Worth dissecting where we are with Covid. Instead of watching the television, or listening to blowhard politicians, it is best to look at data and statistics. Unfortunately, most people do not understand stats. Most of the stats you see in the news are manipulated in some way to drive an opinion.
People use fear to whip and drive people. They use fear to control them. One of the things I learned trading is if I traded from a place of fear, I made bad decisions. As I invested in startups, I saw CEOs wrestle with fear. The ones that handled it did better than the ones that were controlled by it.
Fear is a powerful emotion because of the chemicals that are released into the body. We are genetically ingrained for flight or fight. Animals are too. I see a lot of wild animals up here in Northern Minnesota all summer long and all of them choose flight when you happen upon them. I have seen wolves, bears, moose, deer, fox, and coyotes. All have run rather than face me. Flight is a lot easier than fight.
Same goes for humans. It’s easier to accept all the bullshit that comes down than fight it.
Check this out:
Covid is just not as serious as the politicians are making it out to be. They have another goal. Increase their power. Political entities love power. The Founders recognized that and enshrined people’s rights into the Constitution. It’s worth pointing out the Constitution and Bill of Rights protect people from government, not the other way around.
The statistical distribution for Covid is not a classically formed bell curve statistical distribution. It’s highly skewed. In addition, the outcome is heavily dependent on conditional probabilities and isn’t the same for everyone. Hence, there is a lot of variance in Covid. One size fits all regulations don’t work.
Covid is more an excuse to push an agenda and exponentially ramp up government spending than anything else.
If you were one of the people who got Covid and survived, you have 13x better immunity compared to people who got the vaccine. That doesn’t mean don’t get the vaccine. Get it if you haven’t had Covid. If you had it, no need. This is why the blanket policies being pushed by governments and corporations right now are stupid. They don’t recognize data. Besides, even if you get the vaccine you can still get and spread Covid.
Besides, the Delta variant is 20x less lethal than original Covid. Cases ramp up quickly because it’s more transmissible. Of course, citing cases is stupid anyway. No one should cite the number of cases when talking about Covid. The only meaningful stats are who is getting it, what their health condition is when they get it and did they get admitted to a hospital or not. During the entire Covid event, we have never seen hospital beds overwhelmed in the US anywhere. Never. Recall the cruise ships, Navy ships, and convention centers that were turned into makeshift hospitals for Covid. It was a total waste.
My wife had Covid. It was a mild case. I didn’t. I got the vaccine. We can’t go to a restaurant in NYC together despite the fact she is better protected against getting Covid than I am.
When you look at who dies when they get Covid, it should lessen your fear. Most people under the age of 70 have other problems. They have hypertension. They have some other chronic disease. A large percentage of them are just fat. Face it, there are a lot of fat Americans. They know who they are.
Since governments and corporations are in the business of making choices for people based on vaccination status, should they also choose based on obesity? Obese people are most likely to have trouble with Covid. Maybe airlines ought to ban obese people from flying until this whole thing blows over. Illinois has a governor that probably would have some trouble if he got it.
There is a place to draw the line. It’s masks. Democratic governors all over the country are reinstituting mask mandates. They are totally stupid. Not even based on any peer-reviewed or good data at all. All masks are is a way to spread fear, and increase control over you.
You just can’t say “Masks work” and have any credibility at all.
Here are some studies on masks and their effectiveness. Children don’t need vaccines or masks.
A recent study that looked at deaths occurring in children in the U.K. during the first 12 months of the pandemic found 99.995% of children diagnosed with COVID-19 survived
Between March 2020 and February 2021, only 25 children under the age of 18 died directly as a result of SARS-CoV-2 infection. This gives us an absolute mortality rate for children of 2 per 1 million
In the U.S., 335 children under 18 have died with a COVID-19 diagnosis on their death certificate. The CDC estimates the infection fatality rate from COVID-19 among children 0 to 17 years old is 20 per 1 million
The 20-in-1 million mortality rate in the U.S. cited by the CDC is likely a gross overestimate as, unlike the U.K., PCR tests were done with grossly inappropriate cycle threshold levels, and those who had legitimate infections also had existing comorbidities that were the true cause of death, yet it was inappropriately attributed to COVID-19
Researchers at Johns Hopkins teamed up with the nonprofit FAIR Health to analyze the health insurance data of approximately 48,000 children under 18 diagnosed with COVID-19 between April 2020 and August 2020. None of the children who died were free of preexisting medical conditions such as cancer
CDC numbers show that more people under the age of 18 died of influenza during the 2018–19 flu season—a season of “moderate severity” that lasted eight months—than have died of Covid-19 across more than 18 months. What’s more, the CDC says that out of every 1,738 Covid-19-related deaths in the U.S. in 2020 and 2021, just one has involved someone under 18 years of age; and out of every 150 deaths of someone under 18 years of age, just one has been Covid-related.
Two other studies found no statistically significant differences between their mask-plus-hands and hands-only groups. A 2011 study in Bangkok by Simmerman, et al. observed very similar results for both groups. A CDC-funded 2009 study in Hong Kong by Cowling, et al. observed that the hands-only group generally did better than the mask-plus-hands group, but not to a statistically significant degree.
Among 4,899,447 hospitalized adults in PHD-SR, 540,667 (11.0%) were patients with COVID-19, of whom 94.9% had at least 1 underlying medical condition. