Tag: mailvox

A reader emailed me this amusing proclamation of victory by a collection of Internet gammas:

Marvelous Milestone in the History of the Sub Dedicated to the Misanthropic Midget

My Fellow Gammericans,

I remember it like it was yesterday. That day several months back, when I lead the bloodless coup to overtake r/VoxDay. After taking and holding the high ground at The Battle for Spaghetti Hill, it quickly became apparent that reinforcements would not be arriving to defend Dork Lord’s honor.

On that day, this sub had a paltry 84 members. Our ranks have since swelled to 200 Gammas strong- from all across the Flat Realm. Secret Kings all and chomping at the bit to bite some Unauthorized ankles. Indeed, Kings, I promise you ankles aplenty.

Take pride in this day, GSK. Yet, take heed- the war rages on. I beseech you to not rest on the laurels, for the Unauthorized Empire still looms ahead, albeit battered and greatly bruised. We are still called to man the basements battle-ready.

However, on this day we feast on the bones of Alphas chased down with the tears of Sigmas. Celebrate, for you all have earned it. Troll hard or go home, as our Gamma forbear Marv Albert once said.

Faithfully Yours in Gammahood,

Grand Inquisitor Ipse

It’s always amusing when people of whom you know absolutely nothing and care even less are convinced that their actions are of supreme interest to you. Projection, I suppose. We’re a bit too busy these days to pay attention to how the anklebiters are occupying themselves these days. But, as long as it keeps them happy and they stay on the right side of the law, I suppose it’s harmless enough.

It is mildly surprising that Reddit would even permit the continued existence of an r/VoxDay when even the Wikipedia page about me has less information than it did ten years ago.

A reader sends a list of 10 objectives that were compiled on December 14, 2018. It is fascinating to observe how much the ground has shifted since then:

Objective #1: Stop the Human Trafficking.
This goal has been underway full speed since day 1. With deadly efficiency, no mercy and special forces. Under the radar and below the public news cycle.

Objective #2: Weaponize MIL-INTEL Against Them. 
This plan has been underway since Inauguration Day. Trump visited CIA HQ on his first full day in office. Obama’s secret pardons require post-2016 crimes.

Objective #3: Remove Rogue Nukes & Comms.
Think North Korea nuke mountain collapse 2017. Think Iran. Syria. Ukraine. Venezuela. Pakistan. Think Subs. Missiles. CERN. EMP & SATCOMs.

Objective #4: Secure Senate & Supreme Court.
McCain. Flake. Corker = no real GOP majority. Kennedy. Roberts = no real conservative court. Senate and SC solved with real majority 11.18.

Objective #5: Form a Trusted Global Alliance
Think fall of Saudi Arabia in Oct 2017. Think Xi. Abe. Moon & Kim in Nov 2017. Think Putin. Brazil. Italy. Mexico, etc… 2018.

Objective #6: Strengthen US Military/Economy
Military completely funded through all of 2019. Tax cuts and low interest puts normies at ease. Caravans. Gangs. Antifa pretext for Martial Law. [Note: Corona-chan will serve much better and has already been implemented in Hungary – VD]

Objective #7: Expose Media & Social Giants
Think advent of QAnon and Trump’s Twitter. Showcase media hypocrisy day after day. Showcase social media censorship daily.

Objective #8: Voter Fraud & Voter ID.
Let “them” repeat crimes in 2018 midterms. Build iron-clad cases with obvious verified fraud. Use fraud evidence as pretext for 2020 voter ID.

Objective #9: Control Financial System.
Force Queen. Macron. May. Merkel to submit. Force alliance to hand over SWIFT encryption keys. Force FED restructure & pardon all intra-gov debt. [Note: again, Corona-chan has proven useful in this regard. – VD]

Objective #10: Remove & Arrest Cabalists.
Pick off 1 or 2 “old guard” each month with “deaths”. Pick off 100-200 “CEO’s” each month with “MeToo”. Pick off 10K-20K “suddenly” when “Storm is Upon Us.”

It’s clear from this review that the Q narrative has provided a considerably more reliable map with which to anticipate future events than the establishment news narrative has. The one thing that is obviously missing is Corona-chan, which has proven to be a much more useful tool than any of those that were previously conceived.

I was asked earlier today about the negativity being expressed by some otherwise reliable individuals whom I respect, and my response was to note that a) they are not Americans, and therefore b) are unfamiliar with how the God-Emperor customarily operates. Their analysis is not necessarily incorrect, it is merely incomplete in that it fails to take into account President Trump’s unparalleled ability to anticipate and ju-jitsu the enemy’s actions.

BB believes he has discovered the King of all Secret Kings of fiction:

I believe I’ve found the most Gamma book in existence. It’s called Ready Player One. It’s about a guy who has to play retro games and recite lines of dialogue from movies to win a fortune. In one scene it describes him perfectly reciting every line from Monty Python’s The Holy Grail, and how the people listening to him were cracking up and bursting into uncontrollable laughter as he did so.

The conversations between the protagonist and their friends are some of the worst examples of gamma behaviour I’ve ever seen unwittingly put on paper. Every scene displays the worst aspects of a Gamma.

I find it very hard to believe this character could top Kvoth from The Name of the Wind, but he definitely sounds like a serious candidate. And note that both of these books were successful and very warmly received by the tattered remnants of SF fandom.

Of course, the characters tell us so much more about the authors than we ever wanted to know….

A nurse-practitioner from the Midwest:

The hotline for this medical system has been receiving 1500 to 2000 calls per day. It is the job of the various Providers to respond to these calls with a general medical prognosis and directions based on the symptoms the patient has described over the phone. Coronavirus has very specific symptoms and unless those symptoms are present it is unlikely the person has it. If they do have that list of specific symptoms, the patient is then told that they “likely have COVID19 and to continue to quarantine themselves for at least 14 days, and if symptoms get worse to go to the ER.” These patients are NOT being actually tested, nor recorded officially.

This specific medical system is big enough that they have developed their own, internal test for the Coronavirus, however patients are not actually tested unless they have to symptoms sufficiently severe to place them in to Tier 1/ER/ICU levels of care. Such symptoms would be a either a very high fever or problems breathing. Medical Professionals who have been exposed to the Coronavirus are also being tested. The phone system is a fairly effective way of dealing with patients at the volumes that medical professionals are needing to wade through them.

The main takeaways from what I have overhead and know is that Coronavirus cases that aren’t severe aren’t being tested, so what effect this will have on the reported numbers, I’m not sure. Also, that larger hospital and medical systems have developed the tests internally, so whether or not the CDC/HHS or any other Federal agency acquires them in bulk isn’t as urgent as it is being portrayed.

A medical security officer, also in the Midwest:

I went into the EOC and suggested that they push the idea up that since there are literally HUNDREDS of vacant restaurants all over, that they rent them for a song (using eminent domain or even Trump’s emergency declaration) and institute drive-through testing like they have in Korea… Literally powerwash them, slap your signs over theirs and use the drive-through and mic hookups already in place…

The lady who I told, who is a senior nurse and emergency response director, paused, thought for a few seconds and said “Well, that could work, but there’s so much more we have to do than just driving through, we have to take temperatures etc”

All I could think was, “bitch, that’s what the WINDOW is for!  Have a tent by the lane, have them rub the stupid thing on their own forehead!  Jesus, use your goddamn imagination!”

We’re fucking doomed… And it’s due to the same stupidity I saw in the senior leadership in the Army that led me to leave…

A nurse in the Southwest:

I can confirm that ED nurses have been instructed to forgo masks. In our particular situation, I believe that it is mostly due to supply issues. People off the street have come in and stolen boxes of masks that we usually leave sitting around and non-clinical people have come onto the unit and taken them as well. Nevertheless, it is frustrating because, prior to now, we have all worn masks on a regular basis during flu season.

The real idiocy is that our N-95 masks, for which we were all fitted upon hire into the ED, have been slated for provider-use only. We nurses do not have any, yet we are the people that go face-to-face more often than any other. However, there are some options, less than ideal, being made available. I am not completely sympathetic to these decisions but the supply matter has hit us hard and I have some understanding of the motives behind them.

A doctor from the South:

I am a medical doctor and I believe both my wife and I have contracted corona. We were unable to test for it because it was unavailable given the strict guidelines in place at the time. One of the things I noticed on a pathology report I saw from a patient in China are these so-called thick mucous secretions in the lungs . This reminded me of what happens to an asthmatic’s lungs when they are having an attack. For asthmatics, they die because they cannot oxygenate their bodies because there is so much mucous in their lungs.

I thought, why not treat these lung symptoms from corona  the way you would for an asthmatic .The reason for the mucous shouldn’t matter.  One of those ways is to use a medication called albuterol which you nebulize and give yourself a breathing treatment several times a day if necessary.

