Consistent with similar findings in many prior studies [3,8,10,12,18–20], a higher number of prior vaccine doses was associated with a higher risk of COVID-19. ... Thus, the short-term protection provided by a COVID-19 vaccine comes with a risk of increased susceptibility to COVID-19 in the future.

stickdog · 2024-05-06T20:52:39+00:00

Even the NY Times has finally admitted unsafe.

See this pre-print and its footnotes 3, 10, 12, 19, and 20 reproduced below, as well as the omicron infection experiences of you and everyone you know, for a full confirmation of ineffective.

Effectiveness of the Coronavirus Disease 2019 Bivalent Vaccine

... effectiveness was not demonstrated when the XBB lineages were dominant.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 Vaccine Boosting in Previously Infected or Vaccinated Individuals

In multivariable analysis, boosting was independently associated with lower risk of COVID-19 among those vaccinated but not previously infected (hazard ratio [HR], .43; 95% confidence interval [CI], .41–.46) as well as those previously infected (HR, .66; 95% CI, .58–.76). Among those previously infected, receipt of 2 compared with 1 dose of vaccine was associated with higher risk of COVID-19 (HR, 1.54; 95% CI, 1.21–1.97).

Risk of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) among those up-to-date and not up-to-date on COVID-19 vaccination by US CDC criteria

Results

COVID-19 occurred in 1475 (3%) of 48 344 employees during the 100-day study period. The cumulative incidence of COVID-19 was lower in the “not up-to-date” than the “up-to-date” state. On multivariable analysis, being “up-to-date” was not associated with lower risk of COVID-19 (HR, 1.05; 95% C.I., 0.88–1.25; P-value, 0.58). Results were very similar when those 65 years and older were only considered “up-to-date” after 2 doses of the bivalent vaccine.

Conclusions

Since the XBB lineages became dominant, adults “up-to-date” on COVID-19 vaccination by the CDC definition do not have a lower risk of COVID-19 than those “not up-to-date”, bringing into question the value of this risk classification definition.

Rate of SARS-CoV-2 Reinfection During an Omicron Wave in Iceland

The probability of reinfection increased with time from the initial infection (odds ratio of 18 months vs 3 months, 1.56; 95% CI, 1.18-2.08) (Figure) and was higher among persons who had received 2 or more doses compared with 1 dose or less of vaccine (odds ratio, 1.42; 95% CI, 1.13-1.78). Defining reinfection after 30 or more days or 90 or more days did not qualitatively change the results.

History of primary-series and booster vaccination and protection against Omicron reinfection

The history of primary-series vaccination enhanced immune protection against Omicron reinfection, but history of booster vaccination compromised protection against Omicron reinfection.

stickdog · 2024-03-25T22:24:34+00:00

Excerpt:

Harvard researchers have ceased a long-running effort to conduct a small geoengineering experiment in the stratosphere, following repeated delays and public criticism.

In a university statement released on March 18, Frank Keutsch, the principal investigator on the project, said he is “no longer pursuing the experiment.”

The basic concept behind solar geoengineering is that the world might be able to counteract global warming by spraying tiny particles in the atmosphere that could scatter sunlight.

The plan for the Harvard experiments was to launch a high-altitude balloon, equipped with propellers and sensors, that could release a few kilograms of calcium carbonate, sulfuric acid or other materials high above the planet. It would then turn around and fly through the plume to measure how widely the particles disperse, how much sunlight they reflect and other variables. The aircraft will now be repurposed for stratospheric research unrelated to solar geoengineering, according to the statement.

The vast majority of solar geoengineering research to date has been carried out in labs or computer models. The so-called stratospheric controlled perturbation experiment (SCoPEx) was expected to be the first such scientific effort conducted in the stratosphere. But it proved controversial from the start and, in the end, others may have beaten them across the line of deliberately releasing reflective materials into that layer of the atmosphere. (The stratosphere stretches from approximately 10 to 50 kilometers above the ground.)

...

Proponents of solar geoengineering research argue we should investigate the concept because it may significantly reduce the dangers of climate change. Further research could help scientists better understand the potential benefits, risks and tradeoffs between various approaches.

But critics argue that even studying the possibility of solar geoengineering eases the societal pressure to cut greenhouse gas emissions. They also fear such research could create a slippery slope that increases the odds that nations or rogue actors will one day deploy it, despite the possibility of dangerous side-effects, including decreasing precipitation and agricultural output in some parts of the world.

...

stickdog · 2024-03-25T21:30:28+00:00

Excerpt:

...

We were all called lunatics, hobby virologists, conspiracy theorists and worse for our doubts that Covid was all that dangerous, that lockdowns were worth it, that mask mandates made any sense, and that excluding the unvaccinated from public life was remotely justifiable. A lot of us were banned and ostracised for saying these things. The RKI release shows that our public health managers were having exactly the same discussions in private the whole time. Our politicians told us that all of this lunacy was necessary because we had to FoLlOw ThE ScIenCe. In fact the scientists were mere tools of the prior political decision to force this entire pandemic theatre upon us; they functioned merely to lend the pandemic policies about which they themselves nourished hidden doubts a pseudoscientific aura.

The worst thing is that nothing will come of this, and nothing will come of the still greater revelations likely to follow either.

stickdog · 2024-02-18T01:28:38+00:00

Excerpt:

The State Department is so unhappy a newspaper published details about where it’s been spending your taxes, it’s threatened to only show a congressional committee its records in camera until it gets a “better understanding of how the Committee will utilize this sensitive information.” Essentially, Tony Blinken is threatening to take his transparency ball home unless details about what censorship programs he’s sponsoring stop appearing in papers like the Washington Examiner.

A year ago the Examiner published “Disinformation, Inc.”, a series by investigative reporter Gabe Kaminsky describing how the State Department was backing a UK-based agency that creates digital blacklists for disfavored media outlets. Your taxes helped fund the Global Disinformation Index, or GDI, which proudly touts among its services an Orwellian horror called the Dynamic Exclusion List, a digital time-out corner where at least 2,000 websites were put on blast as unsuitable for advertising, “thus disrupting the ad-funded disinformation business model.”

The culprit was the Global Engagement Center, a little-known State Department entity created in Barack Obama’s last year in office and a surprise focus of Twitter Files reporting. The GEC grew out of a counter-terrorism agency called the CSCC and has a mission to “counter” any messaging, foreign or domestic as it turns out, that they see as “undermining or influencing the policies, security, or stability of the United States.” The GEC-funded GDI rated ten conservative sites as most “risky” and put the Examiner on its “exclusion” list, while its ten sites rated at the “lowest level of disinformation” included Buzzfeed, which famously published the Steele Dossier knowing it contained errors and is now out of business.

In an effort to find out what other ventures GEC was funding — an absurd 36 of 39 2018 contractors were redacted even in an Inspector General’s report — the House Small Business Committee wrote the State Department last June asking for basic information about where the public’s money was being spent. State and GEC stalled until December 3 of last year, when it finally produced a partial list of recipients. Although House Republicans asked for an “unredacted list of all GEC grant recipients and associated award numbers” from 2019 through the current year, the list the Committee received was missing “dozens” of contractors, including some listed on USASpending.com.

...

In response to the outrage of this disclosure, the State Department sent its letter threatening in camera sessions until it gets a better “understanding” of how the Committee will use its “sensitive” information. That’s Beltway-ese for “We wouldn’t mind knowing the Examiner’s sources.”

About that: the State letter wrote that the Examiner’s records were “reportedly obtained from the Committee,” and included a footnote and a link to a Kaminsky story, implying that the Examiner reported that it got the records from the Committee. But the paper said nothing about the source of the documents, which as anyone who’s ever covered these types of stories knows, could have come from any number of places. It’s a small but revealing detail about current petulance levels at State.

“Anti-disinformation” work is not exactly hypersonic missile construction. There’s no legitimate reason for it to be kept from the public, especially since it’s increasingly clear its programs target American media companies and American media consumers, seemingly in violation of the State Department’s mission. The requested information is also not classified, making the delays and tantrums more ridiculous.

...

stickdog · 2024-02-14T22:09:55+00:00

Excerpt:

...

MWO defenders absolutely deny that nearly all governments want to implement the pillars of the NWO and support the same global governance system, regardless of how blatantly obvious it is. And if it is true, they say, it doesn't matter anyway. The MWO is how we will all defeat the IRBO—which is all that matters—and build a global community of sovereign nations states who will make fairer, multilateral global governance decisions.

The idea that "they're all in it together" is preposterous, they claim. East and West are fighting each other for heaven's sake, you fool. Get behind the right political leaders for the sake of peace and stop doubting the good guys.

This rebuttal is like claiming that professional boxers beating each other to a pulp proves the pugilists are determined to resist the international boxing federation. It is tantamount to asserting that boardroom backstabbing is evidence that the corporate executives, enriched by the success of the company, are intent upon undermining the corporation they all profit from.

Not only is this geopolitical analysis predicated upon the idea that some politicians are suddenly trustworthy, and everything they say somehow constitutes evidence, it completely dismisses everything we have learned from historical researchers like Norman Dodd, Antony C. Sutton, Carrol Quigley, G. Edward Griffin, Patrick Wood and many more. It is as if history is no longer relevant.

No one who criticises multipolarity denies the reality of geopolitical competition; none of us think violent conflicts and wars between nation states and their proxies aren't real; not a single voice, warning against the MWO, thinks people aren't being killed as governments fight for supremacy and no one is arguing that governments are "all in it together"—assuming “it” refers to the creation of a multipolar world order.

Quite evidently, there is very real and bitter conflict between nations and it is causing immense suffering. In fact, one of our chief concerns is that the transition to a MWO will cause significantly more suffering.

What we are saying is that there is no disagreement on the pillars from any quarter. But this is no claim that national governments are “all in it together.” On the contrary, the fact that there is both conflict and, at the same time, global agreement on the pillars, suggests a “geopolitical reality” that no member of the multipolar fan club seemingly wants to discuss.

Agreement on the pillars does not suggest all national governments are of one, single hive mind. It suggests that governments do not control the global governance system. They are subject to it, just like the rest of us. The best they can achieve is "partner" status. And they are not senior partners.

The pillars did not originate with national governments. The pillars were mapped out by public-private globalist think tanks and international organisations that serve the interests of oligarchs.

As the Chinese government openly declares:

China maintains that for the world, there is only one system, which is the international system with the United Nations at its core, that there is only one order, which is the international order based on international law, and that there is only one set of rules, which is the basic norms governing international relations based on the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. China actively participates in and leads the reform of the global governance system.

This “leadership” is transitioning the world to precisely the global governance system, replete with its SDGs, CBDC (digital money), surveillance, censorship and centralised global control of all nation states, that the oligarchs want. It is a bid to construct the latest iteration of the "New World Order."

This is also the global tyranny that, until very recently, nearly every Western commentator in the "independent media" was warning against.

Now, a growing chorus is suggesting we should accept the MWO because it will allegedly defeat the IRBO. This is a false dichotomy and a propagandist trap.

The IRBO is undoubtedly on its way out, but global oligarch networks haven't suddenly vanished. Far from it. We only need look at recent events to see who is actually profiting from them. The IRBO's demise is necessary for the birth of the MWO, and through it, establishment of the oligarch's NWO global governance technocracy.

The irony is that the Eastern independent media—where it exists—continues to question the oppression of global governance and remains highly critical of it. Yet some in the Western independent media seem pathologically averse to even acknowledging, let alone reporting, criticisms made by Russian independent commentators, for example.

As multipolar advocates claim that none of this is true, then I ask them to provide some evidence of one major economy that is not erecting the pillars. Can the MWO campaigners please explain how it is possible that all leading economies are pursuing the same policy platforms, simultaneously, without centralised, global coordination and policy control?

...

stickdog · 2024-01-26T01:01:42+00:00

Of course, but reducing the overall impact of humans on the environment is a great goal regardless of climate change. There are hundreds of ways to do this that start with the worst offenders before we get to the personal carbon allowance the elites desperately want to foist on everyone except themselves.

The elite's "climate change is the greatest emergency in the history of humanity" is just their newest way to turn the compassionate sentiments and healthy collectivist instincts of us regular people against us.

Every time they bring up any rationing of carbon or curtailing of our rights to travel, our hearty and unanimous reply needs to be "YOU FIRST!"

stickdog · 2024-01-24T00:58:29+00:00

More Lunatics Running Our Asylum

stickdog · 2024-01-24T00:37:59+00:00

Many supporting links at the OP

Excerpt:

The vaccine mandates of the Covid pandemic were a radical departure from previous public health policies and norms in America. During the pandemic, often while it was still under an expedited “emergency authorization,” many children and adolescents were barred from colleges, summer camps, sports, arts programs and other activities if they hadn’t received the vaccine. Countless adults, similarly, were unable to work, go to a restaurant, a concert, a show, or participate in other social activities without proof of vaccination.

Unlike many other vaccines, given that someone’s Covid vaccination status was uninformative about whether they were infected or not, these mandates not were only an imposition on civil liberties, but also epidemiologically unsound.

Court documents from more than a half-dozen Covid vaccine fraud cases around the country shed new light on this fraught time in our history, and expose some inconvenient truths.

First, the cases suggest that media narratives around “anti-vaxxers” as an only-right-wing phenomenon were misleading.

In January 2022, Time magazine ran a story titled, “How the Anti-Vax Movement Is Taking Over the Right.” The piece detailed how the movement against vaccine mandates “was a window into a growing political cause that is beginning to unite a host of groups across the right.” And the article asserted that anti-mandate rallies “seemed to be driven by the same narratives that pulled thousands of Americans into the QAnon conspiracy.” NPR ran a piece on the “growing alliance between anti-vaccine activists and pro-Trump Republicans.” The widely covered Canadian trucker convoy—which began as a protest against vaccine mandates—was similarly portrayed as a coalescence of right-wing views. Beyond the media, the academy pushed this idea as well, for example a scholarly paper tying “anti-gender and anti-vaccine” positions together as part of “right-wing discourses.”

It is true that Republicans were vaccinated against Covid at a lower rate than Democrats. (Though, since people often answer polls and surveys with what they think is an acceptable response, rather than the truth, survey data can be notoriously unreliable.) Still, among the half-dozen or so vaccine fraud cases I reviewed, a number of the perpetrators were almost certainly on the left politically.

A midwifery in upstate New York called Sage-Femme, like many of the schemers, used its status as a medical center to order vaccine doses and receive genuine vaccine cards from the government. But instead of vaccinating patients the center destroyed the doses and filled out cards for patients erroneously saying they had been vaccinated. Sage-Femme racked up two separate indictments against different staff members.

Data suggest that midwives are almost universally left-wing, and inclined to be liberal and democrats. For good measure, midwives, by and large, are staunchly pro-choice, not a position associated with the political right.

Another fraud case is against Juli Mazi, a naturopath in California. Mazi allegedly gave patients “COVID-19 homeoprophylaxis immunization pellets,” but filled out official cards saying they had received the vaccine. Naturopaths almost definitionally exist as an alternative to the medical establishment, and their approach is aligned with a “holistic” or nature-based worldview typically associated with the far left, or, at the least, simply outside our traditional political alignments. It’s hard to view Mazi, who has Facebook posts that say “Hug trees, clean the seas, save the bees,” as right wing.

Julie DeVuono, a nurse practitioner, who worked at Wild Child Pediatric Healthcare, in Long Island, New York, was indicted for selling forged vaccination cards and making false entries into the state’s vaccination database. DeVuono is a “natural medicine oriented pediatric nurse,” who has advocated for cupping treatment while at an acupuncturist’s office—again, not exactly the profile of a typical right-winger.

This of course is not a systematic review of all vaccine fraud cases. But in the random sampling of court cases I reviewed it’s hard to argue that “anti-vax” sentiment—erroneously defined by the media as being against Covid vaccines or simply Covid vaccine mandates—was exclusive to the right, as much of the media narrative portrayed it to be.

...

This isn’t to say the government does not have an obligation to prosecute fraud. Only that the resources for these sting operations and legal battles against the Covid vaccine card schemes could have been used for any number of other healthcare crimes of far greater magnitude. For example, medicare and medicaid fraud is estimated to cost in the billions-of-dollars each year; there is more than $1 billion in telemedicine fraud annually; and phantom billing, upcoding of services, duplicate claims and so on all cost in the billions.

...

One may argue that the prosecutions of the vaccine card frauds happened not solely or specifically because of the financial stakes, but rather that the harms from the crimes here are societal, in the form of making fellow citizens less safe. Indeed, this assertion was made in many indictments. But a look at the dates of some of these cases immediately disproves that line of argument. The plastic surgery case, the Van Camp case, and other cases cited actions as late as spring 2022. This was long after it was widely known that the vaccines did not stop infection or transmission, which was the only ethical and logistical justification for mandates.

This raises the third, most important issue: the mandates were so feared and loathed by significant and diverse numbers of citizens that they were willing to become criminals rather than comply. (Even among the distributors only some of them appeared solely motivated by money. Many cited philosophical opposition to the mandates as their motivation.) Just the smattering of cases I reviewed represents thousands of regular citizens who felt compelled to fake their vaccination status.

Perhaps some portion of them had already been infected and knew what many European governments had acknowledged, and what has been a basic truism in immunology over centuries—that for many viruses past infection tends to confer robust protection. The US was fairly unique in not allowing “natural immunity” to substitute for being vaccinated. (A salient side note: many of the state requirements for the pediatric vaccine schedule—for MMR, chickenpox, and so on—specifically make exemptions to the vaccine requirement if the child had prior infection.)

...

The prevalence of people with fake cards calls into question the effectiveness of mandates. And it also suggests a lack of wisdom by health professionals to understand the consequences of interventions. Requiring individuals to have a medical product injected into their bodies that they so strenuously did not want that they were willing to commit fraud in order to give the illusion of compliance were bound to cause far more indignance and distrust than officials had planned for.

stickdog · 2024-01-24T00:32:31+00:00

Thanks.

stickdog · 2024-01-24T00:29:59+00:00

Yeah. The fires were caused arson. Not climate change. Would you agree or disagree?

Can you explain how the muddled motivations of the deranged arsonist change the fact that the fires were caused by arson?

And personally, I am not a climate change denier.

What I am is a "the threat of climate change makes austerity for average humans beings the highest possible good" denier.

Did you know that our richest oligarchs have been trying to find some way, any way, to sell all of us on the tremendous "benefits" of austerity for all of us serfs since at least the 1970s?

So I am asking you, are will willing to endorse authoritarian austerity on all of us serfs in the name of "combatting climate change" as 77% of the top 1% now insist is necessary?

Put more succinctly, do you demand austerity for the masses because of climate change?

stickdog · 2024-01-18T02:35:01+00:00

Excerpt:

World leaders meeting in Davos for the World Economic Forum (WEF) this week are set to discuss concerns about the potential for a future pandemic that could cause 20 times more fatalities than Covid-19.

It’s known by the placeholder name of Disease X, with the term used to refer to planning for a hypothetical future international epidemic caused by a pathogen as yet unknown to cause human disease, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

In a session entitled “Preparing for Disease X”, a panel led by the WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus will talk about “novel efforts needed to prepare healthcare systems for the multiple challenges ahead” if we are to be ready for a much more deadly pandemic, the WEF said.

The WHO ranks Disease X as a priority disease in its awareness campaigning, alongside Covid-19, the Ebola virus, Zika virus, Crimean-Congo haemorrhagic fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (Mers-CoV) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars).

Disease X was added to the list in 2018 as the WHO sought to open up discussions about tackling a global pandemic in the future.

The WHO has prioritised research and development in an emergency context for all these diseases, stating that the blueprint “explicitly seeks to enable early cross-cutting R&D [research and development] preparedness that is also relevant for an unknown Disease X”.

“Worldwide, the number of potential pathogens is very large, while the resources for disease research and development (R&D) is limited,” the WHO had previously said in a statement.

Along with Dr Tedros, the session this Wednesday will feature Brazilian health minister Nisia Trindade Lima, pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca’s chair of the board Michel Demaré, Royal Philips CEO Roy Jakobs, and Indian hospital chain Apollo’s executive vice-chairperson Preetha Reddy.

To be clear, scientists don’t yet know what kind of virus might lead to the next pandemic – or, in other words, what Disease X will turn out to be.

Many people think it could be a coronavirus – like SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes illness with Covid-19 – or a new strain of influenza.

“This concept [of Disease X] was one of the lessons we learned from this [Covid] pandemic,” said Dr Thomas Russo, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Buffalo Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

...

stickdog · 2024-01-18T02:13:20+00:00

Yep. They may as well call their efforts The Ministry of Misinformation.

stickdog · 2024-01-18T00:59:45+00:00

Abstract

Background: Most government efforts to control the COVID-19 pandemic revolved around non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) and vaccination. However, many respiratory diseases show distinctive seasonal trends. In this manuscript, we examined the contribution of these three factors to the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: Pearson correlation coefficients and time-lagged analysis were used to examine the relationship between NPIs, vaccinations and seasonality (using the average incidence of endemic human beta-coronaviruses in Sweden over a 10-year period as a proxy) and the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic as tracked by deaths; cases; hospitalisations; intensive care unit occupancy and testing positivity rates in six Northern European countries (population 99.12 million) using a population-based, observational, ecological study method.

Findings: The waves of the pandemic correlated well with the seasonality of human beta-coronaviruses (HCoV-OC43 and HCoV-HKU1). In contrast, we could not find clear or consistent evidence that the stringency of NPIs or vaccination reduced the progression of the pandemic. However, these results are correlations and not causations.

Implications: We hypothesise that the apparent influence of NPIs and vaccines might instead be an effect of coronavirus seasonality. We suggest that policymakers consider these results when assessing policy options for future pandemics. Limitations: The study is limited to six temperate Northern European countries with spatial and temporal variations in metrics used to track the progression of the COVID-19 pandemic. Caution should be exercised when extrapolating these findings.

...

3.2. Influence of Vaccinations on Pandemic Progression in Northern Europe

The number of deaths relative to the total population and infection number decreased shortly after the introduction of vaccines, continuing into the spring and summer of the same year, prompting many to infer that the vaccination programmes were successfully beginning to end the pandemic [23,24]. However, as shown (Figure 5), throughout autumn/winter 2021, deaths began increasing again despite the percentage vaccinated (all ages) being on average of 72.6% (min 70.74%–max 77.05%).

Several explanations have been offered for this—chiefly suggesting some combination of the evolution of new variants of the virus and/or the possibility that the vaccine efficiency wanes over time [28,29]. However, we note that there are reasons to consider the possibility that the vaccines were simply not as effective as originally hoped. For instance, studies from June–August 2021 found that the mean viral loads were similar for vaccinated and unvaccinated individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 during the Delta variant surge regardless of symptoms [103]. Additionally, a UK Health Security Agency report (3 March 2022) found that the rates of all COVID-19 cases were between 1.7 (80 years or over) and 3.4 times higher (40–49 years) among those who had received at least three vaccine doses compared to the unvaccinated in all age groups of 18 years and older [104]. This suggests that the promising initial claims that these COVID-19 vaccines were very effective at reducing the likelihood of infection [5,6,7,8] were not as robust as hoped. Indeed, Kampf (2021) noted that the high “rate of symptomatic COVID-19 cases among the fully vaccinated breakthrough infections” since July 2021 contradicts the expected reduction in transmission among the vaccinated population [27].

Despite the high incidence of “breakthrough infections”, some justified the continued use of COVID-19 vaccines as a means of substantially reducing COVID-19 severity and/or death [28,29,105]. However, although the magnitude of the third pandemic wave seemed to be reduced for Ireland, the UK and Sweden after the introduction of vaccination (in comparison to the first two waves), the opposite was observed for Demark, Finland and Norway, i.e., these countries had a comparatively larger third wave than the preceding two waves (Figure 5). These unexpected trends are even more pronounced if the progression of the pandemic is measured through cases (Figure S3a), positivity rate (Figure S3b), hospitalisations (Figure S3c) or ICU occupancy (Figure S3d). Therefore, as for NPIs, we should be careful not to prejudice our analysis of the effectiveness of these COVID-19 vaccines with our expectations of what should be.

...

In terms of cases, we would expect to see a negative correlation between the vaccination rates and the progression of the pandemic. That is, as the vaccination rates increased, we would expect the incidence of cases to generally decline, perhaps with a lag of a few weeks. However, for many of the countries, there is a positive correlation (Finland, Norway, Denmark and Ireland) which seems perfectly level through all time lags except in the case of Norway where there is a barely perceptible increase in correlation. The correlation values for Sweden remain negative but not significant and the values for the UK slowly move from a negative to a positive correlation although all these values are also not significant (Figure 6a).

Therefore, this analysis failed to identify any evidence that the vaccines reduced the incidence of cases in any of the Northern European countries.

...

Meanwhile, for the other three countries (Denmark, Norway and Finland), we can see that vaccination is positively correlated with death for all lags up to 8 weeks. Again, this is the opposite of what should be expected if the vaccination programme had been effective in reducing the number of deaths.

Therefore, our analysis also fails to identify any evidence that the vaccines have reduced the number of COVID-19 deaths in any of the Northern European countries.

...

stickdog · 2024-01-18T00:03:06+00:00

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen today declared that “misinformation and disinformation” are greater threats to the global business community than war and climate change.

“For the global business community, the top concern for the next two years is not conflict or climate,” she said in her speech at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos. “It is disinformation and misinformation, followed closely by polarisation within our societies.”

The solution, according to von der Leyen, is for businesses and governments to collaborate to quash disinformation. “Many of the solutions lie not only in countries working together but, crucially, on businesses and governments, businesses and democracies working together,” she said. “While governments hold many of the levers to deal with the great challenges of our time, business have [sic] the innovation, the technology, the talents to deliver the solutions we need to fight threats like climate change or industrial-scale disinformation.”

To illustrate her point, von der Leyen mentioned the upcoming election-heavy year, calling it “the biggest electoral year in history”, and warned that bad actors may exploit the openness of democracies to influence elections with disinformation.

In the latest WEF Global Risk Report, misinformation and disinformation were ranked as a greater risk to the world than everything but extreme weather. Polarisation, the housing crisis, cyberattacks, economic downturn, supply-chain disruptions, and even nuclear war ranked beneath misinformation in the WEF risk report. Misinformation was rated more than three times higher in risk level than the erosion of free speech.

Fears about the democratisation of information have been an enduring theme at WEF conferences in recent years. Having been concerned by the threat of disinformation in the context of 2016 election interference and Covid-19, Davos attendees say they’re now focusing on the risks of AI.

“The disruptive capabilities of manipulated information are rapidly accelerating, as open access to increasingly sophisticated technologies proliferates and trust in information and institutions deteriorates,” the risk report reads. “Even as the insidious spread of misinformation and disinformation threatens the cohesion of societies, there is a risk that some governments will act too slowly, facing a trade-off between preventing misinformation and protecting free speech, while repressive governments could use enhanced regulatory control to erode human rights.”

stickdog · 2024-01-17T23:44:02+00:00

Thanks for the reply.

Well, I was just unbanned there, so I should really get rid of this post, but I am going to leave it up as shameless self-promotion for anyone who misses my previous incessant posting of scientific critiques of constant COVID injections.

Until further notice, you can find all the most recent COVID injection news that's pfit to print here.

stickdog · 2024-01-17T21:39:48+00:00

Another interesting thing about this is that until very recently, I was able to see the entire list of moderators for the DebateVaccine website. Now, that list has been hidden from me.

Instead of the previous list of roughly a dozen moderators that used to appear, not all I see in a single button "MESSAGE THE MODS", and all the individual mod accounts have been blocked from my view.

Is this a reddit feature that normally goes into effect with any permaban, or is this special for me?

stickdog · 2024-01-16T17:56:41+00:00

My thoughts exactly

stickdog · 2024-01-15T23:34:36+00:00

Excerpt:

...

Ok, so digging a bit into travel bans, you’ll recognize that there have been travel bans based on big storms in the past here in New York. However, those are issued by the local government (i.e. County Executive), after a state of emergency is declared. They are not issued by the Governor, nor are they issued without an emergency declaration. By the way, the travel ban is still in effect for most of Erie County today. Anybody surprised?

Does anyone see the correlation here between government overreach, their quest for “centralized” power, and their fear mongering? It’s the same thing the Governor and her DOH have been doing with their hideous “quarantine camp” regulation that I have been fighting in court for nearly two years now! The name of that case is Borrello v. Hochul, and you can read the details and case history here. Connecting the dots to the analysis at hand, you will note that the quarantine camp regulation tried to take the power from (elected) judges (in keeping with our law) who have the authority to temporarily quarantine sick, dangerous people, and shift that power to unelected, statewide, DOH employees and appointees who have zero accountability to We the People. Under their quarantine camp reg, the Governor and her DOH would have centralized control over 19 million New Yorkers, to force you to lockdown in your home, or they could force you (with the use of police) to go to a quarantine center/ facility/ camp (pick your noun), without any proof you are sick, indefinitely, with no procedure by which you can regain your freedom, and with no declared state of emergency! The fear factor used to try to justify the authoritarian power grab here is the threat of death… If we don’t lock people up who are possibly exposed to a disease, then you might die. Swap out “possibly exposed to a disease” and put in its stead “unclean.” What does that make you think of?

My next question: do you see any similarities here to Hochul’s probably illegal climate lockdown? I say “probably illegal” because I couldn’t find the supposed legal authority that she’s relying upon to prohibit people from driving. If you know what she is relying upon, feel free to post it in the Substack comment section below.

...

stickdog · 2024-01-11T20:49:34+00:00

Obviously, the OP lives in a bizarre fantasyland where Democrats are trying to win, trying to help the working class, and trying to appeal to the working class. But I still find it interesting.

stickdog · 2024-01-08T18:40:10+00:00

Yeah, well, you know, that’s just, like, your opinion.

stickdog · 2024-01-07T02:57:40+00:00

Right.

"The rape is coming from inside the house."

stickdog · 2024-01-07T01:10:11+00:00

Great question. But why isn't he talking about his close relationship with Epstein is an even better one.

stickdog · 2024-01-07T00:06:35+00:00

The children of Gaza didn't kill themselves.

stickdog · 2024-01-06T22:59:11+00:00

Excerpt:

...

In a new update to the developing story, the Daily Mail reported this week that intelligence sources say the operation was most likely a "honeypot" blackmail operation intended to entrap influential figures. The term honeypot (or honey trap) comes from the world of espionage. It is believed to be a practice involving the use of a covert agent using a romantic or sexual relationship to compromise a target.

At the time of the arrests, the DOJ stated that beginning in July 2020, suspect Han Lee of Cambridge, Massachusetts, along with James Lee and Junmyung Lee, operated an "interstate prostitution network" with multiple brothels in Cambridge and Watertown, Massachusetts, as well as in Fairfax and Tysons, Virginia. All three suspects are South Korean nationals.

The suspects were charged with conspiracy to coerce and enticement to travel to engage in illegal sexual activity. The sex workers were flown in from Los Angeles and Las Vegas and often moved from one location to another. The suspects would meet the women at the airport, buy them groceries, move them into the brothel locations, and then begin offering them to potential clients.

The DOJ accuses the suspects of using two now-defunct websites— bostontopten10.com and browneyesgirlsva.blog—to entice potential clients with appointments with young Asian women in either greater Boston or eastern Virginia. The websites advertised nude Asian models for professional photography as a front for prostitution offered through appointments with women listed on the sites. The websites listed the height, weight, and bust size of women available for appointments.

The brothels operated in Unit 245 at the Avalon Mosaic in Fairfax, Virginia, and Unit 649 at the Hanover Tysons in Tysons Corner, VA.

The DOJ also claims that between December 2019 and October 2023, Han Lee “deposited just under $795,000 of cash into her personal Bank of America bank accounts." Lee also used around $109,000 in cash to make payments on her Bank of America credit card account. The DOJ said the Bank of America account was used for "travel-related purchases and other expenses associated with brothel operations."

Regarding the potentially high-profile clientele, investigators stated they "believe there are potentially hundreds of yet to be identified customers that may include other professional disciplines not included in the list above."

Intelligence experts, including former US intelligence officials, spoke anonymously to the Daily Mail warning that the operation may have been a blackmail operation organized by a foreign nation. The Daily Mail reports:

"They believe the brothels – allegedly masterminded by a 41-year-old South Korean woman – targeted politicians, high ranking government officials and defense contractors.

"But the mystery is which country was behind the scheme. Russia, China, Korea itself, or even Israel are al[l] seen as possibly being behind the scheme.

"'Having the Koreans out front could have been a false flag to give China or another country plausible deniability if the plot unraveled,' a one-time CIA senior operations officer told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview."

...

stickdog · 2024-01-06T21:00:31+00:00

Excerpt:

You can see the common theme of the constant prudential tip-toeing around Russia’s redlines so as not to excessively provoke Putin.

They go on to express that the CIA is keen to distance itself from any of Ukraine’s more provocative actions, like the Nordstream attack, or strikes on Russian territory.

But the key portion of the article, which comes next, is the admission that Biden dispatched CIA director Burns to Russia on the eve of the invasion in late 2021. They had been watching Russia’s troop buildups, and in essence sent Burns to deliver a final warning of consequences should Russia proceed with an invasion. Though Putin ended up “snubbing” the CIA head by staying in a Sochi resort and refusing to meet him in person, he did take his secure phone call from Sochi.

What comes next is the heart of the entire article and is one of the most significant and remarkable admissions of the entire war. It is a must read:

image

...

And that angle could very well be their attempt to distance themselves from an increasingly erratic and unpredictable Ukrainian ‘mad dog’, which has increasingly gone ‘off the leash’, refusing to play by those previously established rules. The article goes on to highlight this next:

One crisis was averted. But a new one was brewing. Strikes inside Russia were continuing and even increasing, contrary to the fundamental U.S. condition for supporting Ukraine. There was a mysterious spate of assassinations and acts of sabotage inside Russia, some occurring in and around Moscow. Some of the attacks, the CIA concluded, were domestic in origin, undertaken by a nascent Russian opposition. But others were the work of Ukraine—even if analysts were unsure of the extent of Zelensky's direction or involvement.

Given the above, could the CIA have been using such publications to absolve itself? This would further play into the chief theme that the CIA is very diligently trying to signal its ‘gentlemanly’ intentions to Russia so that no misunderstandings or un-planned escalations can occur.

The article segues this into the Nordstream attacks in such a way as to almost suggest the entire thing was written merely to absolve the CIA of those attacks, and pin the blame entirely on Ukraine.

...

After the foolhardy drone attack on the Kremlin in the center of Moscow, the article notes that even Poland had begun warning the CIA that Ukraine was, in essence, a refractory mad dog:

A senior Polish government official told Newsweek that it might be impossible to convince Kyiv to abide by the non-agreement it made to keep the war limited. "In my humble opinion, the CIA fails to understand the nature of the Ukrainian state and the reckless factions that exist there," says the Polish official, who requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.

This is quite interesting for the following reason. Firstly it could explain Poland’s own later distancing from Kiev, the fruits of which we’re seeing now. Even brazen Poland may have started getting cold feet after they realized that Ukraine’s entire MO would likely revolve around trying to rope Poland into WW3. Not only were there several missile attacks on Polish territory for which Ukraine tried to frame Russia, but there were increasing reports in recent weeks from Russian intel sources that Ukraine intended to escalate this plan in the near future.

It’s clear that Poland has recently seemed to have a big shift vis a vis Ukraine—the turning point was several months back after the failed NATO summit and Zelensky’s subsequent disrespectful rhetoric. That is when Duda openly called Ukraine a “drowning man that would pull everyone down with him.” It all went down hill from there.

But it could also explain the US’s new cold posture and seeming snub of Ukraine. For instance, many are currently complaining that the US has $4B drawdown authority funds remaining yet they’ve announced no further funding will be allotted. This mysteriously comes on the heels of repeated Ukrainian strikes to sensitive targets in Crimea, as well as senseless attacks on Belgorod. Could the CIA have finally seen the light, preached earlier by Poland, and perhaps convinced the Biden administration that this mad dog is getting too unhinged to continue safely supporting? It could at least have something to do with it, if not be entirely responsible for the cold stance switch.

In fact, this is suggested by the very next paragraph in the article:

In response, the senior U.S. defense intelligence official stressed the delicate balance the Agency must maintain in its many roles, saying: "I hesitate to say that the CIA has failed." But the official said sabotage attacks and cross border fighting created a whole new complication and continuing Ukrainian sabotage "could have disastrous consequences."

As one can see, Ukraine’s recalcitrant flaunting of the ‘unspoken rules’ could have finally contributed to making the US realize that it was suicidal to continue supporting such a brazenly fractious mad dog whose sole intention has clearly become to embroil the world in WW3 as a last ditch escape from its own self-sealed fate.

...

stickdog · 2024-01-01T23:42:18+00:00

Excerpt:

...

Honestly, even if I weren’t a free speech absolutist, the self-regard and confusion of the people pushing this line would set me off. The combination of preening self-righteousness and total incoherence is really remarkable here. For example, Nathan Tankus of Notes on the Crises, an economics blogger, very loudly and ostentatiously took his newsletter to Ghost due to the supposed transphobia of Substack. This mostly engendered discussion about Substack, but it probably should have instead put the spotlight on Ghost, which was designed to allow for no central moderation at all and thus certainly hosts transphobia and all manner of other ugly content. It’s so fucking bizarre! “I can’t stand the refusal to moderate the transphobia off of this platform, so I’m moving to a service that has no ability to moderate transphobia” is ridiculous and incoherent on its face. Hell, Ghost even makes it hard for you to tell when someone’s using a Ghost install at all, so it’s difficult to even know who’s hosting the Bad Stuff! The logic here is so strained and unworkable that it leads me to conclude that Tankus simply found that he wasn’t seeing the kind of financial success he was hoping for on Substack and went through with his whole peacocking exercise in a desire to brand himself as A Guy Who Really Cares, and in doing so harvest more subscriptions.

Wordpress? Really? The backbone of a vast portion of the written content on the web, and thus certainly a repository of far-right attitudes? Let’s not just talk about Wordpress run on private server space, let’s look at Wordpress.com, which is hosted by Wordpress itself. Here’s the blog West Hunter. I wouldn’t ever want to censor this blog because I wouldn’t want to censor any blog, but let me tell ya, that’s an ugly, ugly place! It’s been written by the late Henry Harpending, considered a white nationalist by the SPLC, and Gregory Cochran, a physicist who a) pushes race science and b) believe homosexuality spreads pathogenically. These are certainly the kinds of guys that Katz would want to force off of Substack, were they on there. Instead they’re not just using a Wordpress install, they’re hosted by Wordpress - which is frequently celebrated as a purer, more progressive alternative to Substack! Google’s Blogger service? Though he hasn’t written there for years, notorious race-science proponent Steve Sailer’s blog is hosted on Blogger. I’m sure there are many, many more examples for any given blogging service. What are we to conclude from the fact that so many prominent platforms are home to offensive content? That we just need to get much more aggressive about cleaning up the ol’ web, free expression be damned? No, I think the conclusion is that the problem is not with platforms, the problem is that the world is full of bad people who believe bad things. And it is so indicative of the liberal mindset to insist that there’s One Weird Trick to stopping the far right, like you can flip a switch and just turn of Nazism.

...

I’m sorry to repeat myself, guys, but I must: we fought a war against fascism that killed 4% of the world’s population, and yet fascism survived. You can’t stop it by tweaking the terms of service. The only thing liberals know how to do anymore is to work the refs - to beg someone in authority to run in and enforce some sort of rules that, they’d like to imagine, secretly run the universe. This was stupid, entitled behavior ten years ago. But after the election of Donald Trump, it stands as something else, something darker. Do you remember the cry that rang out when Trump was elected and in the first years of his presidency? “This is not normal!” As if “normal” ever meant anything, and as if there was some benevolent clockmaker watching over it all who could adjust the dials and fix it so that our country was normal again. How on earth so many educated and successful professionals continue to believe that there is some celestial authority out there who will eliminate fascism if only we pass the right legislation, I cannot understand. Not one of us will live to see the elimination of fascism. Luckily, actual fascism is a tiny fringe ideology that has no power. Unluckily, mainstream conservatism, and its great enabler mainstream liberalism, are bad enough.

By the way, Jonathan, The Atlantic is run by Jeffrey Goldberg, who helped lie us into the Iraq war and admitted in his book to abusing Palestinian prisoners when he was a literal prison camp guard. Great company you keep there! And, indeed, he is vastly more influential than any of the people you want to deplatform. You strengthened him and his position and the ideology he serves; you put money in his pocket. Does that feel good? Like you’re on the side of the angels? Sometimes, it feels like none of our hands are clean.

stickdog · 2024-01-01T23:19:24+00:00

Excerpt:

There are reports that there has been a run on ATMs in Ukraine. Accordingly, Ukrainians withdrew the equivalent of a billion dollars from their accounts in one day, which could become a problem for the Ukrainian banking and financial system.

The reason for the run is a bill that is intended to support the forced conscription of a further 500,000 people to the front, which is being discussed in Ukraine. According to the bill, people who evade the draft would be banned from carrying out financial transactions or selling property.

Since many men in Ukraine have been hiding from forced conscription for a year and a half and many who have not previously been affected are now afraid of the conscription and are thinking about going into hiding, cash will suddenly become indispensable if the law comes into force. As a result, many have plundered their accounts and are now hoarding cash at home.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-30T01:14:50+00:00

I wonder if they perhaps suspect a near future increase in the need for cancer medications?

stickdog · 2023-12-29T20:35:54+00:00

The Deep State are DESPERATE to Justify More Funding for Ukraine

stickdog · 2023-12-29T20:30:21+00:00

Excerpt:

It’s clear that Ukraine needs more support. What isn’t clear is why the latest White House spending package includes $50 billion in additional military funding, which is more than Ukraine has received from the United States since the war began in early 2022. This could a very dangerous escalation of the risk of nuclear war. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock already stands closer to “midnight” than ever.

There’s a better way. The United States can take an active role in organizing a ceasefire, to be followed by negotiations toward a permanent settlement.

Unfortunately, so far Biden has made little effort to end the slaughter. In fact, there is serious evidence that Great Britain and the US played a decisive role in blocking a 2022 peace deal between Ukraine and Russia. We also know now that the administration was aware the counteroffensive had little chance of success but kept it a secret from the American people. (They were reportedly “furious” when the deception was exposed.)

There is a growing gap between the goals of Washington DC’s war lobby and the realities on the ground in Ukraine. Some national security insiders have openly endorsed the idea of using the Ukrainian people as cannon fodder for a dangerous proxy war against Russia. There have even been fantasies about overthrowing Putin and plunging Russia into chaos, which would not bring around the America-friendly regime of neoconservative dreamers. Instead, it’s likely that Putin would be succeeded by the same generals who have been prosecuting his war.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-29T02:36:11+00:00

It wasn't meant as a serious OP. Just a cute KILLER ROBOT!!! diversion.

stickdog · 2023-12-22T18:45:20+00:00

Yes, but isn't that part of diet for many kids? Wouldn't eating more pasture fed meat, free range eggs, and fresh produce instead of glyphosate drenched processed grains be a huge step forward?

stickdog · 2023-12-18T23:13:03+00:00

archive link of The WSJ's Report

stickdog · 2023-12-18T20:06:08+00:00

Thom Hartmann is willing to stem the flow of illegal immigration if this will get the damn Republicans to finally come to their senses about handing out scores of billions more to military defense contractors!!!

stickdog · 2023-12-17T19:39:05+00:00

Excerpt:

Lockdown had a “catastrophic effect” on the nation and the most disadvantaged are no better off than they were during the global financial crash 15 years ago, according to a landmark report.

The Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) think tank warns that post pandemic, the UK is in danger of sliding back into the Victorian era marked by a widening gulf between mainstream society and a depressed and poverty-stricken underclass. Its report, Two Nations: The State of Poverty in the UK, found that some 13.4 million people lead lives marred by family fragility, stagnant wages, poor housing, chronic ill-health, and crime. And many believe that the jump from welfare to work is “not worth it”.

The findings will make for difficult reading for Prime Minister Rishi Sunak as the Conservatives languish in the polls behind Labour after 13 years of Tory rule.

The study raises questions about the Government’s handling of the pandemic, finding that lockdown was particularly harmful for the least well off, where the gap between the so-called “haves” and “have nots” was blown wide open.

It says: “During lockdown calls to a domestic abuse helpline rose 700 per cent; 1.2 million more people went on working-age benefits, 86 per cent more people sought help for addictions; prisoners were locked up for 22.5 hours per day. There is a growing gap between those who can get by and those stuck at the bottom.” Six in ten of the general public say that their area has a good quality of life but this plummets to fewer than two in five of the most deprived.

The report found that during the pandemic, mental ill health in young people went from one in nine to one in six and nearly a quarter among the oldest children. If this trend continues, by 2030 more than one in four 5 to 15-year-olds – which may be as many as 2.3 million children - could have a mental disorder. There are likely to be 108 per cent more boys with mental health disorders by 2030 than there would have been if the lockdown had not happened.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-17T07:15:53+00:00

Excerpt:

The Funnel

Wealthy families funnel their kids into the best prep schools.

The best prep schools funnel their students into Ivy League universities.

Ivy League universities funnel their students into McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, etc.

It turns out that those companies are basically criminal enterprises.

But once you’re in, there’s no way out (you can’t buy a nice house in a mafioso economy without playing the game).

Then the cycle repeats.

This creates a brain drain as, generation after generation, those with the most advantage and promise are siphoned away from productive activities toward negative sum activities.

This also causes a moral hollowing out of society as the various participants come up with creative ways to justify this system.

If we are going to survive, we have to build an alternative to this system.

The origins of RSV

Most people don’t realize that RSV made the leap from chimpanzees to humans because of shoddy research to develop a polio vaccine. From Children’s Health Defense:

What we know from the research on RSV:

• Chimpanzee Coryza Virus (CCV) was first identified in 1955 in a group of chimps used for polio research at Walter Reed Army Research Institute in Silver Springs, Maryland.

• The caretaker for the apes also developed CCV in early 1956, and the virus spread from the caretaker to several of his bunk mates at the institute located in Silver Springs.

• One year later, in 1957, a new virus was found in infants in Baltimore. That virus, identical to CCV, was renamed Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV).

• Five years later, RSV virus was responsible for the majority of severe respiratory infections in infants and young children across the globe.

In short, the introduction of RSV from apes used for the development of polio vaccine in the 1950s resulted in the creation of a new respiratory disease that the World Health Organization (WHO) now estimates results in more than 3 million hospitalizations and nearly 60,000 deaths in children under 5 years of age every year.

So the RSV shot that they are selling via every TV channel in America is in response to the RSV virus they created.

...

Killing is a business model

“The pharmaceutical industry is as interested in world health as the arms industry is in world peace.”

— Dr. Simon Goddek

The totalitarian impulse

Bolshevism is totalitarianism based on class.

Nazism is totalitarianism based on nationality and race.

Theocracy is totalitarianism based on religion.

Patriarchy is totalitarianism based on sex.

Pharma’s enslavement of the developed world is totalitarianism based on profit, control, and sadism.

But what explains the totalitarian impulse itself? Other animals don’t behave this way.

“Against Libertarian Brutalism”

Back in 2014, Jeffrey Tucker (now president of the Brownstone Institute) caused quite a stir in the libertarian world with the publication of his article, Against Libertarian Brutalism. He makes the case that libertarianism is characterized by two camps — the humanitarians and the brutalists.

The humanitarians want to use liberty to support human flourishing — the good, the true, and the beautiful. The brutalists are obsessed with flaunting liberty’s other possibility— the right to do whatever they want especially if that means being boorish and regressive. Freedom contains both possibilities but libertarian humanitarianism is where we should put our energies.

The article caused consternation among the libertarian brutalists. But I read the piece as an incredibly gracious invitation to people of all ideological faiths to join the freedom movement to create the better world our hearts know is possible.

My favorite line from the article:

Freedom is what gives life to the human imagination and enables the working out of love as it extends from our most benevolent and highest longings.

The article is essential reading for anyone who cares about liberty.

stickdog · 2023-12-17T06:57:24+00:00

I just have never been able to accept the idea that omertas can only manage to maintain secrecy for certain types of criminals but never for others.

Does this make any sense to you?

Remember that psychological studies prove the the easiest way to get people to agree to deceive is when they think they are doing so for a good reason. So why should it be any harder for intelligence agencies to keep secrets than it is for organized crime syndicates? It's not as if they penalties for telling the truth are any less severe.

stickdog · 2023-12-17T02:10:55+00:00

It is a hilarious argument to me. Does anybody have a hard time believing that the Mafia can keep a secret?

stickdog · 2023-12-17T00:07:43+00:00

While that has got to be an overestimate, I also cannot find a clear answer to that simple question.

Here is the best I could come up with:

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/how-do-prescription-drug-costs-in-the-united-states-compare-to-other-countries

stickdog · 2023-12-16T22:51:31+00:00

Related link:

https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-introduces-legislation-install-400-new-automated-license-plate-readers

The San Francisco Police Department created the problem of out of control petty crime by not prosecuting any burglars or robbers and by allowing huge stolen goods fencing outlets to operate in with the knowledge of basically everyone on SF's streets.

Now the WEF has come to rescue with their ingenious solution of surveilling all innocent drivers!

Of course, the small proportion of thieves who use cars rather than scooters or bikes for their petty heists use stolen plates and/or stolen cars. [b]And there is, of course, no chance that these 400 automated license plate readers will ever be used to restrict personal car use should any future pandemic of climate crises require such prohibitions![/b]

https://youtu.be/iWWWyG5ZwG8

Excerpts from the OP:

Over the past eight months, Rober and his team recorded 25 car break-ins, but something surprised him. Most weren't those groups of apparently organized thieves we often see on cell phone videos.

"Something like 80% of our break-ins were just individuals," Rober siad. "So not groups coming around in cars. And honestly, it felt like a lot of them could have been their first break-in almost, right? Like, they weren't very good at it, they couldn't break the window, or they got scared off really easily."

Dan Noyes was also able to track license plates used in the crimes; they often turned out to be from stolen cars, to make the criminals harder to catch.

Gerald Eisman told the I-Team, "I went over to my car and my license plates were gone."

The retired San Francisco State professor had plates stolen twice from his car parked in front of his Oakland home. We showed him the video of his plates being used in a break-in.'

Mark Rober also took notice of our investigation earlier this year -- a videographer placed airtags on his gear, and after a car break-in in Oakland, he watched the equipment travel into San Francisco.

Dan Noyes reported in September, "He's on the phone with a San Francisco police officer when he sees his camera gear arrive at this location in the 300 block of Leavenworth."

"And he goes, Oh, yeah, that's a known major fencing operation," Justin Schuck told us. "Everybody in the Bay Area knows that they can bring their stolen goods and offload them there."

So, Mark Rober rigged a laptop with a tracking device. "We took an actual gaming laptop, remove the extra fan and in its place added a GPS tracker that will continuously stay charged by using the laptop battery."

He got it stolen, and tracked it -- to the same location.

"That was bonkers to me," Mark Rober told us. "Like you publicly outed this as a fencing operation a month and a half ago. And it's still being used as a fencing operation."

stickdog · 2023-12-16T02:19:45+00:00

Excerpt:

Legislation will be expedited to get already approved technology on the streets faster to more quickly combat organized retail theft, motor vehicle theft, and other critical public safety needs

San Francisco, CA – Mayor London N. Breed today will introduce legislation to allow the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) to use Automated License Plate Readers (ALRP) to address public safety issues in San Francisco. Mayor Breed has asked Board President Aaron Peskin to expedite the legislation, which he has agreed to do, so it can be approved in a few weeks, instead of the months it would normally take.

While SFPD is already approved to use Automated License Plate Readers, a local law passed in 2019 prohibits any changes to the approved policy without Board of Supervisors approval, even if those changes are technical in nature. To receive Automated License Plate Readers provided by a recent state grant, SFPD must adjust its technical policies, and therefore SFPD must seek further legislative approval from the Board of Supervisors. “Public safety requires us to be nimble and quick to adapt to use new technologies,” said Mayor London Breed.

“These license plate readers can play a critical role in disrupting retail theft, car break-ins, sideshows, and other criminal activity. But our current laws inhibit, rather than support, the expansion of public safety tools like license plate readers. We must do everything we can to get these cameras deployed as quickly as possible. There is no reason for delay.”

"Installing a network of automated license plate readers will be a game-changer for San Francisco. The SFPD will be able to more easily identify vehicles and suspects wanted in some of our most pervasive and challenging serial crimes, like retail theft, auto burglaries, vehicle theft and catalytic converter theft to name just a few," said Police Chief Bill Scott. "These cameras will also help our officers be more precise in the vehicles they pull over, which will reduce unnecessary stops, and assist in our ongoing efforts to build trust with the communities we serve."

Driving this need for new legislation for an already approved technology is the fact that San Francisco, like jurisdictions across the state, recently received a state grant to combat organized retail theft. This $17 million grant includes funding to allow SFPD to purchase and install 400 cameras to cover 100 intersections throughout the City. These cameras have proven instrumental in disrupting crime.

However, to install these new cameras, there is a need for legislative changes due to the nature of how San Francisco governs the uses of technologies as set by a policy passed by the Board of Supervisors. Any time a City Department wants to use a new technology or, in this case, finds a need to adjust the technical parameters of that technology, it must seek legislative approval. For example, in this case, SFPD needs legislative approval to change what kind of video files are used and what kind of vendor can service the license plate readers.

As this technology has already been approved for its current use, Mayor Breed asked President Peskin to waive the normal 30-day hold period where ordinances must sit before any action is taken. With that waiver granted, a first legislative hearing can happen as soon as on Monday and be heard at the full Board of Supervisors soon after. SFPD can then begin acquiring and installing these cameras. If it had not been granted, it’s likely that the legislation will not be before the full Board of Supervisors until next year.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-16T02:15:04+00:00

https://www.sf.gov/news/mayor-breed-introduces-legislation-install-400-new-automated-license-plate-readers

stickdog · 2023-12-15T20:53:41+00:00

Excerpt:

...

“The travel exemption portal will define specific categories of workers using a tiered concept to identify who would be exempt from a travel ban in order to commute to and from their place of employment. The list of essential employees will be reviewed annually and employers will be asked to provide updates when an essential employee’s work status changes for any reason that warrants removal from the exemption list," the news release said.

The Dossier spent lots of time Friday searching to see if such measures were even legal, hoping to find inquiries in the news media defending New Yorkers from potential rights violations. Unfortunately, we came up empty. In fact, all we found from the corporate media were questions challenging the legal status of businesses that wanted to remain open during a declared emergency.

Poloncarz has used his police powers as county executive to declare a “driving ban” in the event of a snowstorm.

The driving bans were put in place at the end of 2022, after a major snowstorm wreaked havoc on the area and resulted in the deaths of stranded motorists. Poloncarz then took the opportunity to announce the new policy as a way to “do something” about the crisis at hand.

Now, one year later, they are dramatically expanding that power with the help of both state and federal resources.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-14T02:33:21+00:00

Excerpt:

Chairman Green, Chairman Bishop, Chairman Ivey, and members of the Subcommittee, thank you for inviting my testimony.

Researchers asked by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to flag election and Covid misinformation to social media platforms in 2020 and 2021 say that they didn’t break the law. According to the leaders of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the other groups, they simply alerted social media platforms to potential violations of their Terms of Service. What the platforms chose to do after that was up to them.

But during the two years that these DHS-empowered researchers were asking social media platforms to take down, throttle, or otherwise censor social media posts, the President of the United States was accusing Big Tech of “killing people,” his then-press secretary said publicly that the administration was “flagging violative posts for Facebook,” members of Congress threatened to strip social media platforms of their legal right to operate because, they said, the platforms weren’t censoring enough, and many supposedly disinterested researchers were aggressively demanding that the platforms change their Terms of Service.

It's true that social media platforms are private companies technically free to censor content as they see fit and are under no clearly stated obligation to obey demands by the US government or its authorized “researchers” at Stanford or anywhere else.

But the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution states clearly that the government should take no action that would limit free speech, and the record shows that the US government, in general, and the DHS in particular, did just that.

DHS supported, created, and participated in the 2020 Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTIL; the 2020 Election Integrity Partnership, or EIP; and the 2021 Virality Project, or VP. In the case of the EIP and VP, four think tanks led by Stanford Internet Observatory, or SIO, and reporting to CISA, demanded and achieved mass censorship of the American people in direct violation of the First Amendment and the prohibition on government agencies from interfering in an election.

A longtime US Navy officer and a UK military contractor created the so-called anti-disinformation wing of the CTIL in 2020. In so doing, they pioneered the misdescription of censorship laundering as “cyber-security.” They used CTIL as a front group to demand censorship and demanded that “cognitive security” be viewed as their responsibility, in addition to physical security and cyber-security.

CTIL created a handbook full of tactics, including demanding social media platforms change their terms of service. Another explains that while such activities overseas are "typically" done by "the CIA and NSA and the Department of Defense," censorship efforts "against Americans" have to be done using private partners because the government doesn't have the "legal authority."

DHS publicly blessed this project, and its staff helped create CTIL’s “anti-disinformation” efforts.

...

he explanations and justifications by the creators and leaders of the EIP and VP have shifted over the last nine months. At first, a SIO executive claimed in a video for DHS that the idea for EIP came from SIO’s interns, who happened to be working at DHS. More recently, another SIO executive claimed that the idea was his.

Then, last month, this committee released documents establishing that the DHS-authorized groups believed the idea had come from DHS. “We just set up an election integrity partnership at the request of DHS/CISA,” said an Atlantic Council senior executive, Graham Brookie, in an email sent on July 21, 2020.

After Matt Taibbi and I testified before Congress in March, a SIO spokesperson says it “did not censor or ask social media platforms to remove any social media content regarding coronavirus vaccine side effects.”

That turned out not to be true, as internal messages from its operation, released publicly by this committee last month, proved.

...

CIS had previously claimed that its definition of election mis- and disinformation did not include “content that is polarizing, biased, partisan or contains viewpoints expressed about elections or politics,” “inaccurate statements about an elected or appointed official, candidate, or political party,” or “broad, non-specific statements about the integrity of elections or civic processes that do not reference a specific current election administration activity.”

But the DHS emails reveal that CISA and CIS did, in fact, consider such content to be subject to censorship. The emails show that CISA and its non-profit partners reported political speech to social media companies, including jokes, hyperbole, and the types of “viewpoints” and “non-specific statements” that CIS once claimed it would not censor. Using the pretext of “election security,” DHS sought to censor politically inconvenient speech about election legitimacy.

Messages one year later also showed VP researchers urging censorship of “general anti-vaccination” posts, of the CDC’s own data, of accurate claims of natural immunity, of accurate information from the journal Lancet, of anti-lockdown protests, and even of someone’s entire Google Drive.

In 2020, Department of Homeland officials and personnel from EIP were often on emails together, and CISA’s personnel had access to EIP’s tickets through an internal messaging system, Jira, which EIP used to flag and report social media posts to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms. And CISA included a threatening disclaimer in its email. It stated that “information may also be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies.”

...

“Psychological and influence operations have long been used to secure military objectives,” noted my colleague, Alex Gutentag, last week. “We now have clear evidence that, with the creation of CTIL and its partnership with CISA, [the censorship leaders] pioneered the use of psychological strategies to combat populism at home by censoring information and narratives associated with populist discontent.” Today, the Defense Department and its contractors openly discuss the importance of “cognitive warfare,” not just “security,” aimed at the American people.

While I believe all of the above is transparently unconstitutional, there is the possibility that The Supreme Court will not rule against it after it hears the Missouri v Biden censorship lawsuit next year. Some justices may conclude that somehow the First Amendment does not cover the Internet or that governments outsourcing censorship to third-party “cut-outs” or front groups is justified even though the Supreme Court has called it “axiomatic” that the government cannot facilitate private parties violating the Constitution on its behalf. Still, other justices may claim that the First Amendment requires a very high bar for government coercion of private actors, even though the First Amendment prohibits government limitations on freedom of speech broadly, not just through coercion.

As such, the importance of this DHS oversight committee in protecting our freedom of speech is essential.

Setting aside the clear and present threat that DHS poses to our first and most fundamental freedom, there is another problem related to DHS’s censorship activities, and that’s the ways in which it distracts from and thus undermines our nation’s cybersecurity.

As this committee knows well, the Internet is more essential than any other piece of America’s infrastructure because every major aspect of civilization depends upon it, including our electrical grids, our transportation networks, and our policing and security systems. If cyber-attacks take down or undermine the Internet, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Given that, does this committee believe it makes sense for the head of the DHS’s so-called “Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency,” CISA, to be involved in policing what people say, hear, and think?

Set aside for a moment the Orwellian aspects of CISA’s efforts at mind control. What do we think the consequences could be of CISA taking its eye off the cybersecurity ball so that it can crusade with Stanford interns against wrongthink? Should we be able to sleep soundly at night knowing that CISA is focused on the problem of people being wrong on the Internet rather than on China, Russia, Iran, and other malicious actors seeking to harm American businesses, government agencies, and our citizens?

Over the last 100 years, the Supreme Court created a tiny number of exceptions to the radical commitment to freedom of speech enshrined in our constitution. Nobody questions the need for governments to fight fraud, child exploitation, and the immediate incitement of violence.

What’s at stake here is our fundamental freedom to express our views on controversial social and political issues without fear of government censorship. CISA drifted so far from its mission that it slid down the slipperiest slope in American political life.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-12T23:48:04+00:00

Dozens of supporting links at the OP.

Excerpt:

Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf recently took to X to mourn the “catastrophic” decline in U.S. life expectancy.

But his post, which hit on smoking, diet, chronic illness and health care, ignored the obvious: People are dying in abnormally high numbers even now and long since COVID waned. Yet public health agencies and medical societies are silent.

Life insurers have been consistently sounding the alarm over these unexpected or, “excess,” deaths, which claimed 158,000 more Americans in the first nine months of 2023 than in the same period in 2019. That exceeds America’s combined losses from every war since Vietnam. Congress should urgently work with insurance experts to investigate this troubling trend.

With the worst of COVID behind us, annual deaths for all causes should be back to pre-pandemic levels — or even lower because of the loss of so many sick and infirm Americans. Instead, the death toll remains “alarming,” “disturbing,” and deserving of “urgent attention,” according to insurance industry articles.

Actuarial reports — used by insurers to inform decisions — show deaths occurring disproportionately among young working-age people. Nonetheless, America’s chief health manager, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, opted in September to archive its excess deaths webpage with a note stating, “these datasets will no longer be updated.”

