?!” – well there you go.
Yes, maybe growing up and then getting hit with ethnic civil war which to me came out of nowhere colors my perception.
So there’s really not a trade of amnesty for reparations. Basically, the Dems get everything to cement those three pillars of their base. And maybe as early as next year, if they take the Senate and the Presidency.
Why would anybody who isn’t a Dem support that? Is the idea that we can’t make the identity politics grievances go away?
whether recent increased activity due to protests and riots will see more states with a resurgence in the future.
Only the Reopen protests will lead to increases. Lil Rona is scared of BLM protestors and rioters.
On this note, ReopenNH will be at PorcFest on June 27th, 2020. I will be there. Glibs meet-up?
Does this mean they’re all gone?
Only certain ones.
Restaurants, gyms, hotels, and a host of other businesses are still restricted with no end in sight.
Governers + lampposts
In False Flag incidents…
“The man”…. sure….
Grand theft: Northview Road
On June 13, a man was reportedly being chased by another man near the Rocky River High School softball fields. When officers arrived, the victim said that his daughter had told him that she had observed the suspect attempting to break into their cars.
The man reported that he had made contact with the suspect, who took his shirt off and told him he wanted to fight him.
The suspect left the area, but while speaking with the victim, officers received another call from a resident on Beaconsfield reporting a suspicious person without a shirt on.
Contact was made with the man, identified as a 35-year-old Rocky River resident, who was positively identified by the victim as the man who was attempting to break into his 2015 Ford F-150. He was arrested.
In any fight, bet against the first person to take their shirt off. World Star!
Wife works at a large hospital in Arlington Texas. They’re currently running 2 ER’s, one for Covid and one for everyone not Covid related. They’re in the process of opening up another wing of the hospital to act as a 2nd Covid unit.
Thanks BLM…
Apple is closing all its (remaining) stores in Arizona. I’m assuming the one that got looted at Scottsdale Fashion Square was already closed.
What will mac people in Arizona do?
Learn to code?
According to Big Bang Theory, the people at the Genius Bar aren’t really geniuses…
Forever?
Hope so. I’m less worried about Apple than I am that it’s a harbinger coming of Lockdown Part 2.
The state will gets its Wave #2 by hook or by crook.
Covid 2 Viral Boogaloo?
You’re braver than I. I intentionally refrained from using the ‘b’ word, so I wouldn’t wind up on some NSA list.
I see they are yammering about reparations again. What a clusterfuck that would be. Actual descendants of slaves, none of whom have 100% slave ancestors, along with millions that have no slave ancestors but do have black skin would receive a pittance. The vast majority of any money put towards that would be looted by the bureaucracy created for the purpose of distributing it. A bureaucracy whose budget would far exceed the total amount of money designated for ‘reparations’.
What a fucking scam.
old joke: Guy visits DC as a tourist. He sees all of the monuments and great buildings and then starts checking out the HQ’s of various agencies, taking the tours. He gets to the bureau of Indian affairs offices and sees the lobby, etc. He gets on an elevator and accidentally gets off on the wrong floor….the working offices. When the door opens he sees an open floor divided into small cubicles. It is so large that he cant see the opposite side or either side right or left….thousands upon thousands of cubicles. Each one has a bureaucrat seated at a desk that is piled several feet high with files. There is a low hum from all of the people talking on phones and clicking away at keyboards. He walks a bit down the first aisle and comes upon one of the bureaucrats seated at his desk, head in hands and the guy is bawling his eyes out like a baby. Tourist steps in, places his hand comfortingly on the bureaucrat’s shoulder and asks “Sir, are you ok? What is the matter?”
With bleary eyes and face streaming with tears the bureaucrat turns to him and says “My Indian died!” then he turns back and begins blubbering uncontrollably.
Fuck reparations.
We are all descendant of slaves and slave owners. Depends on how far back you want to go.
They found me under a rock.
I know because the people who found me while hunting for mushrooms and then adopted me told me so.
That’s what happens when people look for mushrooms without proper certification.
Im sure if I looked back far enough, but great-great-great Grandpa Tres arrived here from the Alsace-Lorraine area of Switzerland with a group of Mennonites and other Anabaptists. Fortunately for me, Grandpa Tres was thrown out of the church (I cant grow a beard- Id be useless mennonite) so I dont know too much about doctrine. But I dont think slavery was our bag, baby.
Yes, but you benefited from that sweet sweet white privilege.
If you don’t agree, then you’re suffering from white fragility.
Not to mention the benefit of nearly every inherited medical problem, thanks to their inbred asses.
MARRY OUTSIDE THE CHURCH ONCE IN A WHILE!
So you’re saying you can have the cultural in-religious preferences, but you better be a proselytizing religion?
depends on how many members of your congregation you want to have flipper arms
Alsace and Lorraine have never been in Switzerland.
They’re currently in France but were controlled by German at one time. Elsaß (Alsace) has a Alemannic dialect which is related to Swiss-German and Swabian.
When did Switzerland get Alsace-Lorraine?
w/e
/fuckin’ pedants
I had to look it up….the old family homestead is in Wedernberg.
excuuuuuuusse me!
What is the already nearly one billion dollars and rising that corporations are throwing at NGOs if not “reparations”?
Plus the myriad current and historical affirmative action, quotas, minority special programs, etc.
Graft
I think for reparations to count it has to be made unwillingly.
I wouldn’t count these as “willing”.
