CNN idiots say Jan 6 was the single worst act of political violence since the Civil War, making JFK's brains just chopped liver I reckon

 

Fauci and others are not wrong to make comparisons between influenza and COVID-19 in terms of infection spread

One year of COVID-19 infected ~ 8.67% of the US population.

The average influenza year produces a similar result: about 8%.

Deaths are another matter entirely.

A typical flu year involves 36,000 deaths, or about 11/100k at current population.

COVID-19 gave us roughly 515k deaths in one year, March on March, or about 155/100k.

C19 has been 14 times more deadly than the flu.

But will it continue to be?

At this same point last year there were about 27k more dead from C19 than there are today, 108k vs. 81k.

Keep in mind that there are only just so many people with comorbidities and other vulnerabilities to fuel the death fire.

If the S&P 500 regressed to trend level tomorrow, it would fall to about 1551 according to the geeks

Think of it as fair value.

Another way to get there: 

GDP(63) = S&P fair value

$22.061 trillion x 63 = 1390

That formula worked for most of the post-war up until the Trump era. The fancy regression analysis done by the geeks always came up pretty close to the same result, but not lately.

Still another way to look at it:

S&P 500 4230 / GDP 22.061 = 192.

That's an elevated ratio which was common before 1929, but we've never seen such levels in the post-war.

Sum ting funny goin' on. 

Today is the 77th anniversary of the Normandy invasion by the Western allied powers

My dad served in France and Belgium. He never talked about it much at all, when I was growing up or when I became old enough to understand.

We didn't "celebrate" the day or otherwise mark it in any way. Neither did anyone else.  Same with most of the "war" holidays.

They just wanted to forget the war and move on.

And they did.

They were young and had lives to live.

The war sucked.

Biden can crow all he wants about "creating" jobs: The deficit in full-time compared with the 2019 average is still 5.1 million in May; just getting back to where we were before this debacle occurred will take years

 May 2021 full-time jobs: 48.5% of population

Average 2019: 50.4%

Missing full-time compared to 2019: 5.1 million

 

 

Federal extended unemployment pandemic payments are scheduled to end in early September, coinciding with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan

 Or is it the other way around?

In any event, the Taliban is already taking control of the Afghan countryside while the US Taliban of Commerce is celebrating victory here at home.

32 years ago we could have supported the right side but instead our elites chose labor arbitrage to make-ah the moolah, ruining our own country and making China great again

 

Fredo Fauci on US mortality rate for COVID-19 vs. influenza

Anthony Fauci should have known better than to make a mistake like this in March 2020, saying the coronavirus mortality rate was 2%, but I think he's getting beat up over this unfairly.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

He meant case mortality rate.

Technically that's not a thing, but that's how most of us were talking at the time, as a synonym for case fatality rate. Admittedly using the word "mortality" in this way only confuses matters. And to this day. Yes, I'm talking about Alex Berenson.

Fauci was, after all, responding to the popular press, understanding correctly how the popular press talks about these matters.

Mortality rate is a technical measure of the number of deaths in a particular population per unit of time, usually annual, usually expressed as the number of deaths per 100,000 of population (not per cases!). Since the virus was barely 3 months old, any annual rate could only be a projection, not an observation, and I don't think Fauci was so foolish as to be making such a projection based on not even three months experience with a new virus.

The implications of a 2% mortality rate would be astounding. It would mean 2% of the US population dying over the course of a year, or 6.6 million. The quick spread of the virus from China to the rest of the world by aircraft was reason enough to think this magnitude of death was possible if in fact prevalence of the disease were to dwarf that for influenza.

I don't think Fauci meant that. I think he meant case fatality rate, which fluctuates with cases and necessarily declines over time. One person gets sick with something new and dies, the case fatality rate is automatically 100%. The second case survives, the rate falls to 50%, and so on. CFR is a function of cases.

Mortality rate is function of population and time.

His flu comparison shows that he didn't mean the mortality rate technically understood. He didn't technically give the "mortality rate" for the flu.

He gave the case fatality rate for flu, which is 0.1%.

Prevalence of influenza in the US is roughly 8% of population annually on average (the morbidity rate). In any given year roughly 8% of the population gets the flu. 8% of 328 million people is 26 million cases, 0.1% of which die every year, or 26,000. If the prevalence is a little higher, you'll get more deaths. Just one more point of prevalence gets you to almost 30 million cases and 30,000 deaths, and so on. And that's what we've actually experienced in the US. As the population has aged, more older people have experienced flu which kills. Annual cases for all groups have come in at an average of almost 30 million for the last decade. Deaths have averaged almost 36k per year.

That's an average annual case fatality rate of 0.12%, just as Fauci indicated in the email.

So it's pretty clear to me that Fauci was not referring to the technical "mortality rate", but to the "case fatality rate". We were all talking about it, sloppily.

Here's how COVID-19 in the United States actually looks after what amounts to one year, using covidtracking.com data through March 7, 2021, when it quit its data gathering operation, from which we can calculate an actual mortality rate because it had been a year (population figure is US Census for Sep 7, 2020, the mid-way point, at 331.7774 million):

Confirmed US cases C19 to 3/7/21: 28.7565 million

Cumulative hospitalized to 3/7: 0.8786m

Cumulative dead to 3/7: 0.5152m

% cases hospitalized: 3.06

% cases dead: 1.79 (case fatality rate)

% population infected: ~ 8.67 (morbidity rate, very similar to influenza)

% pop. hospitalized: ~ 0.26

% pop. dead: ~ 0.16 (mortality rate).

 

Now let's compare COVID-19 to flu in terms of the "mortality rate", technically understood, expressed per 100k of population.

To 3/7/21, 515151 C19 deaths per 331.7774 million people works out to 155 deaths per 100k.

Average annual flu deaths of 36,000 per 331.7774 million people (0.011% of population) works out to 10.85 deaths per 100k (In 2019 it was 15.2/100k).

Thus COVID-19 in the US after one year has a mortality rate 14.3 times worse than for the flu on average. Its case fatality rate, 1.79%, has been 14.9 times worse than for flu's average 0.12%.

Fauci's 2% estimate in March 2020 was good enough for government work.

FOIA'd Fauci email shows his top people informed him 31 Jan 2020 that the coronavirus looked engineered and was inconsistent with evolutionary theory

In other words, it might have come out of a lab, not out of nature by crossing from bats to some unknown animal intermediary found at the Wuhan wet market.

 

CDC: Breakthrough cases in Kentucky skilled nursing facility outbreak in March reached 25%

COVID-19 Outbreak Associated with a SARS-CoV-2 R.1 Lineage Variant in a Skilled Nursing Facility After Vaccination Program — Kentucky, March 2021:

Among 83 residents and 116 HCP, 75 (90.4%) and 61 (52.6%), respectively, received 2 vaccine doses. Twenty-six residents and 20 HCP received positive test results for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, including 18 residents and four HCP who had received their second vaccine dose >14 days before the outbreak began. An R.1 lineage variant was detected with whole genome sequencing (WGS). ... 25.4% of vaccinated residents and 7.1% of vaccinated HCP were infected.

Looks like Pfizer vaccines are somewhat less effective in older people, but there is no age data given in this report. Critics of the Pfizer trial say not enough old people were part of it. This would seem to bear that out.

 

Why are 90% of the residents vaccinated but only 52% of the workers who care for them?

 

Seems like an ongoing phenomenon for people "in the industry" to be vaccine hesitant.

 

Let's hear it for democracy!

This shews how perfectly the rump

and commonwealth, in nature jump:

For as a fly that goes to bed,

Rests with his tail above his head;

So in this mungrel state of ours,

The rabble are the supreme powers.

-- Samuel Butler, Hudibras

Heroes never die

Thus am I doubly armed; my death and life,

My bane and antidote, are both before me:

This, in a moment, brings me to an end;

But that informs me I shall never die.

 

-- Joseph Addison

This is Ronald Reagan's baneful legacy: The appointment of libertarian Anthony Kennedy, his third choice after Bork and Ginsburg

If you could poll the American soldiers who died in World War II whether they died to make men and women free to commit sodomy, you would not like their answer.

But hey, fuck you, and enjoy your long weekend.