Money, of course, is a motivating issue for insurers. In 2020, death claims took their biggest one-year leap since the 1918 influenza scourge, jumping 15.4 percent to $90 billion in payouts. After hitting $100 billion in 2021, claims slowed in 2022, but are still above 2019. Indemnity experts are urging the adoption of an early-warning program to detect looming health problems among people with life insurance and keep them alive.

Unlike in the pandemic’s early phase, these deaths are not primarily among the old. For people 65 and over, deaths in the second quarter of 2023 were 6 percent below the pre-pandemic norm, according to a new report from the Society of Actuaries. Mortality was 26 percent higher among insured 35-to-44-year-olds, and 19 percent higher for 25-to-34-year-olds, continuing a death spike that peaked in the third quarter of 2021 at a staggering 101 percent and 79 percent above normal, respectively.

“COVID-19 claims do not fully explain the increase in incurred claim incidence,” the Society said. COVID-19 deaths dropped 84 percent from the first three quarters of 2021 to the same period in 2023.

To some extent, we know what is killing the young, with an actuarial analysis of government data showing mortality increases in liver, kidney and cardiovascular diseases, and diabetes. Drug overdoses also soared nationwide, but not primarily in the young working class. Therein lies the most pressing question for insurers, epidemiologists and health agency officials. Why is the traditionally healthiest sector of our society — young, employed, insured workers — dying at such rates? Public health officials aggressively oversaw the pandemic response, for better or worse. Why aren’t they looking into this?

In the United Kingdom, where post-pandemic excess deaths in similar demographics also persist, a government-funded independent inquiry is underway. “With each passing week of the COVID inquiry,” the BBC reported recently, “it is clear there were deep flaws in the way decisions were made and information provided during the pandemic.”

The United States needs such an examination of the measures taken to fight the pandemic. This probe — by a high-level, unbiased commission — should focus on what worked and what did not.

Lockdowns limited access to education, social interaction and healthcare with documented harm to childhood development, mental health and the economy. Treatment protocols dictated how doctors should deliver COVID care — primarily in hospitals and with expensive medicines — and limited early access to generic drugs that might have helped.

Vaccines were given to more than 270 million people, among them babies, pregnant women and workers under employer mandates. The therapeutic’s “warp speed,” emergency use authorization must be part of any post-pandemic analysis, in light of more than 1 million reports of possible harm to the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System and a new Yale University study validating a chronic post-vaccination syndrome.

Finally, government officials who sanctioned unprecedented censorship of dissent — enforcing pandemic measures through media pressure — must be called to account.

Actuaries and industry analysts predict excess deaths will continue among people with life insurance through 2030 and are “anticipated to be highest at younger ages.” This prediction defies normal expectations of mortality for a robust population of people with life insurance. Now consider how other disability-afflicted, poorly insured Americans may fare.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-12T20:56:32+00:00

Do not commit genocide. Much less complicated.

stickdog · 2023-12-12T20:53:29+00:00

It's amazing to me how easily the billionaires have captured the misleaders in almost every single government on Earth through "club membership", bribes, blackmail, and if all else fails, murder.

And if any one of these misleaders is removed from power due to the "democratic" unrest, this misleader is typically replaced with yet another WEF young misleader.

stickdog · 2023-12-10T21:12:26+00:00

It's just so amazing to me how fucked up and politically divided almost everyone's supposed "principles" are.

The actual current SCOTUS interpretation of free speech is that all political speech is protected, even clearly and consciously understood lies.

It's all protected speech, even lies, unless:

it proscribes advocacy of the use of force or of law violation
it iss directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action
it is likely to incite or produce such action

Just read below if you don't believe me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_theater

The First Amendment holding in Schenck was later partially overturned by Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969, in which the Supreme Court held that "the constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."[1][15] The test in Brandenburg is the current Supreme Court jurisprudence on the ability of government to punish speech after it occurs.

Why (most) lies are protected speech, and why they should stay that way

This is because the government cannot and should not decide what is true and what is false.

Of course, speech that directly incites the Hutus to kill the Tutsis is not protected. But that's about it.

But shitcons want to ban trans speech, flag burning, and "from the river to the sea" while shitlibs want to ban Hunter Biden stories, lab leak theories, and any and all criticism of lockdown, vaccine or mask mandates.

Why can't anyone on either side stick to any principles? Whatever happened to "I don't agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"?

stickdog · 2023-12-10T20:55:12+00:00

It's also a record low in Switzerland: https://lenews.ch/2023/12/08/switzerlands-birth-rate-from-baby-boom-to-bust/

stickdog · 2023-12-09T22:32:12+00:00

Excerpt:

...

The lowest-hanging fruit for the counterargument is all in New York Times Company v. Sullivan, in which a quite liberal Supreme Court repeatedly and very clearly spelled out the American standard for the criticism of government. Justice Arthur Goldberg, in a concurring opinion: “In my view, the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution afford to the citizen and to the press an absolute, unconditional privilege to criticize official conduct despite the harm which may flow from excesses and abuses.”

This is how the Supreme Court showed up in 1964 to start thinking about a case involving the limits of speech about public officials; as Justice William Brennan, Jr. wrote in the majority opinion, “we consider this case against the background of a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open, and that it may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Compare that conclusion to the argument that government has not engaged in viewpoint discrimination, because it banned comments only in the context of being addressed with vitriol. We didn’t say we didn’t didn’t like their viewpoint; we just said that their opinions were too extreme.

But here’s the important thing about New York Times Company v. Sullivan: it’s a history lesson. The majority opinion quotes James Madison and John Stuart Mill, and examines debates over public speech in the early republic. Looking at the national past and its political sources, they saw only the idea that government officials may properly be addressed with whatever degree of firmness citizens choose to apply. American politics were never polite, and were never thought to be. The tumult of a democratic republic, Tocqueville wrote, “begins in the lowest ranks of the people,” storming the seats of government to shout their disapproval.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-08T02:55:55+00:00

Excerpt:

Except it's not a "Black Mirror" episode. It's real life. And it's happening right now in Ireland.

The so-called "Hate Speech" bill isn't what it seems. It's not a bill about protecting the Irish people from hate crimes. It's a Trojan Horse designed to control the world's Big Tech companies — X, Facebook, Google, and YouTube.

This is a free speech emergency. We thought the legislation was dead. But the Irish government is using recent riots as an excuse to ram the legislation through before Christmas.

THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THIS IS NOT ABOUT IRELAND. THIS IS A TOTALITARIAN EFFORT BY GLOBAL ELITES TO CENSOR ALL OF US.

It's right there in black and white: "One of the key features of the Bill," write two attorneys with a leading Irish law firm, "is the provision for offences by corporate bodies."

https://matheson.com/insights/detail/hate-speech-bill-corporate-offences-on-the-horizon…

How can Big Tech companies avoid censorship?

You guessed it: by agreeing to regulation of their content by the Irish government.

"The current iteration of the Bill provides a defence for the corporate body to show that it took all reasonable steps and exercised due diligence to avoid the commission of the particular offence. Therefore, to establish and maintain such a defence, companies will need to have the appropriate processes and procedures in place."

The Irish government is almost certainly not acting alone. As my colleagues and I have reported, the demand for censorship is coming directly from the militaries, intelligence agencies, and their front groups in the US, UK, and around the world.

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1731737414077719029?s=20…

The intelligence communities of the Five Eyes nations of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have been working together to censor ordinary citizens and politicians alike for disfavored speech for the last several years.

https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1729537450752811097?s=20…

There's no time to mince words. What governments are doing is against the law. They are violating the constitutions of the nations that the people elected them to uphold.

Because of the high level of secrecy they are using, we can't say whether or not these are "rogue" elements within governments or whether these orders are coming from heads of state.

But we do know that demands for censorship have come both directly from the US military and from heads of state of Western nations around the world.

What's happening should terrify all freedom-loving people.

We must fight back.

We will fight back.

That starts with recognizing what's going on.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-08T02:47:35+00:00

Excerpt:

Well, 2023 is almost in the books, and things couldn’t be going better for the New Normal Reich. It’s been a long, strange seven years, but we’re finally back to the Global War on Terror, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2016 by the War on Populism, which, as you may recall, was abruptly preempted in 2020 by the Apocalyptic Pandemic, which, as you may recall, was what ushered The New Normal Reich into being and brought us full-circle.

Anyway, here we are, back in The Global War on Terror, or the War on Horror, or The War on Whatever … Islamic terrorism, Russia, Trump, disinformation, racism, hate speech, conspiracy theories, anti-Semitism, anti-vaxxerism, transphobians, Communists, cultural Marxists, radical wokesters, the Cult of Musk, neo-Covidians, Zionazis, climate-change deniers, decapitated baby rapers … it doesn’t really matter. Pick an enemy and join the Roman Orgy of Hatred!

The schizotocracy couldn’t care less which side of whatever you think you are on.

Yes, that’s right, “the schizotocracy.” I’ve coined a new name for the supranational network of global corporations, nominally-sovereign governments, non-governmental governing entities, media conglomerates, oligarchs, etc., that comprise the global-capitalist system that is driving the course of events in our time. I’ve coined this new name for those of my readers who suffer apoplectic seizures whenever I write about “global capitalism” (or “GloboCap,” as I sometimes jokingly call it) and its predictable evolution into “The New Normal Reich.”

...

Now, let me tell you about the schizotocracy. Or, rather, let me tell you about schizophrenia, which is really just a fancy name for psychosis. I want to do that because that’s where global capitalism (or crony capitalism, or the corporatocracy, or the New Normal Reich, or cultural Marxism, or whatever you want or need to call it) is inexorably taking us, i.e., into a state of societal psychosis, so it would probably be a good idea to understand how psychosis works.

What happens when you become psychotic is, you lose your ability to participate in “reality.” It’s like being in a country where you don’t speak the language. Or trying to play a game that everyone else is playing when you don’t know the rules, or the point of the game, and no one will tell you. See, normally, “reality” is just, well, reality. It doesn’t take scare quotes. It’s just “the way it is.” But it isn’t. Reality is manufactured. Which is why what is “real” has changed throughout history. (Of course, those earlier versions of reality were wrong, and our current reality is right, and future generations will never look back on our reality as we look back on the reality of people in Medieval Europe, or ancient Rome, or Mesopotamia.)

In other words, reality is a fiction … a fiction that we all agree to believe in. But that doesn’t make it any less real. On the contrary, it is absolutely real, and absolutely necessary. It is an absolutely necessary fiction. It is what makes communication and cooperation possible. It is what makes all human society possible. As long as we forget that it is a fiction. As long as we don’t perceive it as a fiction.

Which is the problem for psychotic (or “schizophrenic”) individuals. They are unable to not perceive reality as a fiction, a work of ontological fiction in progress. They have forgotten to forget that it’s all made up — which is the price of admission to our communal “reality” — so they desperately try to interpret everything … literally everything, everything that we don’t have to interpret and just take for granted.

...

OK, so back to the schizotocracy, which is where The New Normal Reich is taking us, which I described above as societal psychosis. And, yes, we need to talk about capitalism. We need to talk about what it does to society when people let it run amok.

Now, I want to be ultra-clear about this for those of my readers who go totally ape-shit every time I write about capitalism. I have no problem with capitalism per se. I’m not an economist. For all I know, capitalism may be the best economic system in the entire history of economic systems. I am not calling on the proletariat to rise up and seize the means of production. I am writing about capitalism as an ideology, because it’s the ideology that has become our reality, the reality of the planet Earth, which it is transforming into one big marketplace.

See, what capitalism does, if you turn it loose, when it isn’t restrained in any real way by any sort of dominant value system — e.g., a religious, or cultural, or social value system — what it does is, it transforms societies into markets, and turns everything and everyone within them into commodities. It strips societies of all other values — i.e., impediments to the free flow of capital — until nothing remains but the marketplace, where exchange value is the only value and nothing has any real value in itself, or any real meaning in itself.

And the kicker is, what capitalism does next, when it’s allowed to go hog-wild on society, is it sells the desiccated husks of people’s values back to them as lifestyle commodities. Identities, religions, political parties, sexual orientations, left, right, capitalist, anti-capitalist, whatever. They are all just interchangeable commodities. Consumer products. Leisure activities. If they aren’t, if you attempt to actually live your life according to non-global-capitalist values (like, just for example, Islam, or Christianity, or communism, or any other values that impede the unbridled flows of capital), you will quickly find yourself branded an “extremist.” Go ahead, those of you who call yourselves Christians, try this … give everything you have to the poor, chase the money-changers out of your churches. See how fast you are branded “terrorists.”

...

We end up with societal psychosis. We end up ruled by a schizotocracy. Our reality changes from day to day, as does who we thought were our allies and adversaries, depending on the fluctuations of the market. The ideological market. The “reality” market. One day we’re all “free-speech” champions, and the next we’re screeching for censorship of speech. One day people are demonizing “the Unvaccinated,” and the next they are screeching that they are being demonized. Comparing anything to Nazi Germany is anti-Semitism, until it isn’t, and wasn’t, until it was, and then wasn’t again. Trump is Hitler. Putin is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Netanyahu is Hitler. Anyone who calls anyone Hitler is Hitler. Men are women. Women are Hitler. The Hamas terrorists are worse than the Nazis. Israel is worse than the Nazis. Masks work, and they don’t. Stand with Ukraine. Stand with Israel. Stand with Whatever. Listerine kills the germs that brushing can’t. Have it your way. You’re in good hands. Fly the friendly skies. And so on. Nothing and no one can be trusted. No one has any values or principles, so we’re just shrieking gibberish and slogans at each other, like corporations advertising their products on a television network that no one is watching.

And, of course, just like the psychotic individual, who desperately attempts to impose a new “reality” on the terrifying chaos of the obliterated reality from which they have been exiled, many folks are going full-blown fascist and trying to ram their “truth” down everyone else’s throat in an attempt to reestablish something, anything, resembling a functional reality … a reality that isn’t up for grabs. Other people are switching off, and withdrawing from society, overwhelmed by it all. Others are searching for someone to tell them what is really going on and what to do about it. “Leaders” are coming out of the woodwork, delivering speeches and holding seminars, explaining the problem … and who “our enemy” is.

I think you know how the rest of this story goes.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-08T02:32:31+00:00

Time to start threatening!

stickdog · 2023-12-08T02:07:20+00:00

Excerpt:

Last week’s hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government featured testimony from two investigative journalists about newly released documents.

Journalists Michael Shellenberger and Matt Taibbi discussed the “CTIL Files” — which refer to the Cyber Threat Intelligence League, or CTI League, a key player in the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

The files are based on documents received from an unnamed but “highly credible” whistleblower, according to the journalists, and reveal more details about what they first referred to in March, during previous testimony before the committee, as the “Censorship-Industrial Complex.”

THE CTIL FILES #1

“Many people insist that governments aren't involved in censorship, but they are. And now, a whistleblower has come forward with an explosive new trove of documents, rivaling or exceeding the Twitter Files and Facebook Files in scale and importance.” — Michael Shellenberger, 28 Nov 2023 (X) Two additional witnesses testified last week: Rupa Subramanya, a Canadian journalist who writes for The Free Press, and Olivia Troye, a former Homeland Security and Counterterrorism adviser who worked for the Office of Vice President Mike Pence.

The findings contained within the first release of the “CTIL Files” were a focus of the hearings, including allegations that the federal government engaged in “public-private partnerships” that outsourced censorship to private entities to circumvent First Amendment free speech protections.

Subramanya warned that encroaching censorship in the U.S. may lead to a situation similar to that of Canada, where many categories of speech are restricted.

Subcommittee to subpoena Biden administration officials

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chair of the subcommittee, said during his opening remarks, “One of the most egregious forms of the weaponization that this subcommittee has worked to expose is the coercion of social media companies by the federal government,” crediting the “Twitter Files” with casting light on such examples.

“We wouldn’t know anything that we know today, we wouldn’t have learned and had the reports we’ve had, without the work of Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger [and] other journalists who wrote the Twitter Files and … exposed these efforts,” Jordan said.

“The path for getting this information out has not been easy. Finding the truth never is. Instead, we were obstructed at almost every turn.”

Jordan said that while the subcommittee has previously shed light on multiple instances of federal government censorship of speech, and has “more information forthcoming,” it is nevertheless “impossible to get a full accounting of the government’s censorship efforts” without the cooperation of the “government actors involved.”

He said the subcommittee subpoenaed former White House officials Robert Flaherty and Andrew Slavitt, noting they “have so far refused to sit for interviews despite being directly implicated in emails between the White House and tech companies.”

...

stickdog · 2023-12-06T22:44:28+00:00

Right. But how long can the public health and medical establishment officials ostensibly charged with lowering rates of excess mortality keep ignoring these clear signals in every single over-injected country on Earth?

stickdog · 2023-12-05T02:40:35+00:00

If you are wondering why so many Americans are stressed about their finances these days, just look at the numbers. The Social Security Administration just released national wage statistics for 2022, and the figures that they have given us do not paint a pretty picture at all. In particular, we should all be deeply alarmed that the median wage earner brought home just $40,847.18 last year. That breaks down to about $3,400 a month, and that is before taxes. Needless to say, you cannot live a middle class lifestyle in America today on just $3,400 a month before taxes. So in most households more than one person must work, and in many cases more than one person is working multiple jobs.

During our current inflation crisis, the cost of living has been rising much faster than paychecks have, and this is squeezing American families like never before.

Right now, the national median price of renting a home is $1,978 a month, and so after paying rent on a home the average worker wouldn’t have much left over for anything else.

Meanwhile, actually owning a home is the most unaffordable that it has been since 1984…

Buying and paying for a house costs Americans more now than at any point in almost four decades. Thanks to strong demand and a limited supply of new homes – even as mortgage rates have more than doubled in the past year – it now takes nearly 41% of the median household’s monthly income to afford the payments on a median-priced home, according to research from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE). The last time housing payments cost that much was in 1984.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-05T02:39:19+00:00

Excerpt:

The health official who conspired with Anthony Fauci to downplay suggestions Covid-19 leaked from a Wuhan laboratory has revealed he lies awake at night agonising about the chain of events they set in motion.

The former Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response at the US Department of Health, Dr Robert Kadlec, has told Sky News he feels obligated to reveal confidential discussions he had with Dr Fauci, America’s top infectious diseases adviser, about diverting attention away from the lab leak theory.

In his first television interview, to air on Sky News on Tuesday night, he also warns of another pandemic emerging from high-risk experiments in laboratories globally, saying the lessons from Covid-19 haven’t been learnt.

“The tools of science to do this kind of synthetic biology, this risky research has not been limited to China. It happens in the United States. It’s happening in a lot of places in the world and we could have another one of these (pandemics) if we don’t accept that,” he says in the new Sky News documentary “What Really Happened in Wuhan, the Next Chapter.”

Dr Kadlec, who worked for presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump and lead American efforts to develop a Covid-19 vaccine, said his intention in initially downplaying a lab leak was to encourage co-operation from China in the early days of the outbreak.

But the public denial of the lab leak theory spiralled and the proposition Covid may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology turned into a conspiracy.

“I wake up at usually about 2 or 3am and think about it honestly, because it’s something that we all played a role in,” Dr Kadlec says.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-05T02:35:15+00:00

Archive version of the OP

stickdog · 2023-12-05T00:31:37+00:00

Does even one elected official associated with today's Democratic party not whole-heartedly support this sort of gutting of the First Amendment?

stickdog · 2023-12-04T22:34:15+00:00

Excerpt:

...

Dangers of Epistemic Tribes:

Echo Chambers and Confirmation Bias: Within these tribes, there's a tendency to create echo chambers where only beliefs and opinions that align with the group's ideology are amplified. This can lead to confirmation bias, where members disproportionately notice and give credence to information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while disregarding or rationalizing disconfirming evidence.

Intellectual Isolation and Homogenization of Thought: Continuous exposure to homogenous ideas can lead to intellectual isolation. It can stifle creativity, critical thinking, and the ability to understand and empathize with differing viewpoints. This homogenization of thought can lead to a diminished capacity for critical analysis, as alternative viewpoints are not thoroughly considered or are outright dismissed.

Polarization and Social Fragmentation: Epistemic tribes can contribute to societal polarization. As individuals become more entrenched in their viewpoints, the middle ground erodes, leading to increased social and political fragmentation. This can manifest in intensified partisanship, where compromise and dialogue become difficult, if not impossible.

Manipulation and Misinformation: Epistemic tribes can be susceptible to manipulation, especially in the digital age where information (and misinformation) spreads rapidly. Individuals within a tribe may not question the validity of information that aligns with their beliefs, making them vulnerable to manipulation by those who wish to exploit these biases for various agendas.

Undermining Trust in Institutions and Experts: These tribes can lead to a distrust of mainstream institutions and experts. While skepticism is healthy, excessive distrust can lead to the dismissal of well-established knowledge and expertise, potentially undermining efforts in areas like public health, science, and governance.

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stickdog · 2023-12-04T22:29:05+00:00

Excerpt:

With support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the United Nations (U.N.) this month launched an “ambitious-country-led campaign” to promote and accelerate the development of a global digital public infrastructure (DPI).

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) said its “50-in-5” campaign will spur the construction of “an underlying network of components” that includes “digital payments, ID, and data exchange system,” which will serve as “a critical accelerator of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).”