Well i’ve been sick all week with a cough and runny nose, and a sore throat earlier. Got tested and it came back negative. If a guy can’t get sick and get some of that sweet Covid cred, what’s he gotta do?
Go find the homeless chick at Rhywun’s bus stop, and gratify her orally. That should do it.
Even the death numbers are intentionally skewed.
Every year between 10 and 70 thousand people die of the flu. This year the number is zero. They are all covid-19, including any pneumonia deaths. We are way below 118,000. They word it as if we are way higher than that, however.
Funny how flu/pneumonia case/deaths dropped off after the discovery of this particular coronavirus.
Reading about the history of Conscription in the United States. If you needed any more reasons to hate WW: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_States#World_War_I
No one wanted to join your stupid war, so you decided to enslave them.
You might want to get tested again…lots of reports of false results.
Bonus, Civil War Draft:
Hey Joe…. So we took a vote, and we all decided you would be the best one to go instead of James
I think there was an awful lot of sandbagging that went on as well.
I mean yeah, when the government doesn’t allow dissent, you would be surprised how little dissent there is.
And to bring it full circle, the complicit newspapers also refused to print stores about the flu pandemic in the foxholes and waited until the flu reached Spain (neutral) – thus the reason the press called it Spanish Flu.
Ok. I’ll add this one last Thing, and then i’ll let my Anti-conscription hobby horse out to pasture for the rest of the day. The amount of times things like “Re-institute the Draft” and “National service” comes up in regular political discourse tells me that Americans don’t even care about Slavery. They dissaprove of a certain form of slavery practiced at a certain point in the countries history. But being against it? No, they actually don’t care.
Update on the soufflé.
Too many potatoes so it wasn’t fluffy enough but was damned delicious. Next time a little less potato and one more egg white. Other than that it was a good first effort. All was consumed.
Did you have a sitcom situation where you spent hours trying to prevent loud noises so it wouldn’t collapse?
…and once Suthen got the souffle in the oven, a troupe of ballet dancers entered the kitchen….
Touring company of Riverdance.
…followed by a parade, Animal House style
That is usually how things go.
We have dogs in the house. Sometimes the neighbors dog or cat walks by and can be seen through the glass door.
Our dogs go apeshit. You cant believe how loud they are.
I cant believe that didnt happen while the soufflé was baking.
Not exactly but we did try to not bang things around and stayed out of the kitchen.
They aren’t that fragile. It was overplayed in comedies for a long time.
Just don’t open the oven before it’s done. The rush of cold air will cause a collapse.
I must confess I was imagining a couple dogs having a romp through the kitchen, accompanied by Yakety Sax.
“The souffle isn’t the souffle. The souffle is the recipe.”
– The Impossible Girl (and last good companion back when Doctor Whodidn’t suck. ::sheds a tiny tear::)
Throughout the corona panic Harvard Square had free parking. When I noticed it in late March I thought it was the end of days. I’m happy to report that parking is no longer free. I didn’t want to pay 3 bucks to pick up my Shake Shack burger, fortunately I wasn’t ticketed.
I have enjoyed the light traffic on the 15 (they even have most on-ramp traffic lights turned off), but I will accept the heavier traffic happily if that means return to normalcy.
https://www.johnlocke.org/update/flattening-the-curve-means-always-meant-having-higher-hospitalizations-now/
David Angelo had a bit when he would talk about the recession, and he would say “Now i know i’m the only American who has a memory longer than 5 years, but…” and then go on about how the story had changed.
Seems like he could update that to 3 months.
The lockdown was supposed to buy us time so that we could prepare. Now it is clearly about OBEY
They never want this to end.
Hallmark should come out with a new line of greeting cards especially for sending to govt “leaders” and bureaucrats: the “Get Unwell” collection.
“Dear Governor. Congratulations! You have 100 new sick constituents. Enjoy extending the lockdown!”
Seriously, the government power trippers have no incentive to see us get well and see the economy reboot.
Impoverishing the population has always been a major tool for tyrants.
CHOP is racist.
We’re blacking out CHOP…the viral death of black bodies was the catalyst for this current movement and we need to make sure we remain focused. This means both policy and systemic change to our systems and healing space for black people.
So that’s exactly what we’re creating. A series of events in which we center black healing and community.
What we need from our non-black allies are donations of money and supplies and the willingness to support by quietly protecting sacred space for black healing. We need allies on the outskirts who are willing to be a physical barrier of protection and to peacefully deter potential interruptions.
We will be socially distancing. Please wear masks. If you don’t have one, we will have some extra available to make sure we are protecting ourselves.
“What we need from our non-black allies are donations of money…”
Only whites should give money? Sounds like reparations at the point of a gun to me.
Has anyone inside that cluster ever been productive a day in their life? Or are they just a bunch of Obamas that weren’t raised with a silver spoon in their mouth?
Nice to be thought of as a wallet with legs, huh?
the viral death of black bodies was the catalyst for this current movement
And here I thought it was a cop kneeling on a black guy’s neck.
If people hadn’t been whipped up by three months of panicmongering and confinement…
Are there actual numbers supporting the “blacks disproportionately impacted by Covid” narrative?
‘I Told You So,’ Whispers Ghostly Image Of George Orwell Hovering Over Nation
Chick-Fil-A Now Open On Sunday But Only For Black People
On their news feed today it said: “CNN poll shows Trump behind Hillary Clinton by 25 points.”
Oh,man. That Chick-Fil-A one is great
And the “my privilege” line. LOL.