Coming Supreme Court decision in major LGBT rights case seen as bellwether of conservative court:

Since the mid-1990s, the nation’s top court has gradually expanded protections for gays and lesbians, largely under the leadership of former Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018.

 

The Big Voice on the Right has been replaced by a couple of little pipsqueaks playing deep in center field

 

Rush Limbaugh conservatism is so over, if it ever existed

The worst thing about the announcement of Clay Travis and Buck Sexton being hired by Premiere Radio Networks to fill the noon to three once occupied by Rush Limbaugh is that rushlimbaugh.com is promoting this. That wouldn't be happening without the support of Rush's widow.

Never mind what ex-CIA employee Buck Sexton agreeing to team up with this guy says about him, Travis is the last person to whom Rush's audience would ever warm:

A self-described "radical moderate" who is pro-choice and against the death penalty, Travis said he voted for former President Barack Obama twice and never voted Republican. In 2016, Travis voted for Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. As an undergrad, Travis interned for U.S. Representative [Democrat] Bob Clement for four years while in college at George Washington University. In 2000, he worked on Al Gore's presidential campaign. Travis was hired to work on U.S. Representative [Democrat] Jim Cooper's 2002 congressional campaign but was fired for wrecking Cooper's wife's car.

Premiere rolled the dice on this duo and came up with snake eyes. They will have to build an entirely different audience, but it sure as hell won't be a conservative one.

You couldn't have asked for a better recipe to blow-up conservative talk radio.

Looks intentional to me. Is Travis on the Democrat payroll?

Just like that EIB, like Rush Limbaugh, passes into oblivion.

Afghanistan is already collapsing to the Taliban after Biden-ordered US withdrawal continues

 Reported here:

As U.S. forces withdraw from Afghanistan, Taliban militants seize military outposts by threatening security forces until they agree to surrender, The New York Times reported Thursday. ...

At least 26 outposts have surrendered to the Taliban since May 1, according to government officials and village elders, the Times reported. The Taliban have seized four district centers and displaced governors, police officers and intelligence officials.

WAPo calls Chicom propaganda that coronavirus came from Fort Detrick, Maryland, "baseless"

 I don't think so.

This is the same WAPo which highlighted an unexplained outbreak of a respiratory virus in Virginia, just across the border from the Fort Detrick biodefense facility, in June-July 2019, which killed 3 and hospitalized and sickened dozens more. The CDC concluded in late July 2019 that a "common cold" virus was to blame in the outbreak.

Hm, imagine that. But don't think about it too long. The investigative reporting on the right wants us to concentrate on a possible outbreak at the Wuhan lab, which, by the way, wasn't a Wall Street Journal scoop. An Australian journalist had the story already in March.

Meanwhile the CDC temporarily shut down the US Army part of the Fort Detrick operation in August 2019, just a month after the Virginia outbreak, for numerous safety and other violations, not the least of which was an incomplete inventory of agents. The latter problem seems to be chronic at Fort Detrick. The place was similarly cited way back in 2009.

And Congress was deliberately kept out of the loop.

What else is Fort Detrick famous for, besides bioweapons research long ago supposedly abandoned by the US government? 

In 2001 a bunch of people were killed by anthrax mailed in letters shortly after the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers. The anthrax was traced to Fort Detrick.

Robert Mueller and James Comey infamously fingered the wrong guy for those anthrax attacks, who was later compensated millions and exonerated. The true culprit was a senior scientist at United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, Bruce Ivins, who committed suicide in 2008 before our incompetent FBI could arrest him, seven years after the crimes.

What other nutjobs are still working in sensitive positions in our government? 

In light of recent testimony by Anthony Fauci to Congress that he couldn't guarantee that NIH funds awarded to the Wuhan Institute of Virology through a third party were not used for gain of function research to weaponize viruses, you have to open your eyes to the fact of long-standing and intimate cooperation of US researchers with their Chinese counterparts. Chinese "scientists" are all over the place at American universities and research institutions, including at Fort Detrick, where their American counterparts seem all too often unruffled by the security implications. They are all also all dependent on US government, including military, funding for their livelihoods, as well as on funding from what President Eisenhower once warned us about, the military-industrial complex.