“The goal of the campaign is for 50 countries to have designed, implemented, and scaled at least one DPI component in a safe, inclusive, and interoperable manner in five years,” the UNDP stated.

Critics of the campaign include Tim Hinchliffe, editor of The Sociable, who told The Defender he believes DPI “is a mechanism for surveillance and control that combines digital ID, central bank digital currencies [CBDC], vaccine passports and carbon footprint tracking data, paving the way for 15-minute smart cities, future lockdowns and systems of social credit.”

The UNDP is leading the “50-in-5” campaign along with the Center for Digital Public Infrastructure, Co-Develop, the Digital Public Goods Alliance. Supporters include GovStack, the Inter-American Development Bank and UNICEF, in addition to the Gates Foundation.

In September 2022, the Gates Foundation allocated $200 million “to expand global Digital Public Infrastructure,” as part of a broader plan to fund $1.27 billion in “health and development commitments” toward the goal of achieving the SDGs by 2030.

The Gates Foundation stated at the time that the funding was intended to promote the expansion of “infrastructure that low- and middle-income countries can use to become more resilient to crises such as food shortages, public health threats, and climate change, as well as to aid in pandemic and economic recovery.”

California-based privacy attorney Greg Glaser described the “50-in-5” campaign as “a totalitarian nightmare” and a “dystopian” initiative targeting small countries “to onboard them with digital ID, digital wallets, digital lawmaking, digital voting and more.”

“For political reasons, U.N. types like Gates cannot openly plan ‘one world government,’ so they use different phrases like ‘global partnership’ and ‘Agenda 2030,’” Glaser told The Defender. “People can add ‘50-in-5’ to that growing list of dystopian phrases.”

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stickdog · 2023-12-04T22:18:29+00:00

Excerpt:

...

Dr Cheryl Hudson

Cheryl is a lecturer in US political history, University of Liverpool, and author of Citizenship in Chicago: race, culture and the remaking of American identity (forthcoming).

It is difficult to resist choosing sides in the culture wars, but I think we should try. It is too common a demand these days that you ‘have to pick a side’. I have never been shy about arguing for my political position – I am not a fence sitter – but I don’t think it wise to choose a side on the terms offered by the culture wars.

What are we talking about when we talk about culture war? We are not fighting over the quality of a Tolstoy over a Dickens, or the relative merits of Picasso versus Michelangelo. No one is getting dragged on Twitter for liking brutalist over gothic architecture. The culture wars relate not to high culture (although sometimes it does get pulled in) but to the cultures of meaning that we inhabit every day.

The culture wars are an expansive category, but they usually revolve around heated topics relating to questions of who we are rather than what we want (the traditional ground of politics). They are usually rooted in identity, based on shared characteristics – often immutable characteristics – of race, sex, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nationality, and so on, and they can be very tribal.

We all know what culture wars look like: they involve gesture politics or ‘virtue signalling’: not the left and right of politics but right and wrong in a moral, shaming sense. They involve a rigid friend/enemy binary that cares less about truth or complexity and more about shaping a narrative flattering to your particular identity group. They can provide a form of entertainment, a spectacle we can all watch and appreciate while we root for our team.

Sometimes they offer an emotional outlet for righteous outrage. Often a lot of flags are involved, and a lot of the alphabet – LGBTQ+, BLM, and so on. We wave the flag that best represents our identity group to perform for the world (our audience) the kind of people that we are. It is all highly performative. Culture wars also crucially involve a claim to victim status, in what has been called the ‘oppression Olympics’ – if you can show that your group has suffered the most at the hands of the most evil oppressor, then you win moral high-ground points.

They are usually transient and temporary, which is really at odds with how ‘culture’ used to be understood: something that prevailed and was handed down through the generations. The culture wars are always moving on to the next big current thing: more off-the-peg than soul deep. The speed at which people replaced their BLM flags with the Ukraine flag, and now the Israeli or Palestinian flag is indicative. This fickleness denotes a deep lack of seriousness and highlights the superficiality of each debate. There is no sustained attention to any problem, so nothing will ever be resolved.

Even situations like the Israeli – Gaza conflict, which should be the ground of serious politics, have become a culture war in the West. That is, there is little attempt at historical or geopolitical understanding; it is entirely about the identities of the two main ethnic groups involved, whose side you are on, which flag you wave, and how it is important that you demonstrate that your group is the biggest victim and is confronted with the greatest risk.

These cultural clashes are not usually about what they purport to be about; there is a lot of obfuscation. They exist in a hall of mirrors. This is because they are epiphenomenal, that is, they are a secondary feature of a deeper, underlying problem. The culture wars are a symptom of our problem, not a solution to it.

That problem is the absence of politics and the possibility of change. Our society is experiencing a loss of hope about the future, and our ability to shape or change it. We are stuck, and the culture wars keep us stuck. There is a kind of narcissism of small differences that propels debate: I think of it as like two warring groups – with more in common than they like to think – standing on either side of a train track, yelling at one another. The train keeps on going down the track and whatever that train represents - whether neoliberalism, globalisation, social inequality or anything else you might hope to change - it is not diverted in the slightest by all the outrage. It just keeps on going and our inability to change its direction only underlines our powerlessness further.

The liberalism that animates Western societies had within it, right from its inception, the seeds of its own destruction. There was a failure to deliver on the promises that it offered: of freedom, equality and of continual progress and advancement. At first, the chinks were small, and groups left out of these promises – women, blacks, gays, and others – were able to use its unfulfilled promises to demand equality. But over the course of the twentieth century, that tragic flaw in liberal society has become increasingly apparent to more and more people, so that from the 1960s and ‘70s, they’ve begun to turn away from the project entirely. Martin Luther King may have had a dream, but current racial thinking can only see nightmares. Second-wave feminists demanded equality, but no one knows what a woman is anymore.

And that train continues on down the track, along with a sharp decline in social cohesion and in social bonds of trust, as well as an ongoing atomisation and isolation of the individual. The corresponding rise in identity politics and the culture wars was, I think, an answer to our need for social connection, our need for bonding and belonging in a society that has no sense of purpose or collective means of bringing about positive change. Identity has ossified and become our anchor in a world that seems out of our control, but has itself now, with some irony, become a block to any purposive change.

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stickdog · 2023-12-04T22:10:27+00:00

Excerpt:

The biggest divide in American politics at present is not along the lines of socioeconomic status (SES), nor educational attainment, nor area type (urban, suburban, small town, rural), nor sex and gender—although these factors all serve as important proxies for the distinction that matters most. The key schism that lies at the heart of dysfunction within the Democratic Party and the U.S. political system more broadly is between professionals associated with “knowledge economy” industries and those who feel themselves to be the “losers” in the knowledge economy—including growing numbers of working-class and non-white voters.

Two decades ago, sociologists Jeff Manza and Clem Brooks observed that “professionals have moved from being the most Republican class in the 1950s, to the second most Democratic class by the late 1980s and the most Democratic class in 1996.” This consolidation has only grown even more pronounced in the intervening years. As professionals have increasingly clustered in the Democratic Party, moreover, they’ve grown increasingly progressive, particularly on “cultural” issues surrounding sexuality, race, gender, environmentalism—and especially when compared with blue-collar workers.

Federal Election Commission campaign contribution data provides stark insights into just how strongly knowledge economy professionals have aligned themselves with the Democratic Party in recent cycles. In 2016, roughly nine out of ten political donations from those who work as activists or in the arts, academia, and journalism were given to Democrats. Similarly, Democrats received around 80 percent of donations from workers involved in research, entertainment, non-profits, and science. They also received more than two-thirds of donations from those in information technology, law, engineering, public relations, or civil service jobs. Among industries that skewed Democratic, the party’s highest total contributions came from lawyers and law firms, environmental political action committees, non-profits, the education sector, the entertainment sector, consulting, and publishing.

Similar patterns held in 2020: the occupations and employers with the largest number of workers who donated to the Biden-Harris campaign included teachers, educators and professors, lawyers, medical and psychiatric professionals, people who work in advertising, communications and entertainment, consultants, human resources professionals and administrators, architects and designers, IT specialists and engineers. Industries that provided the highest total contributions to the Democrats included securities and investment, education, lawyers and law firms, health professionals, non-profits, electronics companies, business services, entertainment, and civil service. Geographically speaking, Democratic votes in 2020 were tightly clustered in major cities and college towns where knowledge economy professionals live and work—and outside those zones, it was largely a sea of red.

The alignment of knowledge economy professionals with the Democratic Party has also shifted the socioeconomic composition of the Democratic base. To give some perspective of how much has changed: in 1993 the richest 20 percent of congressional districts were represented by Republicans over Democrats at a ratio of less than two to one. Today, they tilt Democratic by nearly five to one. The socioeconomic profiles of Democratic primary voters have shifted significantly as well. Counties with higher concentrations of working-class Americans are today a much smaller portion of the Democratic primary electorate than they were in 2008, while counties with large concentrations of affluent households comprise an ever-growing share. This has important consequences for the types of candidates that succeed in primary elections, the language those candidates use, the issues they center, what the party platform ends up looking like and, ultimately, who is drawn to the party and its candidates in national elections (and who is alienated from it).

The increasing dominance of knowledge economy professionals over the Democratic Party has had a range of profound impacts on the contemporary U.S. political landscape. First and foremost, it has contributed to a growing disconnect between the economic priorities of the party relative to most others in the U.S., especially working-class Americans. As sociologist Shamus Khan has shown, the economics of elites tend to operate “counter-cyclically” to the rest of society, meaning that developments that tend to be good for elites are often bad for everyone else and vice versa.

For instance, professionals tend to be far more supportive of immigration, globalization, automation, and artificial intelligence than most Americans because they make professionals’ lives more convenient and significantly lower the costs of the premium goods and services they are inclined towards. Those in knowledge professions primarily see upsides with respect to these issues because their lifestyles and livelihoods are much less at risk—indeed, they instead capture a disproportionate share of any resultant GDP increases—and their culture and values are largely affirmed rather than threatened by these phenomena. Others may and often do experience these developments quite differently.

Likewise, most Americans skew “operationally” left, favoring robust social safety nets, government benefits, and infrastructure investment via progressive taxation, but trend more conservative on cultural and symbolic issues. For instance, they tend to support patriotism, religiosity, national security, and public order. Although they are sympathetic to many left-aligned policies, they tend to prefer policies and messages that are universal and appeal to superordinate identities over ones oriented around specific identity groups (e.g., LGBTQ people, women, Hispanics, and so on). They tend to be alienated by political correctness and prefer candidates and messages that are direct, concise, and plainspoken. Knowledge economy professionals tend to have preferences on these fronts that are diametrically opposed to those of most other Americans, especially working-class voters.

With respect to values, knowledge professionals skew culturally and symbolically “left” but favor free markets. As statistician Andrew Gelman showed, elites in the Republican Party tend to be significantly more liberal culturally and symbolically than the rest of the GOP yet more dogmatic about free markets. Meanwhile, Democratic-aligned elites tend to be significantly more “left” on cultural and symbolic issues than most Democrats but tend to be much warmer on markets. The primary difference between Democratic and Republican elites seems to lie in how they rank free markets relative to cultural liberalism: those who prioritize the former have tended to align with the Republicans, while those who prioritize the latter have consistently aligned with the Democrats. To the extent that highly-educated people support left-aligned economic policies, they tend to prioritize redistribution in the form of taxes and transfers whereas most other voters prefer predistribution—higher pay, better benefits, and more robust job protections so less needs to be reallocated in the first place (typically at the expense of some market freedom).

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stickdog · 2023-12-04T22:06:21+00:00

Excerpt:

...

If the intention was really to save the environment, wouldn't this fact make replacing beef with frankenmeat a non-starter? It's not like this data is coming from some "fringe" site or "right-wing" scientist. It was initially reported in a study by the University of California in Davis. As they noted:

The scientists defined the global warming potential as the carbon dioxide equivalents emitted for each kilogram of meat produced. The study found that the global warming potential of lab-based meat using these purified media is four to 25 times greater than the average for retail beef.

If replacing the pasture with the petri dish as the origin of beef has nothing to do with saving the environment, what do the Globalist Elite Cabal members really want? For that answer, we turn to the recently deceased Godfather of Modern Globalism, Henry Kissinger. He detailed three rules for their agenda:

"Who controls the food supply controls the people."

"Who controls the energy can control whole continents."

"Who controls money can control the world."

That first tenet is the relevant one here. Controlling the food supply is a primary goal of the Globalist Elite Cabal. It's exponentially easier to simply outlaw real beef rather than trying to take over every ranch in the world.

To those who may be skeptical about the intentions of the Globalist Elite Cabal, I urge you to dig deeper into all three Kissinger tenets. Watch what's happening to the food supply with the frankenmeat push, unprecedented bird flu, food production plants being destroyed, laws being passed to harm farmers, and massive inflation at the grocery stores and restaurants.

Then, repeat the process for energy and money. One does not have to become a full-blown conspiracy theorist questioning the moon landings in order to see the machinations of the Globalist Elite Cabal unfolding before our eyes. One simply has to realize that the "elites" (I hate using that term but it's what everyone else uses so I'll invoke it here for clarity) really are engaged in a depopulation and control agenda that spans the aforementioned governments, media, and "scientific community." Add in academia, federal law enforcement, Big Tech, central banks, Hollywood, and a dozen other influential industries and the scope of our dilemma becomes more clear.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-02T23:33:27+00:00

Now look at the Massachusetts raw data from January 6, 2022:

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/archive-of-covid-19-vaccination-reports#january-2022-

Click on "Weekly COVID-19 Municipality Vaccination Report – January 6, 2022"

Now open the Excel file, and click on the tab "Age --- municipality"

Look that the very first city of Barnstable.

It says:

the 65-74 population of Barnstable is 7,032, but the number vaccinated with at least one does is 7,340
the 75_ population of Barnstable is 4,798, but the number vaccinated with at least one dose is 5,206

Of the 3,035 entries in this spreadsheet, a full 825 (over 27%) have a higher value for vaccinated with at least one dose than for the entire population!

Now, click on the tab "Race and Ethnicity --- municipality"

Look that the very first city of Barnstable.

It says that the Hispanic population of Barnstable is 2,644, but the number vaccinated with at least one dose is 2,856!

Now check out Brewster. It says that the Black population of Brewster is 97, but the number vaccinated with at least one dose is 128!

Do any of these published data strike you as reliable?

And of course they left clues as to what they were doing on a weekly basis. They were doing God's work by overestimating all of these vaccination rates!

stickdog · 2023-12-02T20:37:32+00:00

There are many supporting links at the OP.

Excerpt:

Michael Shellenberger, Alex Gutentag and Matt Taibbi have continued their reporting on the “Censorship Industrial Complex” with a new piece on an odious organisation called the Cyber Threat Intelligence (CTI) League. Their revelations provide fresh details about the early history of the public-private campaign to censor the internet in the wake of the 2016 presidential election, and I have to say that this is one of the most amazing and bizarre stories I have ever encountered.

The CTI League appear to be an organisation cobbled together in 2020 from two main factions. The first comprised a group of computer security experts and military/intelligence contractors put together by a (former?) Israeli intelligence official named Ohad Zaidenberg during the early months of the pandemic, originally (and allegedly) for the purposes of protecting hospital computer systems from security threats. They were soon joined by separate group around an eccentric “UK defence researcher” named Sara-Jayne Terp, who believes that social media “misinformation” campaigns were responsible for Trump’s election and that these campaigns have to be countered in the same way as cybersecurity threats. Terp developed an array of censorship strategies she called the “Adversarial Misinformation and Influence Tactics and Techniques” (AMITT) Framework. These were first applied by CTI League, and have since been rechristened “DISARM.” In this form, Terp’s tactics have been used for “defending democracy, supporting pandemic communication and addressing other disinformation campaigns around the world, by institutions including the European Union, the United Nations and NATO.”

More:

The framework has helped establish new institutions, including the Cognitive Security ISAO, the Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg and OpenFacto’s analysis programme, and has been used in the training of journalists in Kenya and Nigeria. To illustrate, with one other specific example, DISARM was employed within the World Health Organization’s operations, countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe. The use of framework methodology enabled the coordination of activities across teams and geographies, and also – critically – across multiple languages, eliminating the need to translate text by matching actions to numbered tactics, techniques and procedures within the framework.

The framework has helped establish new institutions, including the Cognitive Security ISAO, the Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg and OpenFacto’s analysis programme, and has been used in the training of journalists in Kenya and Nigeria. To illustrate, with one other specific example, DISARM was employed within the World Health Organization’s operations, countering anti-vaccination campaigns across Europe. The use of framework methodology enabled the coordination of activities across teams and geographies, and also – critically – across multiple languages, eliminating the need to translate text by matching actions to numbered tactics, techniques and procedures within the framework.

That’s right, the NAFO Twitter scourge, lockdown-promotion bots, weird vaccinator social media propaganda and god knows what else, all look to be downstream of Terp, AMITT and the CTI League.

Then, I started looking more closely into Terp and this AMITT Framework specifically, and I decided all of that could wait for another day.

Obviously the insidious intent and scale of Terp’s tactics, and their clear violations of the United States Constitution, make all of this reprehensible. At the same time, the absolute hamfisted idiocy of AMITT and the entire “MisinfoSec” approach to internet censorship is a thing to behold. Our oppressors are dangerous, malign and powerful people who want nothing good for us, but they are also just some of the dumbest sods you can imagine.

What happened here is fairly clear: The American and British political establishments developed a new fear of social media following the great populist backlashes of 2016. Suddenly, they wanted very badly to do something about the malicious misinformation they imagined to be proliferating on Facebook and Twitter. A whole tribe of opportunist insects like Terp were eager to meet this demand, snag lucrative contracts, and perhaps even (in the words of the Shellenberger/ Gutentag/ Taibbi informant) “become part of the federal government.” To do this, they shopped about a bunch of transparently pseudoscientific graphs and charts, laden with obfuscatory jargon, and amazingly they weren’t laughed out of the room. You just have to imagine that everybody involved in this scene is a knuckle-dragging retard who knows exactly nothing about how social media works. We must be talking about soccer moms and geriatric index-finger typists who can barely log into Facebook. When they see an edgy internet meme with a lot of retweets their mind immediately goes to Russia, and when a global warming sceptic stumbles into their feed they assiduously reply with links to Wikipedia articles about the Scientific consensus on climate change. They can never figure out why everybody is always laughing at them. It must be Putin, that must be why.

...

stickdog · 2023-12-02T19:34:36+00:00

This is so awesomely circular.

They created with entire "waste problem" of ownership with planned obsolescence and no right to repair. Now they bring us their solution, which is that they own everything, we own nothing, and we are only allowed to use any of their stuff at their whim.

stickdog · 2023-12-02T19:04:22+00:00

The source is LA County's own official vaccination dashboard.

Just go there and click on the choice "Seniors 65+ yrs".

This is what you will see.

The graph for just Seniors 65+ years clearly reads:

Total population: 1.37 million
with 1+ doses: 1.39 million
with 1+ bivalent dose: 564K (41%)
up to date: 276K (20%, well now up to 21%)

On the bright side, even in LA, even among seniors, only 21% still believe in Big Pharma's latest scam.

In San Francisco, official city data show that over 100% of Bayview/Hunters Point residents have completed the primary series of two vaccination.

San Francisco neighborhood data.

Check out the very first row:

Bayview Hunters Point -- total acs_population = 38,480 count_series_completed = 38,547

So more the number of people who got 2 doses is greater than the total population?

Note that the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood is one of blackest, poorest, and youngest neighborhoods in SF. Hmmmm. So how far off do the think the city's official higher than 100% officially reported vaccination rate is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayview%E2%80%93Hunters_Point,_San_Francisco

According to the 2010 U.S. Census, Bayview–Hunters Point had the highest percentage of African-Americans among San Francisco neighborhoods, home to 21.5% of the city's Black population, and they were the predominant ethnic group in the Bayview. Census figures showed the percentage of African-Americans in Bayview declined from 48% in 2000 to 33.7% in 2010, while the percentage of Asian and White ethnicity increased from 24% and 10%, respectively, to 30.7% and 12.1%. However the eastern part of the neighborhood had a population of 12,308 and is still roughly 53% African-American.

A recent Brookings Institution report identified Hunters Point as one of five Bay Area "extreme poverty" neighborhoods, in which over 40% of the inhabitants live below the Federal poverty level of an income of $22,300 for a family of four.[45] Nearly 12% of the population in the Bayview receives public assistance income, three times the national average, and more than double the state average. While the Bayview has a higher percentage of the population receiving either Social Security or retirement income than the state or national averages, the dollar amounts that these people receive is less than the averages in either the state or the nation.

What purposefully underestimating actual populations and counting undocumented people as vaccinated does is ruin all population-based statistics that have ever been published purporting to show that "unvaccinated people are X times more likely" to get COVID, be hospitalized with COVID, or die from COVID (or other any other cause).