I had been listening to my wife’s lungs for several day,s and on one day I noticed a decrease in breath sounds in one of her lobes along with some wheezing. This is an indication that mucous was plugging up the bronchiole. A worrisome sign and a harbinger of pneumonia potentially coming. I started her on two treatments a day which immediately caused the mucous to break up. We knew this because she started coughing it up. One day later, her lungs were clear and there was no wheezing. I did it to myself just as a preventive measure one time a day. We continued this for about a week before stopping it. It appears we have recovered from the infection.

A retired nursing director from the South:

The corona virus has exasperated the shortage of nurses.  Many of them are mothers and now that schools and daycare are closed they must stay home to take care of their children.  The state medical system is now short hundreds of nurses. Observation – this is what happens when you have to have two parents working in order to be average middle class, no margin.  Not only have we leaned our supply system with no inventory buffer, but we have done the same to our labor pool. 

A reader writes about leaving his job. He’s doing the right thing, because he has correctly assessed the situation and that place is going to go out of business with or without the assistance of Corona-chan.

Today I handed in my resignation at my current work, after the situation the last few months has turned from bad to intolerable.

I am currently reading Corporate Cancer, and it has become quite obvious that I myself am working in a converged company. In this case it is the HR department that is leading the convergence. Interestingly, they are not going against the wish of the customers, but rather their own employees, more specifically the most valuable ones. I guess they are too difficult to work with because they have an opinion of their own?

This is a very new company without any revenue yet, but here are some examples of the HR-led convergence craziness:

• They are now doing all the hiring, even though none in HR knows anything about the industry
• One colleague went from pre-HR employee of the year to “Drama King” within a few months, and was subsequently forced to quit. All because a young women at work that was in love with him repeatedly made complaints about him to HR because he did not reciprocate her feelings.
• The same young woman, with no prior work experience – except for one year where she did less than what was required, spending most of her time complaining that her job was boring – was promoted to [a junior executive position].
• They required that we should have transgender bathrooms, which resulted in unisex bathrooms instead, to the dismay of all the women.

In the last four months four key employees have resigned, but they do not seem to understand the problem, or even be willing to see that there is one.

In general, however, I recommend always finding a new job before leaving the old one. But regardless of the ideal sequence, the point is to understand that a company’s convergence is a flashing red sign to start looking for work elsewhere.

I am a boomer and an ER physician and I agree completely with your prioritizing younger people over older people when resources are limited and given that all other factors are equal. Unfortunately, they almost never are.

Except, of course, they already are now in many countries, and if events follow the expected course, they will be in the USA too. There are 5,000 respirators in the UK available to serve as many as 7.9 million cases. The Italians are already adopting triage practices and other European nations are anticipating the need to do so.

And frankly, this relentless boomer bashing and treating the worst of my generation as exemplary gets really annoying.

This sensitivity is downright amusing. My generation has found the relentless Boomer boomering to be really annoying for as long as we can remember. You Boomers were annoying when you were getting divorced and our friends were returning to elementary school in the fall with haunted expressions and new last names. You were annoying when Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven was named the #1 most-requested song on the main rock station for the 25th year in a row. You were annoying when you first proclaimed 40 the new 30, then 50 the new 30, then 70 the new 50.

And Boomers are still every bit as annoying today. I recently saw a grotesque television commercial that literally showed incontinent old Boomer women rolling around in their underwear, with the tagline OUR BODIES CHANGE, BUT WHY SHOULD WE? The name of the commercial? Of course, it’s AGELESS. Companies wouldn’t still be marketing to the Boomer’s trademark generational narcissism if it didn’t continue to work for them.

The Boomers haven’t changed. They don’t want to change. They are still proud of who and what they are. And that is why the younger generations, particularly Generation X and the Zoomers, will continue to relentlessly despise them. The thing is, we’ve been doing it all along, they were just too self-absorbed to even notice. But now that the media culture no longer caters solely to them, they’re shocked to discover that they weren’t considered cool, they aren’t admired, and no one else wants to be like them.

This email tends to demonstrate, as if it was necessary, the utter inability of Boomers to imagine that everyone else isn’t as relentlessly narcissistic as they are:

After reading the “boomers need to be left to die” post I was reminded of something. Logan’s Run seemed to advance this basic strategy. Now though, facing another of the inevitable crises that blindside everyones cool plans, age has been upped to about 65+.

Allow me to exaggerate:

Sure sounds neat if you are younger. Because all the points you make are largely true. What you and the bulk of the responses put forth as the logical solution seems incredibly dangerous.

On one hand, if you really believe this, the consequences of the consequences may well roll right over you once it becomes the culture. Perhaps you could volunteer to self extinct upon achieving that benchmark age, because that is at the bottom of the slope you are promoting.

Second, when you successfully implement this “boomers must die” program, the message is: Now that you have spent your life paying and paying not only for your own family, but every unproductive fellow citizen the state could force upon you, just die already, now you are useless and unfortunately expensive.

Please, explain to me why anyone witnessing this regime would feel eager to work to support it, as any contribution in the positive you have made is deemed worthless at the cut off age.

This isn’t some butt hurt defense of being older. This crisis isn’t some Titanic sinking unexpectedly, this is simply life being random and deciding your new and better form of socialism is kill the old. How old is too old? When the bottom really drops out, is 65 too old? How about 40?  30?

Triage is fine, and necessary in short term disasters with small populations of a common culture and will obviously be employed until resources are found to save the remainder. Once you cast aside the elderly, you define life not worth living. Pick a demographic, demonize it. Replay Zimbabwe. $$$$$$$

And yes, boomers are not your friends and yes they have created a lousy situation. Many generations do. Are you promising your way is better? Because that is clearly what they thought.

First, we know perfectly well that we will experience the consequences. So what? We don’t care! We have known we weren’t going to be collecting much, if anything, in the way of social security since literally the very first day we paid into it. We have known that our selfish, self-centered predecessors weren’t going to leave us any inheritances since we first started saving money. Our only mistake was to believe that they would at least leave us a functioning society. The Boomer’s very questions reveal his total ignorance of the generation that follows him, let alone the subsequent generations.

 Second, this isn’t The Day of the Pillow. This isn’t a “Boomers must die” program. This is merely the time-honored, eucivilizational concept of “child-bearing women and children first”. Only a Boomer could possibly assume that not being prioritized is tantamount to a death sentence.

Third, the Boomer again reveals his narcissism. Who would work to support such a regime? The very same sort of men who have planted the acorns for the mighty oaks under whose shade they never sat for generation after generation. The fact that this is not only an alien concept, but one that is actually perceived as a negative one is something that damns the Boomer far more comprehensively than anything I can possibly say.

Fourth, we’re not those who “cast aside the elderly”. We loved our grandparents. We prioritize our children. The Boomers are those who adopted the twin philosophies of “never trusting anyone over thirty” and “he who dies with the most toys wins”. Yes, I promise that our way is better, because our way is the old way, the way of our ancestors, the way that you Boomers proudly rejected.

And fifth, whether what I have put forth as a logical solution is dangerous or not is irrelevant, because it is inevitable. The math doesn’t lie.

You made your beds. Now die in them, preferably with some dignity if you can muster it for the first time in your cursed dyscivilizational existences.

An emailer reveals a number of assumptions:

Emails. The gamma can’t help but type novels. So, help me understand this about the hierarchy: I’ve always thought that most people ignore emails out of passive-aggressiveness, to control conversations, and because they’re cowards.

Clearly though, there’s a time to ignore people. However, I hate to do it, because I don’t want to be the above mentioned things. I’m fine being an asshole, but a coward… no.

How do you choose when and who to ignore? You obviously engage annoying people privately at length. Why?

I’ll leave it to the readers here to point out the obvious ironies here, but I will correct a misapprehension and point out that I do not engage annoying people privately at length, ever. Most of my private replies are very short and I very seldom respond to a second email. The only place I provide longer responses is here on the blog.

And for any even modestly public figure, the correct time to ignore emails is every single freaking day. You know those people who say that although they don’t respond to every email, they do read all of them? Rest assured, most of them don’t even do that.

An industry veteran explains why it doesn’t make sense for us to create a game review site and channel:

Hey Vox – There is a hole in the community, but it’s not a hole in the market. Because there’s no market for games journalism.

Games journalism traditionally offered three things:

One son of a Delta has some unpleasant childhood memories stemming from his attractive mother:

The part about alpha trying to hit on the very attractive wives of lower status men resonates with me. My mother was always a very attractive woman and she was married to my father, a delta. Alpha men were always hitting on her, including my father’s boss at a Christmas party that later devolved into a huge argument when we all returned home. 

It’s a difficult situation because it’s almost inevitable and is going to be hard on the Delta husband even if his attractive wife is entirely faithful to him. First, it’s always pleasant to know that people are drawn to you, and second, it’s actually the Delta’s lack of confidence in his ability to keep his attractive wife that tends to undermine the relationship.

Because if he gets his panties in a bunch every time over the behavior of others that she can’t control, eventually she’s going to decide that she might as well do the crime if she’s going to do the time anyhow.

The father shouldn’t have argued with his wife after the Christmas party, he should have complained to the boss’s boss. The most effective weapon against an alpha is a bigger alpha.