I don't believe any of these people as far as I can throw them.

We know the Chicoms were working on coronavirus. But it's not outside the realm of possibility that one of the inventory lacunae at Fort Detrick was the coronavirus, too. Was it just a coincidence that there was an outbreak of coronavirus-like disease in Virginia in the summer of 2019? CDC should be forced to reveal more.

The American elites who work on this stuff have all the same incentives to keep it all secret as the Chinese do. American scientists are thick as thieves with the Chinese. The fact is they are in this together, and we are the helpless bystanders on the outside. My estimation is they have too much to lose to tell the truth to the American people. Money trumps patriotism. 

As U.S. calls for focus on covid origins, China repeats speculation about U.S. military base:

Zhao, one of the country’s most notoriously hawkish diplomats, referenced a U.S. military location that has been baselessly linked to the coronavirus outbreak by Chinese media.

Better build a bunker, Chicoms are building two new breeder reactors which produce plutonium

China Is Building Two Secret Nuclear Reactors. Scientists Are Worried:

 

Why would China be stockpiling plutonium behind closed doors? “China is presently engaged in a large nuclear weapons build-up that U.S. intelligence officials publicly estimate will result in at least a doubling (or more) of the size of Beijing’s nuclear arsenal,” the experts explain, and accumulating plutonium gives them even more of these critical resources.

LOL, Rush Limbaugh time slot to be taken over by duo which includes political moderate Clay Travis

Pfffft.

Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Show to Be Taken Over by Clay Travis and Buck Sexton:

The Rush Limbaugh replacements are in, as Clay Travis and Buck Sexton will take over his three-hour conservative talk radio show time slot, said distributor Premiere Networks. ...

Premiere Networks has continued to syndicate “The Rush Limbaugh Show” using archived segments on topics relevant to the day’s news, with guest hosts filling in between clips. The program was attracting about 75% to 80% of its regular audience, according to a person familiar with the matter. ...

A self-proclaimed political moderate and independent, Mr. Travis last year announced he would be voting for former President Donald Trump, saying it would be the first time he would vote for a Republican for president. He has written several books, most recently 2018’s “Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports With Politics.”

That lunatic billionaire Ronald Unz not only thinks America developed COVID-19 as a bioweapon, but released it in Wuhan

 

 He also believes the China data:

(6) Unfortunately for these plans, the Chinese government reacted with astonishing determination and effectiveness, and soon stamped out the disease. Meanwhile, the lackadaisical and incompetent American government largely ignored the problem, only reacting after the massive outbreak in Northern Italy had gotten media attention. Since the CDC had botched production of a testing kit, we had no means of recognizing that the disease was already spreading in our country, and the result was massive damage to America’s economy and society. In effect, America suffered exactly the fate that had originally been intended for its Chinese rival.

The Casino is minting millionaires as we speak

When stock is high, they come between, 

Making by second hand their offers;

Then cunningly retire unseen,

With each a million in his coffers.

-- Jonathan Swift

Johns Hopkins: USA reaches 590k COVID-19 deaths

 

Drudge headlines about COVID-19 in Japan are pure hysteria

 

The USA has achieved a new low for COVID-19 hospitalizations since the beginning of the pandemic

 

It's delusional to think US C19 cases per million fell 73% from peak by Feb 20 because 12% of the population had been vaccinated with at least one dose

 

It's delusional to think vaccinating 25% of England vs. C19 by Feb 20 was responsible for daily new cases per million falling by 81%

 

LOL, lad from Leeds, Wall Street Journal newsman, Mike Bird is impressed as hell by China vaccination statistics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh yeah? 

Who needs vaccines when you have no cases?

LOL, C19 cases per million in Bahrain is up almost 1000% since vaccination effort began Dec 23, 2020

 

Vaccinations in Vietnam with AstraZeneca started to really take off on Apr 19, daily new C19 cases subsequently spiked vertically

 

Taiwan started vaccinating against COVID-19 with AstraZeneca on Mar 21, 2021

 

World Health Organization chimes in supporting global excess deaths due to COVID-19 far in excess of 3.4 million official toll

Excess deaths due to pandemic much higher than reported COVID toll: WHO

Asked how many excess deaths could be attributed to the pandemic today, Asma said that "I think safely, about six to eight million deaths could be an estimate, with a cautionary note."