Garbage denominators in:

huge overestimates of achieved vaccination rates by the very institutions tasked with making them as high as possible
huge underestimates of entire populations so that unvaccinated populations (which are calculated by subtracting the often over 100% vaccinated population estimates from the purposefully underestimated total population estimates)

and garbage data out.

stickdog · 2023-12-01T01:24:58+00:00

DHS tries to scrub its Big Brother fingerprints

Please spend 2 minutes and 18 seconds and watch this video.

Thankfully, someone saved this video.

In a short post today, I’d encourage my readers to simply watch this 2-minute video that was produced by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

The video encourages a young girl - depicted in a cartoon - to report her “Uncle Steve” for spreading “disinformation” about Covid.

Uncle Steve had written on a social media post that the Infection Fatality Rate for Covid is “the same as the flu.”

For most healthy people under the age of 60, this is a completely true statement.

But, for the sake of argument, let’s say it’s not true - that Uncle Steve is wrong.

According to the DHS, Uncle Steve is a threat to public health and should be turned in - by his own niece … who, in this video cartoon, does dutifully turn Uncle Steve into authorities.

Right, wrong or possibly right, Uncle Steve can’t even share an opinion if it goes against what Anthony Fauci said.

As this must-read article shows, the DHS has now gone back and scrubbed all of its website posts that brag about how the bureaucracy is now performing “domestic” surveillance on Americans who are spreading disinformation. (It also scrubbed - or tried to erase - this video.)

stickdog · 2023-12-01T00:01:43+00:00

Excerpt:

This past Thursday I spoke at The Cambridge Union, the debating society at Cambridge University. The proposition was “This House Would Respect Our Elders.”

Below is a transcript of my speech.

Good evening,

The motion before us contends that we should respect our elders. I align myself with this proposition. Not as a call for uncritical reverence, but rather to acknowledge the limitations of youth and a recognition of the intricacies of the human endeavor that spans generations.

I’m a psychologist, not a sociologist or an economist or a political scientist. I generally tend to focus on empirical research about individuals. In order to form a grounded opinion on the motion, it is essential to understand what a large body of research indicates about the psychological and behavioral differences between young adults and older adults.

Many people believe, for example, that advanced age is accompanied by maturity and wisdom.

This is reflected in official policies that set age thresholds for driving, military service, voting, drinking alcohol, and holding elected office. For example, the minimum age requirement for head of state is 35 in the United States, 40 in South Korea, and 45 in Singapore.

Incidentally, the United Kingdom's minimum age for all elected positions is only 18, an interesting fact that may shed light on why this debate is particularly pertinent in this setting.

Moreover, a brief glance at those in positions of power reveals a skew towards older individuals:

The average age of a successful startup founder is 42 years old. The media-driven belief that successful founders are typically very young is untrue.
The average British MP is 51 years old
The average CEO of a Fortune 100 company is 57 years old
The average age at the time of hire among S&P 500 company CEOs is 58 years old
The average age of G20 world leaders is 62 years old
The average U.S. senator is 64 years old
The average member of the House of Lords is 71 years old

And the current president of the United States is one-hundred and ninety-six years old.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-30T23:55:19+00:00

Yes, the analysis is facile. Still, our supposed climate crisis, regardless of its reality, is now being used to get you to demand the exact same austerity for the masses prescriptions that Thatcherites, Reaganites, and rich conservatives of all stripes have long championed.

And we should all have just two words for the billionaires driving this social project:

You first.

stickdog · 2023-11-30T23:35:09+00:00

Excerpt:

While we cannot create a heaven on earth, we can create a hell and history is full of examples. Many of these man-made hells are the result of war and conquest, but many others are the result of governments persecuting their own people. Be it the Gulags of the Soviet Union, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Nazi concentration camps, the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, or the Cultural Revolution in China, power-hungry political leaders are responsible for the deaths of millions of people in the 20th century.

How much have we learned from these recent horrors? Could a modern democratic government commit a political persecution and kill a portion of its own population? In this video we are going to explore how this risk is high in any society that is naïve and sheepish enough to permit the rise of totalitarian rule.

“. . .the totalitarian hell proves only that the power of man is greater than they ever dared to think, and that man can realize hellish fantasies without making the sky fall or the earth open.”

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism

To achieve its ideological ends a totalitarian government mobilizes all the mechanisms of the state to exert a strict top-down control of the populace, a mass surveillance system is put in place, and all aspects of life become politicized.

In the 20th century Nazism was the ideology that drove totalitarianism in Germany, it was Fascism in Italy, while in Asia and other parts of Europe it was Communism. Today a new totalitarian ideology appears to be taking root. This ideology is built on the belief that at current population levels human beings are parasitic creatures, and if allowed to be free, will run roughshod over mother earth. Harmony can be returned to our planet, and ecological disaster averted, but only if certain politicians and bureaucrats are granted the power to control our lives. What to eat, what type of energy to use, where to work, how to spend one’s recreation time, how many children to have, and where one travels – all these questions are to be answered by the totalitarian ruling class, not by free individuals planning their lives within the law and order of a free society.

“The controlling mind [of the totalitarian] foresees a paradise in which every action and every object is monitored, labeled, and controlled. There will be no room for any bad thing to exist. Nothing and no one will be out of place.”

Charles Eisenstein, Fascism and the Antifestival

Will we in the modern world allow another group of sick minds the opportunity to remake society in the image of a deluded ideology? Will we permit the rise of totalitarian rule? If we do the result will be same as it was in the 20th century, society will be destroyed, poverty will be the norm, and many people will be killed. To understand why every time totalitarianism is tried it devolves into mass killings by the government in power, we must examine the mind of the totalitarian politician and bureaucrat. For when we understand the pathologies that afflict these individuals it will be clear why totalitarians will drive society into ruin before abandoning course and admitting failure.

A first characteristic of the politicians and bureaucrats who make up the totalitarian government is that they are deluded true believers in their ideology. They are convinced, in other words, that what they are trying to accomplish is for the good of humanity and that society would be worse off absent their rule. The totalitarian mind is similar to the schizophrenic mind. It believes the web of delusions in which it is caught; it sticks to its ideological model of the world in the face of disconfirming evidence; and it tends to hate those who try to pierce its illusions.

A second characteristic of totalitarians is that they hold a contemptuous view of the masses and see normal men and women as inferior and incapable of making good choices. For their own good, it follows, and for the good of mother earth, the masses must obey the government. Totalitarians also tend to view the masses as unneeded, in such large numbers, for the realization of their ideological aims and so view whole segments of the populace as useless eaters who are overpopulating the world.

“Only where great masses are [viewed as] superfluous. . .is totalitarian rule. . .at all possible.”

Hannah Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism

A further characteristic of totalitarians is their tendency to judge moral issues through a utilitarian lens. When making policy decisions, in other words, totalitarians tend to use the criteria of the greatest good, for the greatest number of people as the justification for their actions. Individual rights matter little to the utilitarian, what matters is the good of the collective and to the totalitarian the good of the collective always means achieving its ideological ends. This utilitarian approach to moral issues is reflective of a very disturbed mind, or as Iain McGilchrist explains:

“The tendency to adopt a calculating and utilitarian approach in judging moral issues is more marked in those with reduced aversion to harming others, lower trait empathy, higher psychoticism (which is itself characterised by reduced empathy and emotional blunting). . .and greater Machiavellianism. It is also characteristic of the moral thinking of psychopaths. . .”

Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things

A deluded true believer in a utopian ideology, viewing him or herself as a superior being, seeing the world as overpopulated, and judging moral issues through a utilitarian lens, such is the mind of a totalitarian, and such is a mind capable of committing a mass atrocity. After totalitarians have taken power, all that is needed to initiate the process of political persecution is the inevitable failure of their rule. And fail they will, as all attempts to control society in a strict top-down manner are doomed from the start. The more order the totalitarians try to impose on a society the more chaos they create, and with such chaos comes a never-ending series of crises. But when the crises come instead of admitting that the fault lies with their rule, totalitarians deflect blame to others through the process of scapegoating. For as true believers totalitarians never consider the possibility that the crisis is a by-product of trying to force a deluded ideology on society through top-down control. Rather they convince themselves, and strive to convince others, that responsibility for the crisis lies elsewhere.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-30T06:15:02+00:00

Coffee & COVID's take on this interview

Professor Sachs sprinted out of the gate, starting his takedown of the existing narrative by connecting the current proxy war to the U.S.’s meddling in Ukraine back in the 2014 color revolution. But Sachs went further, claiming that Viktoria Nuland and Lindsay Graham bungled the whole thing at great cost to Ukraine:

SACHS: “The war’s been going on for nine years since the U.S. participated in the violent overthrow of a Ukrainian president that wanted neutrality for his country — not NATO… During this whole period, the U.S had a weak hand and it played it terribly… at every step Ukraine could have been saved but the U.S. kept upping the ante and Ukraine kept losing more.” According to Professor Sachs — who is an actual expert on international politics — Ukraine’s losses starting with Crimea are directly attributable to U.S. bungling, and he even called out Joe Biden as the bungling co-author. If that’s not a sign that Biden’s political future is numbered, I don’t know what is. People like Professor Sachs don’t get where they are without having a solid sense of politics.

Dr. Sachs explained that, if it weren’t for U.S. meddling, the Ukraine would still own the Crimean peninsula, not to mention still have millions of now-departed citizens:

SACHS: “Then Russia retook Crimea. It wasn’t even demanding Crimea! It was demanding a lease on its naval base until 2042. But then it took Crimea. Then the U.S. upped the ante, sending in weapons, we’ve got your back. President Putin said in December 2021, ‘let’s negotiate over this.’ The U.S. said, ‘no way, it’s none of your business.’ Then the Special Military Operation started. Ukraine said in March 2022, ‘ok, ok, we can be neutral.’ The war could have ended then, but the U.S. intervened… Now Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of people, the population has declined by millions due to mass migration. They’ve just done a terrible job, and I’ve been saying this to the White House every step of the way… Biden played it wrong at every moment.” Even the shows’ anchors seemed dismissive of the war. The tone of their questions suggested that the war’s poor prospects should have been obvious to everyone from the get-go:

MALE ANCHOR: “What were the intelligence, the defense experts thinking? Were they naive? Or did they actually think that somewhere before this point — where we’re not willing to fund the resistance any longer — that they were actually going to deal a lethal blow to Russia? Or at least eject them from the country?” Professor Sachs not only agreed with the anchor’s cynical sentiments but went further, suggesting — unless I’m misunderstanding something — that Ukraine should just give up and the U.S. should apologize to Russia:

SACHS: “Robbie, I’m an old guy. I’ve been through this a lot of times (since) Vietnam. This is standard operating procedures of the United States. Over-promise. Over-Sell. Get into proxy wars. Then, they fail… (Look,) we’ve run out of time. We’ve run out of patience. We’ve run out of budget support. We’ve run out of 155 millimeter shells. And tragically, Ukraine’s running out of soldiers. So that old line, that we’re in there to the last Ukrainian, is tragically, literally happening right now… Ukraine has lost hundreds of thousands of people in this absolutely stupid, avoidable conflict. So it’s gonna stop. It has to stop. NATO — that means the U.S. by the way, it doesn’t mean anything else — has to help to end this in the most favorable way by saying (to Russia), okay, okay, we’re not going to enlarge in in some lamebrain idea of George W. Bush Jr., and we (wrongly) kept it going, and we should’ve negotiated with you, the whole thing was a stupid idea. We’re going to have to say that.” If the anchors are bipartisan, then we’re all bipartisan now. The anchors and Dr. Sachs all seem solidly on board with where Coffee & Covid readers have been for over a year now. Not only did the “liberal” female anchor dismissively call the conflict “this proxy war,” but she then pitched Sachs a softball over the most recent, utterly ridiculous, official narrative about the Nordstream bombing:

FEMALE ANCHOR: “Such an important point about the human cost. Ukraine is starting to recruit or conscript women into the military, (and) Max Blumenthal posted a disturbing video earlier this week of new recruits who all looked to be men in their fifties and sixties. So it does look like there has been just an incredible human toll in the people of Ukraine who’ve been made to fight this proxy war. But I did want to turn to this new reporting about the Nordstream pipeline last week, where it was reported a Ukraine military official played a central role in the 2022 sabotage of the Nordstream pipeline. How credulously should we be looking at (this story)?” I saw it but didn’t even bother commenting last week about the Washington Post’s latest preposterous claim that — it hurts to even try describing WaPo’s nonsense — a rogue Ukrainian intelligence agent who was acting alone orchestrated the entire Nordstream bombing, all by himself, without Biden or even Zelensky knowing one single thing about it. And of course, Biden and Zelensky would have opposed an illegal act of terrorism like that.

Supposedly this daring, 007-like, deep-sea diving, two-places at one-timing, nearly invisible man of mystery has, allegedly, been arrested for his terrible crimes against the international order and is now rotting in isolation in a remote Ukraine jail cell someplace extremely inconvenient for visitors.

Good grief. Only Washington Post reporters could be dumb enough to believe that anyone would buy that obvious prevarication. Professor Sachs doesn’t buy it either, and agrees with us over who is really to blame, strongly hinting the bombing was obviously the USA. More remarkably, Professor Sachs then advised the two young anchors — who seemed to agree — not to believe the government about anything:

SACHS: “First thing, don’t believe anything the government says. It makes up whatever is convenient. [Male anchor nods in agreement.] So, there’s absolutely no credibility to pinning it on one person who happens to be under wraps and in custody in Ukraine. I’m still going with Seymour Hirsch (who blamed U.S. Navy divers) till I hear otherwise, but who knows. I testified in the U.N. security council on a session calling for an independent, U.N.-led investigation. Who blocked it? The United States government… has blocked any real investigation in this.”

stickdog · 2023-11-25T16:22:59+00:00

I don't think it's pointless to point out that there are no true heroes among our world leaders.

stickdog · 2023-11-24T22:25:36+00:00

Excerpt:

I come bearing game-changing news.

BRICS is rising up against the Satanic West’s monopoly on “puree from black soldier fly larvae”.

Last month, Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin quietly signed a decree allowing food manufacturers to produce “coarse larvae flour” and other anti-globalist delicacies. This is the final judo-chop that will ultimately lead to the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the creation of a worm-backed global digital currency that honors the true spirit of the United Nations Charter.

Bugs = food security and economic prosperity, as one Russian media outlet correctly reported on November 9:

The head of the department of the Federal Research Center for Animal Husbandry, Professor Roman Nekrasov explained that “the government’s adoption of the resolution is long-awaited and in demand; it will make it possible to officially establish the production and processing of products from black soldier fly larvae by agricultural producers. This opens up the possibility of producing a variety of insect products on a large scale, which will strengthen the country’s food supply.” According to him, insects can now become a kind of mini-livestock that can be raised for human nutrition.

Companies involved in the production of food products from processed insects are going to supply the market with components for making cutlets, sausages, as well as ingredients for protein bars, according to Viktor Eremenko, director of the Unicon consulting company.

Who among us could say no to a succulent larvae sausage?

...

stickdog · 2023-11-24T22:12:27+00:00

Excerpt:

There is a danger that the new Polish government may just waive through this oppression policy...

The agreement between the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union on the EU Digital Identity Wallet is open to abuse and gives Brussels the ability to deny people rights and control them.

According to the new European legislation, the wallets, which are to be voluntary for the time being, will include digital versions of all ID cards, driving licenses, degree certificates, and medical documentation.

The European Commission insists that the system will be secure, and the current Spanish presidency of the EU is saying that this will make the EU a digital leader at a global level in protecting democratic values, but what has digitalization got to do with European values?

On the contrary, the move actually threatens European values as argued by 504 academics and experts from 39 countries who have signed an open letter warning of the dangers to people’s online security and freedom.

The pandemic moved us in this direction when the Covid-19 vaccine passports were introduced and limited the right to travel. The new wallet will move us much further in the direction of oppression.

Having all documents in one place means that they can be confiscated in one click. This was done by the Trudeau administration in Canada when, during Covid, it denied vaccine-refusers access to their accounts and later removed insurance rights from drivers participating in the protest blockade of the capital, Ottawa.

...

The head of Poland’s central bank Adam Glapiński, says consumers do not want their bank to know about all their transactions and full digital centralization of transactions removes that right to anonymity.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T21:55:56+00:00

I agree, but this doesn't mean that taking the side of peace (without genocidal oppression, of course) isn't a good approach both in this situation and in general, at least when it comes to rhetoric.

stickdog · 2023-11-20T21:52:12+00:00

Well, it's the NY Post, so it is this is the rule rather than the exception. Normally, I post that in the title. Sorry.

The only actual newsworthy part of it is just how bad the US has looked, is looking, and almost certainly will be looking in terms of overall life expectancy, not that this was news to 98% of anyone here.

stickdog · 2023-11-20T21:47:42+00:00

OK. So where was the real lab? Under whose auspices did it operate? And how many more are there?

stickdog · 2023-11-20T08:40:48+00:00

When you've got nothing, you've got nothing to lose.

stickdog · 2023-11-20T02:17:11+00:00

Excerpt:

Many have discovered an argument hack. They don’t need to argue that something is false. They just need to show that it’s associated with low status. The converse is also true: You don’t need to argue that something is true. You just need to show that it’s associated with high status. And when low status people express the truth, it sometimes becomes high status to lie.

...

The founders of the elaboration likelihood model wrote that, “Ultimately, we suspect that attitudes are seen as correct or proper to the extent that they are viewed as beneficial for the physical or psychological well-being of the person.”

In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel writes, “a substantial reason we evolved such large brains is to navigate our social world… A great deal of the value that exists in the social world is created by consensus rather than discovered in an objective sense… our cognitive machinery evolved to be only partially constrained by objective reality.” Our social brains process information not only by examining the facts, but also considering the social consequences of what happens to our reputations if we believe something.

Indeed, in his influential theory of social comparison processes, the eminent psychologist Leon Festinger suggested that people evaluate the “correctness” of their opinions by comparing them to the opinions of others. When we see others hold the same beliefs as us, our own confidence in those beliefs increases. Which is one reason why people are more likely to proselytize beliefs that cannot be verified through empirical means.

In short, people have a mechanism in their minds. It stops them from saying something that could lower their status, even if it’s true. And it propels them to say something that could increase their status, even if it’s false. Sometimes, local norms can push against this tendency. Certain communities (e.g., scientists) can obtain status among their peers for expressing truths. But if the norm is relaxed, people might default to seeking status over truth if status confers the greater reward.

Furthermore, knowing that we could lose status if we don’t believe in something causes us to be more likely to believe in it to guard against that loss. Considerations of what happens to our own reputation guides our beliefs, leading us to adopt a popular view to preserve or enhance our social positions. We implicitly ask ourselves, “What are the social consequences of holding (or not holding) this belief?”

...

Which brings us to a question: Who is most susceptible to manipulation via peripheral persuasion? It might seem intuitive to believe that people with less education are more manipulable. But research suggests this may not be true.

High-status people are more preoccupied with how others view them. Which means that educated and/or affluent people may be especially prone to peripheral, as opposed to central, methods of persuasion.

Indeed, the psychology professor Keith Stanovich, discussing his research on “myside bias,” has written, “if you are a person of high intelligence… you will be less likely than the average person to realize you have derived your beliefs from the social groups you belong to and because they fit with your temperament and your innate psychological propensities.”

Students and graduates of top universities are more prone to myside bias. They are more likely to “evaluate evidence, generate evidence, and test hypotheses in a manner biased toward their own prior beliefs, opinions, and attitudes.”

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T02:09:14+00:00

IS THE CDC COVERING UP A BIOWEAPON BIOLAB IN CALIFORNIA?

Excerpt:

I came across this amazing story by chance. It looked so bizarre I did not know what to think. It was a stunning and (if true) horrifying story. It involved the US Center for Disease Control (CDC) which continues to be responsible for setting a large part of the discredited worldwide Covid pandemic policies – including the next pandemic wave for which the main stream news media seems excited to be preparing us.

We are also aware that the CDC, has been spreading misinformation throughout this so-called “pandemic”: the CDC advocated no early treatment; called ivermectin toxic horse paste; refused to acknowledge the importance of natural immunity; called the injections “safe” when they were not; advocated total masking where there was no evidence; supported injecting children, babies and pregnant women with the experimental jabs with no safety data; supported school closures; etc etc etc. They have been shown to be consistently reckless and incompetent.

The scandalous and diabolical relationship between the US National Institute of Allergy and Infection Diseases (NIAID) under Dr. Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan Institute of Virology biolab in the dangerous gain-of-function research surrounding SARS-CoV-2 is a matter of record.

Now, one of my readers referred me to a Substack by Jeff Childers of 19 Nov 2023 where the CDC appears to have again acted in a strange and irresponsible way in relation to the discovery of a covert biolab discovered in California. CLICK HERE to view. Here is part of the Substack below (other parts are of high interest also).

The Substack commentary is below:

“As a result of that investigation, this week the Select Committee on the CCP released a pretty shocking report (40 pages).

...

The House Committee’s report revealed some shocking new information. First, we learned that courageous code inspector Harper tried over and over to get the CDC to investigate, but the CDC refused to investigate. Federal health officials even hung-up on persistent Officer Harper multiple times. Only after the local Congressman got involved did the CDC finally agree to inspect the warehouse — and it found "at least 20 potentially infectious agents, including HIV, Tuberculosis, and the deadliest known form of Malaria."

But — and this is critical — for some inexplicable and unexplained reason, the CDC did not test any of the samples — even the ones with unknown contents or with coded labels. Later, local officials discovered a freezer labeled ‘Ebola’ — Ebola! — but still the useless CDC has refused to follow up.

Local officials also discovered bags labeled cocaine, methamphetamine, ecstasy (MDMA), and THC. Not quite doing justice to the case, the Committee succinctly described the CDC’s disinterest in the lab as being “baffling.” I could think of some stronger but still accurate words. “Treasonous” comes to mind.

The CDC and the Corporate Media have gullibly accepted the cover story and still describe the lab’s purpose as “creating Covid-19 test kits.” And, in fact, the lab received hundreds of thousands, if not millions, in grants from the State of California to create covid test kits. But the Select Committee’s investigators found the lab workers were actually just buying cheap “counterfeit” covid tests from China and repackaging them in the warehouse. They didn’t actually create anything. Not test kits, at least.

The report explained there was a "lack of apparent legitimate (or even profit-motivated criminal) motive in the operation of the illegal facility." So the lab’s real purpose remains unknown.

But it gets even murkier. The Select Committee discovered that Jesse Zhu/David He, the lab’s criminal operator, was "receiving unexplained payments via wire transfer" from Chinese banks. In large, round numbers.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T02:02:08+00:00

The FBI and CDC neglected to thoroughly investigate a California biolab operated by Chinese nationals containing deadly transmissible pathogens, according to a new report.

Released by the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party on Wednesday, the findings reveal how Chinese nationals have been conducting experiments on several deadly pathogens in a Reedley, California, biolab under the discretion of a Chinese man connected to Beijing’s communist government.

“This report outlines troublesome gaps that exist in federal law that allow bad actors to take advantage of the system,” Rep. Jim Costa, D-Calif., whose district includes Reedley, said in a statement. “It is my hope no other town in any Congressional district will endure what my constituents have through this experience.”

The whole scandal began to unravel in December 2022 when Jesalyn Harper, a local code enforcement officer, noticed a building code violation outside the facility. Upon gaining access, Harper discovered the warehouse was actually a laboratory being operated by self-professed Chinese nationals. In the lab, Harper noticed vials containing biological substances — one of which was HIV — labeled in Mandarin, English, and an undeciphered code. She also discovered 1,000 genetically modified lab mice, later found to have been “bred to simulate the human immune system for the purpose of laboratory experimentation.”

It was later determined that the Reedley Biolab was owned and operated by Universal Meditech Inc. (UMI), a company controlled by “Jesse” Zhu, a Chinese national “associated with [People’s Republic of China]-government linked companies” who is wanted in Canada for “contempt of court, where he is the subject of a CAD$330 million judgment for stealing American intellectual property.” Upon illegally entering the U.S. under the name David He, Zhu “set up a new network of companies” and has seemingly acquired “thousands of vials labeled as dangerous pathogens, as well as expensive medical equipment.”

Prior to coming to North America, Zhu worked at companies with ties to China’s communist government and would receive payments totaling more than $1.3 million from PRC banks during the years he was selling fraudulent scientific products. Zhu was ultimately arrested by federal agents last month on charges related to “manufacturing and distributing misbranded medical devices” and lying to the Food and Drug Administration.

But it wasn’t just the FBI that dismissed local officials’ concerns about the Reedley Biolab. Fresno County officials spent “months” attempting to reach the CDC, which “refused to speak with them and, on a number of occasions … hung up on them mid-conversation.” It wasn’t until Costa stepped in on their behalf that the federal health agency responded.

During their inspection of the warehouse on May 3, CDC employees discovered that the Reedley Biolab housed “at least 20 potentially infectious agents,” including “the deadliest known form of Malaria,” HIV, Tuberculosis, and SARS-CoV-2 (otherwise known as Covid-19), among others. The CDC classified these “potentially infectious agents” under risk groups 2 and 3, the latter of which is “associated with serious or lethal human disease for which preventive or therapeutic interventions may be available.”

It’s worth mentioning that the CDC based its classifications on the vial labels and refused to test any of the samples, knowing that “absent testing, local officials would have to destroy all samples pursuant to a forthcoming abatement order.” Despite already being deemed an “illegal enterprise,” the agency also issued a three-page report concluding there was no evidence UMI violated U.S. law and that there weren’t any “select agents or toxins.”

While destroying the pathogens and materials, local officials discovered a freezer filled with silver bags containing samples of Ebola. According to the report, the CDC did not appear to be aware of such materials. Nonetheless, the pathogens were destroyed pursuant to the court order.

“The CDC’s refusal to test any potential pathogens with the understanding that local officials would otherwise have to destroy the samples through an abatement process makes it impossible for the Select Committee to fully assess the potential risks that this specific facility posed to the community,” the report reads. “It is possible that there were other highly dangerous pathogens that were in the coded vials or otherwise unlabeled. Due to government failures, we simply cannot know.”

Following her walkthrough, Harper referred the matter to Fresno County and the FBI for further investigation. Two months later, the federal agency notified Harper it had closed its inquiry “because the Bureau believed that there were no weapons of mass destruction on the property.” While the FBI “continued to engage with local officials,” Harper and local officials took the initiative to continue their investigation.

After obtaining a warrant, local officials searched the Reedley Biolab on March 16, in which they “observed blood, tissue and other bodily fluid samples and serums; and thousands of vials of unlabeled fluids and suspected biological material.” They also discovered “ultralow temperature freezers,” raising concerns that the facility was “storing infectious agents on site.” Containers “labeled with biohazard signs” and medical cabinets containing “what authorities later identified as highly flammable, explosive, and corrosive chemicals” were also found.

Local and state officials conducted subsequent inspections on April 21 and May 1-2, respectively.

stickdog · 2023-11-20T02:00:38+00:00

Excerpt:

"Digital technology has enabled immense progress on freedom of speech. But social media platforms have also accelerated and amplified the spread of false information and hate speech, posing major risks to societal cohesion, peace and stability. To protect access to information, we must regulate these platforms without delay, while at the same time protecting freedom of expression and human rights."

Audrey Azoulay UNESCO Director-General

UNESCO's action plan is the result of a consultation process on a scale unprecedented within the United Nations system, with over 10,000 contributions from 134 countries collected over the last eighteen months. Over forty pages, it outlines the principles which must be respected as well as the concrete measures which must be implemented by all stakeholders: governments, regulatory authorities, civil society and the platforms themselves.

Representatives from independent regulators have already welcomed UNESCO's initiative, and several of them - notably in Africa and Latin America - have indicated that they are ready to begin implementing these measures. To this end, UNESCO will organize the first World Conference of Regulators in mid-2024.

...

7 fundamental principles to be respected

UNESCO's measures are organised around 7 principles which must be respected so that:

...

These independent regulators work in close coordination as part of a wider network, to prevent digital companies from taking advantage of disparities between national regulations.
Content moderation is feasible and effective at scale, in all regions and in all languages.

...

Regulators and platforms take stronger measures during particularly sensitive moments like elections and crises.

...

*In particular, platforms must have teams of qualified moderators, in sufficient numbers and speaking all the main languages of their social media, so that they can carry out reliable and effective control of content that is posted online. *

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T01:50:18+00:00

Excerpt:

...

There’s nothing new there, for anyone who has been paying even the slightest bit of attention. Digital identity and digital payment systems are self-explanatory (and we’ve covered them before). “Data Exchange Systems” essentially means national governments will share identity and financial records of citizens across borders with other nations, or indeed with global government agencies.

The key word is “interoperable”.

As we have written before, the “global government” won’t be one single health care system, identity database, or digital currency – but dozens of notionally separate systems all carefully designed to be fully “interoperable”.

As well as being a project of the UNDP, UNICEF, and the Inter-American Development Bank, the 50in5 is funded by various globalist NGOs and non-profits including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and (indirectly through an NGO called “Co-Develop”) the Rockefeller Foundation.

The eleven counties taking part in the program so far are Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Moldova, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and Togo. A careful spread from every continent, including first, second, and third-world nations.

It is a list noteworthy for including NATO, EU, and BRICS members. Interesting implications on supposed “multipolarity” there.

In related news, on the exact same day the 50in5 program launched, the European Parliament and Council of Europe agreed on a new framework for a region-wide European Digital Identity (eID) system.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T01:13:53+00:00

Excerpt:

At a glance:

New study shows that viral rebound with Paxlovid is more common than previously believed.
Clinicians should counsel patients about the possible risk of transmitting virus during rebound.

A new study by Harvard Medical School researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital has found that one in five individuals taking nirmatrelvir-ritonavir therapy, commonly known as Paxlovid, to treat severe symptoms of COVID-19 had a positive test result and shed live potentially contagious virus following an initial recovery and negative test — a phenomenon known as virologic rebound. By contrast, people not taking Paxlovid experienced rebound only about 2 percent of the time.

Results of the study, which was partly funded by the HMS-led Massachusetts Consortium on Pathogen Readiness, are published Nov. 13 in Annals of Internal Medicine.

...

“We conducted this study to address lingering questions about Paxlovid and virologic rebound in COVID-19 treatment,” said senior author Mark Siedner, associate professor of medicine at HMS and an infectious disease clinician and researcher at Mass General. “We found that the virologic rebound phenomenon was much more common than expected — in over 20 percent of people taking Paxlovid — and that individuals shed live virus when experiencing a rebound, which means they may be contagious after initial recovery.”

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T00:44:25+00:00

Excerpt:

I just heard someone say, “One war crime does not justify another.” My reflex as a peace advocate is to agree with that statement, but something gives me pause. It starts with a grammatical issue but it doesn’t end there.

The only beings on earth that perform the act of justifying are human beings. “War crimes” do not perform that act. What the statement intends to say is something like, “One cannot legitimately use one war crime to justify another.” But what is this “legitimate”? A substitute for justifiable. One cannot justifiably use one war crime to justify another. We are on the brink of an infinite regress that seeks to convert the subjective act of justifying something into an objective property, as if one could filter all acts through a moral sieve that separates them into two categories, the wrong and the right.

Seen this way, the statement about justifying war crimes is exactly wrong. People do indeed use one war crime to justify another. With the exception of crimes of passion, which people typically justify in retrospect, all wars and most violence begins with justification. The heinous acts of the other side are high-octane fuel for the justification engine.

In the objective sense of an ethical principle, we can argue whether this or that war was justified. But in terms of the rhetorical act of the human being called justifying, all wars are justified. Someone is justifying them.

This is why, as I have argued over the past month, we must exit the conversation about what is justified if there is ever going to be an end to the violence in the Holy Land.

The word just comes from the Latin justus — upright, equitable, lawful, right, proper. To justify literally means to make it right. To take something self-interested or indeterminate and make it into something right, that is justification. It is much easier to override the heart’s repulsion and harm others when aided by a story in which it is right.

Both sides in the Gaza conflict believe they are right. Hamas and the Israeli government both justify acts of carnage. So it has always been, and so it shall ever be. To end it, we have to appeal to something outside of what is justified, who is right, and who is wrong.

Force me to speak in terms of right and wrong, and I would say, yes, it is wrong to kill 4500 children in a bombing campaign. I would say it is wrong to kidnap and murder innocent festival-goers and children in a kibbutz. I do not mean to establish the two sides as equivalent here. I understand well the assymetrical dynamics of oppressor and oppressed. If forced to, I could tell you which side I think is wronger or righter than the other. I am fully capable of understanding each side’s logic and adjudge one or the other more valid. But like many of you, I am sick of being asked to pitch my tent in one camp or another.

I am unwillng to do that, and it is not because, sheltered by my circumstances and privilege, I have the luxury of not taking sides. I am unwilling because I want to see the violence end, and that means that people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.

I repeat: for there to be peace, people are going to have to stop doing what they think is justified.

If I am on a side, it is the side of peace.

I know I am not alone there. In fact many people who do not enjoy the shelter of circumstance and privilege are saying something similar. I already shared the video “In my name, I want no vengeance” by Michal Helav, whose only son was murdered by Hamas. There are many others. Here are a few examples from the article, “Listen to Israeli survivors: They don’t want revenge.”

...

I am in awe of the courage of these people. It is not easy to speak against the howls of a bloodthirsty mob — and the bloodthirsty inner mob that wants to relieve the grief for a moment by converting it into hate. I was on a call a few weeks ago with a group of Israeli and Palestinian peace activists. “If you speak out, they slap you down,” one said. They were afraid to say anything publicly, afraid to protest, and trying to think of more indirect forms of peace action.

In times of conflict, the advocate for peace draws more hatred than even the enemy. The enemy by his existence validates the drama that affirms the partisan’s role and identity (and, in the case of a nation, an agenda of domination or conquest). The more abhorrent the enemy’s acts, the better. But the peace advocate undermines that drama and the roles and justifications that it creates.

Palestinian peace activist Aziz Abu Sarah describes what it is like:

It is a very tough time obviously to be a peace activist and much harder than choosing which side I want to care about more. Because if you are pro-Palestinian you sympathize obviously with the Palestinian cause. If you're pro-Israel, you sympathize with the Israeli cause. And if you're a peace activist, you have friends on both sides. And so your pain is multiplied. Because if I'm talking to my friends and family in the West Bank, I'm talking to my family or my family in Jerusalem, they are living in complete fear. I'm talking to my friends in Gaza who are escaping, terrified. I'm talking to my friends in Israel who are living the biggest nightmare in their lives. I'm terrified for my friends who have missing family members. They are trying to find where they are, most likely hostages in Gaza. I have friends who lost family members. And so you're trying to take the pain of both the Israelis and the Palestinians and absorb both of it and live with both of it. And understand both perspectives, understand when your Israeli friends are angry, and they can't comprehend how you could talk about Gaza right now. Because in their mind, but what about my pain? And my friends in Gaza think I'm completely a traitor, because how am I able to sympathize with the Israelis pain, with the people who've lost their lives in Israel. It's very difficult. But I also think this is exactly what we need right now. This is the time to stand up and say there is an alternative: hate isn't the only path.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-20T00:37:47+00:00

Excerpt:

...

But what really blows my noodle is how rare AI skepticism still is in the media. One year ago, ChatGPT was opened to the public. The onslaught of overheated and careless rhetoric about our imminent ascent to a new plane of existence (or our imminent extermination) began then and has not slowed since. It’s inherent to the financial interests of journalism for professional media to sensationalize, after all. (This is a complaint that’s old enough that it was made by Charles Dickens, among many other journalists.) And so I’m not at all surprised that there’s been so many stories about how nothing will ever be the same, even as we’re all still just living busy little ordinary lives like we always have. What does surprise me is that there hasn’t really been a counterweight to all of that, writers looking at all the froth and seeing that there’s an unfilled need for some skepticism and restraint. It remains the case that the best bet about the future lies in something like the statement “these new ‘AI’ technologies aren’t really artificial intelligence and are unlikely ever to be, but they could have some interesting and moderately significant consequences.” But I see very very little of that. The Boston Globe has run a few skeptical pieces, including by me, and every once in a while I see a strong argument that we’re getting way ahead of ourselves. In general, though, there’s a remarkable dearth of restraint.

The New Yorker recently revealed its new “AI Issue.” There is nary an overall skeptical piece to be found. It just genuinely seems not to occur to the bigwigs at fancy media that there is a place for skepticism about the ultimate impact of this technology, even if (especially if!) they’re sure it will change everything. Here’s some copy in the email from the magazine announcing the issue, by editorial director Henry Finder.

A technology becomes an age—the automobile age, the Internet age—when it’s so pervasive that you can’t imagine life without it. Culturally speaking, there’s a before and after. For people of a certain generation, the Internet was once a rumor about bulletin boards and “Usenet”; now they arrive at a countryside bed and breakfast and ask for the Wi-Fi password with their room key. The new age arrives on no specific day; it creeps up slowly, and then pounces suddenly. And so, it seems, with A.I. For some years, it had been a silent partner in the most ordinary aspects of life, from smartphone pics to Netflix recommendations. But once it learned to converse—via ChatGPT, Bard, and the like—millions of people were startled into elation and alarm. Pygmalion had parted her lips.

Golly, Henry! Maybe you should Finder someone who can articulate the very real possibility that this is all going to look embarrassing a few years from now? Even if you aren’t, like me, one of those who questions how much actual impact the internet has had on our society in structural terms, it’s hard to understand why so few people feel compelled to play defense. Or maybe I do. Right now, AI hype gets clicks and attention, and since there’s not going to be any one definitive moment when all of this hype gets derailed, but rather a long slow embarrassed petering out, no one will ever be forced to confront their predictions that don’t come true.

Of course the New Yorker is not remotely alone in its attachment to ridiculously overheated rhetoric about AI. Perhaps my favorite is Elizabeth Weil’s laughable pick-me notion that Sam Altman of OpenAI is “the Oppenheimer of our age.” Right now, the combined nuclear arsenal of the world is capable of killing a significant percentage of our species, irradiating vast swaths of the earth for generations, and plunging the planet into nuclear winter. All of foreign policy and military strategy are filtered through the prism of nuclear weapons; without Russia’s immense nuclear capability, Vladimir Putin never even attempts to invade Ukraine, and with it, more and more people who formerly draped themselves in yellow and blue are quietly urging Zelensky to cut a deal. That’s how nukes tilt the playing field. The insights developed during the Manhattan Project contributed to an energy technology that should have revolutionized the world and still represents our best hope against climate change, if we only have the wisdom to use it. And Sam Altman is the same as Oppenheimer because… ChatGPT gives 8th graders the ability to generate dreadfully uninspired and error-filled text instead of producing it themselves? What? What? What?

That speaks to the most important point. The question that overwhelms me, and which our journalist class seems totally uninterested in, is simply to ask what AI can do now. Not what AI will do or should do or is projected to do, not an extrapolation or prediction, but a demonstration of something impressive that AI can do today. For it to be impressive, it has to do something that human beings can’t do themselves. I find ChatGPT and the various image generators fun but consistently underwhelming. For one thing, when you see some of their output on social media and it looks impressive, it’s a textbook case of survivorship bias. (They’re not posting all the other outputs that are garbled and useless.) But even were that not the case, you couldn’t point to ChatGPT or MidJourney or the like and call it a truly meaningful advance because there is nothing that they can produce that human beings have not or could not produce themselves. The text ChatGPT produces is not special. The images Dall-E produces are not special. They’re only considered special because a machine made them, which is of obviously limited social consequence. I’m aware that, for example, programmers are finding these tools very useful for faster and more efficient coding. And that’s cool! Could be quite meaningful. But that’s not revolution, it’s refinement. And that’s what we’ve had for the past 60 or so, various refinements after a hundred years of genuinely radical technological advancement and attendant social change.

Every time I ask people what AI can do now rather than in some indefinite future, it goes something like this - someone will say “AI is curing cancer!,” I’ll ask for evidence, they’ll send a link to a breathless story in Wired or Gizmodo or whatever, I’ll chase down a paper or press release to what they’re referring to, and it turns out that someone’s exploring how AI might someday be used in oncology diagnostics in such a way that some cancers might be caught earlier, maybe. Which could be good, definitely, but is also not happening now, and is not revolutionary change, especially given that we’ve learned in the past few decades that earlier detection does not necessarily increase the odds of survival. Even people who appear to be very well-informed about these issues tend to talk about “runaway AI” and “the singularity” with immense imprecision and a complete lack of appropriate skepticism. It leaves someone like me with nowhere to go; when you can just assert that a radically life-altering event is happening in the future, one which depends upon an immense number of shaky assumptions and which assumes that certain “emergent” leaps necessarily will happen because someone has imagined that it might, well, who can hold you accountable to any tangible reality? And I just don’t agree with the framing of a lot of this stuff. I think that eventually self-driving cars will be the norm, and that will be consequential for society. I look forward to it. But will it be as consequential as the switch from horse-powered transportation to the internal combustion engine, which happened barely more than 100 years ago? Not even close.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-19T00:08:54+00:00

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2213836

The sponsor (Pfizer) designed and conducted the trial and was responsible for the collection, analysis, and interpretation of the data. The first draft of the manuscript was written by medical writers (paid by Pfizer) under the direction of the authors. Pfizer manufactured RSVpreF vaccine and placebo.

PROCEDURES

Participants were randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to receive one intramuscular injection of unadjuvanted RSVpreF vaccine at a dose of 120 μg (containing 60 μg each of RSV A and RSV B antigens) or placebo. Placebo was lyophilized to match the appearance of RSVpreF vaccine but did not contain the active ingredients (i.e., RSV A and RSV B preF antigens, which are based on the currently predominant Ontario and Buenos Aires genotypes, respectively).

So Pfizer ran the trials and made the comparative "placebo", but the experiment doesn't tell us what is in this "placebo." It's some substance that they freeze dried to make look like the vaccine, but we don't get know what it was. According the the protocol, "Placebo will be a lyophile match to the vaccine, which will consist of excipients matched to those used in the RSVpreF vaccine formulation, minus the active ingredients."