 

Joe Biden, the Puritan Catholic, is as bad as the libertarian Justin Amash ever was, making the perfect the enemy of the good, but sillier

President Biden: "Every Time We Let Hate Flourish, We Make A Lie Of Who We Are As A Nation"

"We're the United States of America. We're unique among all nations. We are uniquely a product of a document. Not an ethnicity, not a religion, not a geography, of a document," President Biden says. "Every time we're silent, every time we let hate flourish, we make a lie of who we are as a nation. I mean it literally. We can not let the very foundation of this country continue to be eaten away."

This stupid, futile hate crime business was started by George H. W. Bush.

You might as well outlaw human nature and roll out the guillotines.

Hair on fire fundamentalism about the Declaration of Independence is no different than about the Constitution. The only thing Joe Biden is proving is that the left has its own strutting American exceptionalist fool, too.

"Somebody, somewhere had a bad thought. America is finished!"

Russell Kirk's "shop and till conservatives", a bunch of cheats

"But all these are trifles, if we consider the fraud and cozenage of trading men and shopkeepers."

-- Jonathan Swift

Inquiring minds want to know: Why is there so much hesitancy at NIH, FDA, CDC with only 50-60% vaccinated?

 

LOL, this is an actual editorial headline from an American newspaper from the city which just let itself burn down, hung Chauvin out to dry, and whose crime rate is soaring off the charts

 

"Integrity is key after Minnesota's mask mandate is lifted

With no way to police vaccine status, individual honesty and responsibility are critical."

They must be joking. There is no integrity left in America. Every institution is shot through with liars, grifters, power-hungry lunatics and ideologues.

And they represent nothing so much as . . . us.

Lunatic Biden shuts down Keystone, rewards Russkies with pipeline waiver after Colonial hack

Not The Onion.

Not Babylon Bee.

According to Mitch Daniels, injuries from mass vaccination with experimental new technologies which do not have FDA approval are just collateral damage

"That, just as medicines have side effects, almost all actions produce collateral consequences, often collateral damage."

His remarks are a cavalcade of crazy, not the least of which is:

"We can overcome even the biggest obstacles and be the masters of our fates and our futures."

You know, just like Amelia Earhart and Gus Grissom.

Jack Cashill calls them the Pontius Pilate Republicans, which is kinda unfair to Pilate

Why Has the Right Let the Floyd Cops Fry?

Feeling they had to say something about the Derek Chauvin verdict, the Republicans in Congress seemed to take their cues from Pontius Pilate. “I think the jury did its job,” said Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst all too typically, “and I would – I did not follow, of course, all the parts of the trial, but I would say that given the information they received, they did their job, and I guess I’m in agreement.” The sound of hands being washed echoed throughout Capitol Hill.

I find in him no fault at all. -- John 18:38

Know that I find no fault in him. -- John 19:4

I find no fault in him. -- John 19:6

From thenceforth Pilate sought to release him. -- John 19:12

Inflation: Last year TurboTax cost me $110, this year $255

CDC Director Walensky, who is not a Flying Wallenda, goes out on a limb and says the science evolved in two weeks, masks no longer necessary for the vaccinated

 

The euphoria in the US about the COVID-19 situation is the direct inverse of the hysteria

 

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Bathroom transmission of COVID-19

From: Preventing Fecal-Oral And Fecal-Aerosol Transmission Of Covid-19

Though the main way Covid-19 spreads will always be from person to person, exposure to infectious waste and sewage has a part to play in starting outbreaks, especially in apartment buildings or schools where many people share close quarters at regular intervals of the day. ...

Fecal-aerosol transmission, according to a research paper published in Annals of Internal Medicine in December 2020, was suspected to be the cause of a Covid-19 outbreak in a high-rise apartment building in Guangzhou, China that infected at least nine people across three separate households. ...

Almost all of the environmental samples that came back positive were from the master bathrooms, giving the researchers reason to believe that the drainage pipes connecting the three units were to blame.

US Covid-19 update for Sunday May 16, 2021: With nearly 47% of the population vaccinated with one dose, no metric has beaten lows achieved without vaccines

 

.

still 2k higher in May 2021 than Sep 2020

Click on any chart to enlarge.

same as in Sep 2020 but not a new low

bouncing off 4% without equaling the Jun 2020 low

mortality still has a ways to go to equal Jul 2020

Why no one can get a fair trial in increasingly libertarian America

If justice stood on the side of the single person, it ought to give good men pleasure to see that right should take place; but when, on the contrary, the commonweal of a whole nation is overborn by private interest, what good man but must lament?

-- Jonathan Swift

Now that USA CDC has said people vaccinated against COVID-19 can stop wearing masks, let's acknowledge how well masks worked

In Africa.

The continent was a veritable beacon of mask requirements from the Med to the Cape of Good Hope.

And Africa has the COVID-19 case graph to prove how successful this was!

Cases per million in Africa never topped 25! Whereas in North America the metric hit nearly 475/million.

 

Those dang libertarians really screwed things up big time in El Norte with their "We don't need no stinkin' masks!"

For true conservatism which actually works, look to Africa.

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How come 40%+ of FDA, NIH, CDC employees are not vaccinated against COVID-19?

 Asking for a friend.

This has to be the dumbest blackout story ever written: The crisis is entirely of their own making

Blackouts Threaten Entire U.S. West This Summer as Heat Awaits :

States shuttering coal and gas-fired power plants simply aren’t replacing them fast enough to keep pace with the vagaries of an unstable climate, and the region’s existing power infrastructure is woefully vulnerable to wildfires (which threaten transmission lines), drought (which saps once-abundant hydropower resources) and heat waves (which play havoc with demand).

 

Well don't shutter 'em then!

 

Bunch of idiots.

I'm so old I remember when AIDS was going to wipe out America

"In 2017, 16,358 people with HIV died, and 5,534 of those deaths were from HIV-related causes." 

COVID-19 has wiped out that many since April 18th.

A gasoline pipeline hack, inflation, and Liz Cheney are bigger news.

Daily new COVID-19 cases per million fell 62% in South Korea in the two months before vaccination began on Feb 25, and rose 70% in the two months after

South Korea, which has 7.2% of its population vaccinated with at least one dose, uses the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine on its frontline medical workers and the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine on the more numerous population in the long-term care arena: 

By the end of March, authorities plan to complete injecting the first doses to some 344,000 residents and workers at long-term care settings, who will receive the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccines, and 55,000 frontline medical workers, who will receive shots developed by Pfizer and BioNTech.

COVID-19 cases fell without the aid of vaccines in South Korea, and rose again despite them.

Since vaccination began on Feb 25, deaths per million stands today only where it was when the effort first began two and a half months ago.

vaccination

cases

deaths

The Chinese COVID vaccine is a giant nothing burger in Chile

The Chinese COVID vaccine is not preventing much of anything in Chile after three months.

84% of the COVID vaccine doses administered in Chile to date have been Chinese. The effort began in earnest in early February.

44% have received at least one dose of any COVID vaccine in Chile since that time.

Unfortunately, daily new cases per million is still up 44% since the vaccination effort began in early February. And daily new cases per million remains highly elevated compared with the lows of last November, achieved naturally long before any vaccines were available.

Why isn't vaccination producing a low rate similar to that?

Meanwhile deaths per million is still up, 17% since early February when the vaccination effort began. The rate is more than twice as high as it was last November when no vaccines were available at all.

Yet China is distributing these things like hotcakes, over 100 million doses so far, and the WHO is authorizing them for emergency use for the first time.

WHY?

Good a day as any to remember that Alan Greenspan in 2007 explicitly advocated for immigration to suppress the wages of skilled laborers

Greenspan: Let more skilled immigrants in :

"Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world," he said. "If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income."

Yeah, the problem isn't millionaires and billionaires concentrating wealth in their hands, it's the goddamn skilled laborers who must be stopped, the engineers, scientists, doctors and teachers, the crane operators, CDL truck drivers, machinists, drafters, plumbers, craftsmen, cooks and accountants.