But we don't get to know what they put into their "placebo".

https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/should-you-get-the-new-rsv-vaccine

The CDC advisory panel expressed concerns about the clinical trial data to the point where they changed an initially strong recommendation to get the vaccine, if eligible, to one that says people over 60 “may” get an RSV vaccine based on a shared discussion with their doctors. For some, this may mean a discussion with their pharmacist. (The RSV vaccines will be covered by Medicare Part D and, thus, will be administered in pharmacies in many cases.)

One issue was that a few people in the trials developed Guillain-Barré syndrome in the days following the shot. Guillain-Barré is a rare disorder that causes muscle weakness and sometimes paralysis.

In addition, atrial fibrillation (an arrhythmia that can lead to blood clots in the heart) within 30 days of vaccination was reported in 10 participants who received Arexvy and four participants who received a placebo.

“One could argue that the benefits of these vaccines far outweigh the risks; for instance, the protection afforded against severe RSV disease is greater than the small risk of Guillain-Barré in this situation,” says Dr. Roberts. There will be continued monitoring for Guillain-Barré and other issues once the RSV vaccines become available, he adds.

Another issue was that most of the participants in the clinical trials were in their 60s, so there was little data on other high-risk groups, such as those over age 80.

stickdog · 2023-11-18T01:56:15+00:00

Propagandhi - Victory Lap

Arlen Roth - Rooster

stickdog · 2023-11-17T20:41:34+00:00

Yes.

But when people who appointing themselves the brownshirts of the COVID vaxx police are told this, somehow this doesn't even register to them.

They say, "Nobody ever said it was supposed to stop transmission" as if that was not their entire basis ("Your freedom stop when you infect others") for their hatefully oppressive self-righteous discrimination of those whose only crime was not worshipping experimental Big Pharma products as fervently as they did.

And I say did, because even in San Francisco, a place where all of the local business employees I know immediately festooned themselves with Barney Fife deputy vax police badges, fewer than 20% of residents have gotten the newest monovalent booster more than 2 full months since it became widely available.

And note that based on SF's previous "at least one vaccine" statistics in which they published vaccination percentages over 105% for certain neighborhoods and for over 65 demographics, this 19% is almost certainly an overestimate.

stickdog · 2023-11-17T00:25:52+00:00

OK, so a group of scientists finally took the Walgreens data that showed for over a year the vaccinated tested positive for COVID-19 at a higher percentage than the unvaccinated and tried to massage these data the best they could to prove bivalent booster efficacy (which was across the board far higher for compared to those already vaccinated but not boosted than it was compared to the unvaccinated!).

Effectiveness of BNT162b2 BA.4/5 Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Against Symptomatic COVID-19 Among Immunocompetent Individuals Testing at a Large US Retail Pharmacy

To try to make these data look best for the vaccines, they removed 740,342 of the original 1,048,227 tests.

Records were excluded if the individual (1) received any non-mRNA vaccine, (2) received an Omicron-adapted vaccine other than the BNT162b2 BA.4/5 bivalent, (3) received >1 dose of BNT162b2 bivalent, (4) received only 1 original wild-type dose or their last original wild-type dose ≤2 months ago (ie, not eligible for a bivalent vaccine), (5) received a BNT162b2 bivalent dose ≤2 months after their last original wild-type dose (ie, not according to current guidelines), (6) received a BNT162b2 bivalent dose <14 days ago (ie, individuals were not considered vaccinated until ≥14 days), (7) declined to report vaccination status or self-reported fewer vaccines in the current questionnaire than in a prior questionnaire (completed between 1 January 2022 and 31 January 2023), (8) were immunocompromised or received >4 original wild-type doses, (9) had invalid SARS-CoV-2 test results, (10) self-reported a prior SARS-CoV-2 infection ≤3 months ago, or (11) did not report symptoms on the testing survey. Finally, to ensure that cases and controls included in the analysis had similar healthcare seeking behaviors, we also excluded those reporting testing related to future travel or employment screening and those who tested multiple times during the study window.

And even after all of this data massaging, here were the results.

For those counting at home, the positivity rate of the unvaccinated was 33.0% compared to 38.3% for those who had two original doses, 41.2% for those with 3 original doses, and 41.8% for those with 4 original doses. For the vaccinated this includes those who also got the bivalent booster in addition to their first 2, 3, or 4 doses!

Once again, the more injections you have gotten, the more likely that you are getting COVID and spreading COVID to others. The only exception to this is in a very short window from 2 weeks after your last booster to roughly 3 to 5 months after your last booster.

stickdog · 2023-11-15T02:40:00+00:00

Excerpt:

Want to understand why the media we consume is either owned by billionaires or under the thumb of government? The latest developments in the story about who was behind the explosions that destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines that brought Russian gas to Europe provide the answer.

Although largely forgotten now, the blasts in the Baltic Sea in September 2022 had huge and lasting repercussions. The explosion was an act both of unprecedented industrial sabotage and of unparalleled environmental terrorism, releasing untold quantities of the most potent of the greenhouse gases, methane, into the atmosphere.

The blowing up of the pipelines plunged Europe into a prolonged energy crisis, tipping its economies deeper into a recession from which they are yet to recover. Europe was forced to turn to the United States and buy much more expensive liquified gas. And one of the long-term effects will be to accelerate the de-industrialisation of Europe, especially Germany.

There can be almost no one in Europe who did not suffer personal financial harm, in most cases significant harm, from the explosions.

The question that needed urgently answering at the time of the blasts was one no media organisation was in a hurry to investigate: Who did it?

In unison, the media simply recited the White House’s extraordinary claim that Russia had sabotaged its own pipelines.

That required an unprecedented suspension of disbelief. It meant that Moscow had chosen to strip itself both of the lucrative income stream the gas pipelines generated, and of the political and diplomatic leverage it enjoyed over European states from its control of their energy supplies. This was at a time, remember, when the Kremlin, embattled in its war in Ukraine, needed all the diplomatic influence it could muster.

The main culprit

The need to breathe credibility into the laughably improbable “Russia did it” story was so urgent at the time because there was was only one other serious culprit in the frame. No media outlet, of course, mentioned it.

The United States had both the motive and the means.

... ' It is why, when it became obvious that the “Russia did it” claim was unsupportable, the media literally jumped ship: credulously reporting that a small group of “maverick” Ukrainians – unknown to President Volodymyr Zelensky, of course – had rented a yacht and carried off one of the most daring and difficult deep-sea stunts ever recorded.

It is why, later, the media treated it as entirely unremarkable – and certainly not worthy of comment – that new evidence suggested the Biden administration was warned of this maverick Ukrainian operation against the whole of Europe. It apparently knew what was about to happen but did precisely nothing to stop it.

...

And it is why the latest reporting from the Washington Post changes the impossible-to-believe “maverick” Ukrainian operation into one that implicates the very top of the Ukrainian military. Still, once again, the paper and the rest of the media steadfastly refuse to join the dots and follow the implications contained in their own reporting.

The central character in the new drama, Roman Chervinsky, belongs to Ukraine’s special operations forces. He supposedly oversaw the small, six-man team that rented a yacht and then carried out the James Bond-style attack.

The ingenuous Post claims that his training and operational experience meant he was “well suited to help carry out a covert mission meant to obscure Ukraine’s responsibility”. It lists his resistance activities against Russia. None indicate that he had the slightest experience allowing him to mastermind a highly challenging, extremely dangerous, technically complex attack deep in the waters of the Baltic Sea.

...

The Washington Post’s new story repeats the line that the Biden administration was forewarned of the attack. Now, however, the Post casually reports that, after expressing opposition, “US officials believed the attack had been called off. But it turned out only to have been postponed to three months later, using a different point of departure than originally planned”.

The Washington Post simply accepts the word of US officials that the most powerful country on the planet fell asleep at the wheel. The CIA and the Biden administration apparently knew the Ukrainian military was keen to blow up the Nord Stream pipelines and plunge Europe into an energy crisis and economic recession. But US officials were blindsided when the same small Ukrainian operational team changed locations and timings.

On this account, US intelligence fell for the simplest of bait and switches when the stakes were about as high as could be imagined. And the Washington Post and other media outlets report all of this with a faux-seriousness.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-15T01:55:21+00:00

Excerpt:

The power elites think you are cannon fodder, in one way or another.

I’ve been reflecting on all those people I see around me advocating for bloody violent conflict from the comfort of their armchairs, TV studio, or bench in Parliament. How can anyone respect these people?

Right or wrong, “just war” or otherwise, at least in medieval times many of the leaders actually put their skin in the game.

...

They either sincerely (and stupidly) believed their Popes or Gods, or they just really, really wanted some more land and gold. “Might is right!”, especially when you have the “divine right” of a King.

Today, when the power elites want something (usually related to oil or profits for the Military-Industrial Complex), they can just print money (thereby lowering your wealth) and recoup their outlays with war profits from all those juicy 'defence' stocks. Of course, this requires selling a story to the inevitable cannon fodder—flag-draped plebs—and to the foreign—usually brown-faced—'collateral damage.' And the plebs fall for it time and again. Will it be forevermore?

And it's not just the usual career politicians who play this game; the 'intelligentsia' are often worse. Since it's that day of the year again, I found myself reading some of Wilfred Owen's poems, and I was reminded that W.B. Yeats had excluded him from the 'Oxford Book of Modern Verse,' a collection curated by the literary elites. Yeats argued:

'In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies... If war is necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever...'

Thus spoke the man whose nationalistic literary revival enabled the fatal Easter Rising. He would have us believe that those who died found it a 'joy' to die, but for some strange reason, he opted out of the actual fighting. He did write a poem about it, which led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize a few years later, and he lived a long and comfortable life among the political and literary power elites. During this time, he advocated for Fascism and Mussolini, even writing marching songs for the Irish Fascists known as the 'Blue Shirts’.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-15T01:52:53+00:00

Excerpt:

Matt Yglesias suggests that people still underrate the importance of the 2016 presidential election. It’s hard for me to believe that he really thinks that; not a day goes by in which rich angry liberals fail to blame everyone else but themselves for 2016. But it’s his list of “some of Hillary Clinton’s idiosyncratic handicaps” that supposedly cost her the election that’s really risible - “the emails, the decades-long poor relationship with the non-ideological press, the sense that she should be held responsible for stuff her husband did.”

This is, shall we say, selective. In particular, it leaves out the perhaps-salient fact that Hillary Clinton is and has always been one of the most divisive national politicians in the history of public polling. From the time she arrived on the scene as First Lady, to her run as New York’s junior senator, to her role as Barack Obama’s Secretary of State, to her twerking, gaffe-ing, galactically entitled presidential run, Hillary Clinton has always been profoundly unpopular with broad swaths of the electorate. Her traditional high favorability among Democrats was a secondary benefit to her primary campaign - her biggest strength being the overwhelming attitude among Democrat insiders that it was “her turn” - but could do little to help her in a general election where her lack of favorability among independents doomed her.

None of this was a secret in 2016, not her unpopularity and not the fact that she was being handed the nomination because she was a member of a powerful political dynasty that had immense influence on the Democratic party. The will of the voters was secondary at best. The Morning Consult, from that year:

Clinton Is Seen as Untrustworthy and Corrupt

For voters who have an unfavorable view of Hillary Clinton, their dislike can be boiled down to one word: trust. Almost half (47 percent) of voters who have an unfavorable view of Clinton don’t think she is trustworthy and almost four in 10 voters (39 percent) say she is corrupt….

It’s little surprise that 50 percent of Republicans say she is untrustworthy, but that was also the top reason for 47 percent of independents and 39 percent of Democrats who have an unfavorable view of Clinton. Republicans and independents, at 45 percent and 39 percent, respectively, also believe she is corrupt, compared with 25 percent of Democrats.

A little over one-fifth of voters (21 percent) said Clinton changes her positions when it’s politically convenient. At 26 percent, Democrats were slightly more likely to criticize Clinton for that reason, compared with 23 percent of independents and 18 percent of Republicans.

It’s mystifying, how little the conventional wisdom on 2016 reflects this plain reality - that Hillary Clinton lost because voters don’t like her.

There was ample evidence, during that Democratic primary, to predict that her periodic lack of favor would doom her in the general. Here’s a Gallup graphic that shows her popularity over the course of her career in the national spotlight.

...

Her favorable-unfavorable numbers were bad, period. You could be forgiven though for looking at such graphics and thinking that she simply was inconsistent over time. The trouble with saying that her popularity is just inconsistent, rather than a clear disadvantage, is that a graph like this is exactly the last thing you want in a candidate running against Donald Trump in 2016, particularly given that she was clearly entering another period of unpopularity right before the election began in earnest. The Democrats enjoyed the benefits of incumbency and eight years of a president who, despite engendering a lot of conservative insanity, was broadly popular and oversaw a slack but steady economic recovery and a return to normalcy after the habitual insanity of the Bush years. Incumbency + no recession + no major wars is a hard bag to fumble, but the Democrats managed to fumble it. The symbol of the Democratic party shouldn’t be a donkey but rather a man tripping over his own dick.

...

It’s common for people to defend Clinton by saying that her unpopularity is a result of sexism. That is, no doubt, partially true, although she’s also a remarkably clumsy politician. I don’t doubt that sexism has hurt her career in myriad ways. The trouble with that is that it simply doesn’t matter. Elections are what they are’ public sentiment is what it is. If you insist that this was the most important election of our lifetimes, as Yglesias is here, then you have to focus on what is rather than on what ought to be. And the reality was plain: Clinton presented genuinely unique vulnerabilities as a presidential candidate given how many people in the country actively disliked her. For or fair, that was just true.

But we weren’t allowed to point out the clear danger of the moment because the media decided early in the cycle that any questions about Clinton’s electability were simply a stalking horse for misogyny. The party and its loyalists insisted that it was sexist to call a spade a spade and acknowledge that Clinton had severe vulnerabilities in basic public sentiment; here’s a version from the NYT. Under the conditions of 2016, with the incumbency advantages and Trump’s unique issues, you would have wanted to elect someone who simply didn’t have the level of negative baggage that Clinton did, someone who the country generally saw as inoffensive. Yglesias nominates Martin O’Malley, but of course Bernie Sanders fit the bill as well. Sanders beat Trump in poll after poll, and cleaned up with independents, which would seem to be important in a presidential election. Clinton apparatchiks have always scoffed at those polls, asserting without evidence that Republican oppo would have sunk him without caring much that Republican oppo was already sinking Hillary.

Bernie, of course, also would have energized the youth like no other, setting up the Democrats for durable gains down the road with that demographic.

...

stickdog · 2023-11-14T02:24:52+00:00

Well, I was disposed to get it myself.

All I wanted was a shred of data that showed that the overall health outcomes of vaccinated populations were actually better than the overall health outcomes of demographically comparable unvaccinated populations. Yet every time I asked medical professionals and vaccines advocates for these data, I got "just trust us, it's totally beneficial" crickets.

After a year or so of being on the fence about this, I started to figure out why no such data was forthcoming.

stickdog · 2023-11-14T02:20:19+00:00

Pretty much.

And this boggles my mind because he had seemed like at least a reasonable person on every other issue. I mean, not perfect on many issues, but at least reasonable. I just don't get why he decided to stake out the furthest corner of extreme Zionism instead of just sticking to the garden variety insane Zionism of every other federally elected official save the one all the others censured.

stickdog · 2023-11-14T01:37:33+00:00

Yes, thanks.

I'm not sure how I messed up the OP link to the study.

Here is the link to the zip file of the "supplementary" charts.

stickdog · 2023-11-14T01:35:31+00:00

I agree.

However, his candidacy at least seems viable, and I like him more than I like Trump or Biden.

Yes, faint praise indeed.

But he needs to at least champion the principle of free speech over his bizarre, extreme, and unfailing worship of Zionism to retain any support from me.

stickdog · 2023-11-14T00:48:53+00:00

Excerpt:

Who, if anyone, or what, if anything, is in charge?

In many ways this is the question of the age, inspiring passionate debates across the ideological spectrum, with divergent answers springing not just from left and right but from every boutique micro-ideology howling within humanity’s splintered mind. Dissident rightists talk about elite theory and the Cathedral, an emergent managerial structure sprawling across the institutions that coordinates itself with power-seeking talking points the way ant colonies use pheromones to swarm towards food supplies. Libertarians ascribe malign incompetence to the state and its lumbering bureaucracies, and to the central banks and their fraudulent fiat currencies. Accelerationists point to the blind idiot god of technocapital. Wignats talk about The Jews. Conspiracy analysts finger the World Economic Forum, the bankers, the intelligence agencies, the reptoids. Christians speak of the Devil, gnostics of archons. The Woke rant about the invisible witchcraft of systemic racism, white privilege, cisheteronormativity, misogyny, and every once in a while, recall their origins with Marx and remember to blame capitalism.

What all of these have in common is that they remove the source of agency in public affairs from the visible to the invisible. It is not the politicians that we can see who coordinate the world and provide impetus to policy changes, but hidden puppet masters – human or systemic – who manipulate them from off-stage. If there is a single, unifying theme around which most of the current year’s human species can coalesce across all ideological divides, it is this: the true power is hidden.

This state of ignorance encourages an uneasy sense of paranoia. We’re like travellers in a dark forest, unable to see more than a few feet into the shadows beyond a path we aren’t even sure we didn’t wander off some time ago. Every cracking branch in the undergrowth, every rustle in the leaves, every animal cry causes us to startle. It could be nothing. It’s probably nothing. But it could be a wolf. Or a bear. Or some eyeless monster from our childhood nightmares. It probably isn’t. It’s probably just a racoon. But you can’t see what it is, and your imagination fills in the details.

None of which is to say there aren’t monsters out there.

Secrecy in public affairs puts people on edge. You cannot trust what you cannot verify, and you cannot verify what you cannot see. There’s a reason that the archetype of the oily vizier whispering honeyed manipulations in a credulous king’s ear is universally reviled. Whether the king is a good king or a bad king, if he’s really the king, at least you know who’s in charge; you know the rules he follows; you know the customs that bind him, the ambitions that drive him, the personality that animates him. There’s a certain trustworthiness to that. The power that hides itself behind the throne is power that cannot be trusted.

Maybe the vizier is in truth a good vizier, giving the king sage advice, motivated only by his love of the kingdom and his desire for the general happiness and prosperity. But maybe he isn’t. Maybe he’s a serpentine traitor with a gnawing, insatiable hunger for power and wealth at the sadistic core of the sucking black singularity he has in place of a heart. The point is that, so long as he lurks in the shadows, you can’t really know, and your imagination will fill that null space of unknowing with your fears.

In the managerial state, power is deliberately opaque. We face not a single untrustworthy vizier, but armies of them, faceless bureaucrats and nondescript functionaries who camouflage themselves within the dense undergrowth of corporate org charts. Corner one of them over a decision you dislike, and they throw their hands up and say, it wasn’t me, I’m just following policy, or best practices, or mandates, or The Science, or whatever. Try to trace the origin of the policy, and you find yourself in a bewildering web of think tanks, policy institutes, committees, and so forth, none of which is willing to take direct responsibility for the policy. Every once in a while you might manage to find a unique origin point, and almost invariably you find that it started as a simple suggestion, from some nobody with no particular power or influence, who simply put an idea out there which then took on a life of its own.

The lockdowns are a case in point. The idea seems to have originated with a middle school science fair project in which a tween ran a toy model on her computer that showed that if people were locked in their homes viral outbreaks could be prevented, an idea which is obviously true and equally obviously impossible in practice, and ruinous in direct proportion to whatever degree it is put into practice. Early in 2020 it was popularized by some blogger whose name I can’t recall, who wrote something on Medium about dancing hammers which struck panicked midwits as very clever. Then it got picked up by the managerial network organism, turned into policy, and the world was broken.

The lockdowns are an extreme example, but really our entire system works like this. Take building codes. Wherever you live, there is a building code. It specifies in exact detail the best practices for every aspect of construction, and unless you follow it to the letter you will not be permitted to proceed with whatever project you have in mind, whether it’s erecting an apartment block or putting an extension on your deck. Where did the building code come from? It wasn’t the building inspector: he’s just enforcing it. It wasn’t the mayor or the members of the town council: they wouldn’t know where to start. No, the building code emerged from some local bureaucracy, staffed by experts, who put together its elements on the basis of things that other experts said were good things to do. You don’t know their faces or their names. You will almost never track down the specific person who put a specific requirement into the building code. It was probably decided upon in a closed committee meeting, and no one on the committee will admit direct responsibility. Indeed, the committee itself will not take direct responsibility: they were just following the best practices of other committees, modifying other building codes, in other municipalities. If you happen to disagree with some element of the building code – finding it overly restrictive, too cautious, too expensive for whatever marginal improvement in structural stability or energy efficiency it is intended to enforce – you have no way of changing it. The people on the committee weren’t voted into their positions. They don’t have to listen to the public, and therefore they don’t. Meanwhile, within their sphere of responsibility they have absolute power to enforce their diktats. Maybe you can reason with them when exceptions to the building code arise, and maybe you can’t; that’s up to them, and not to you.

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stickdog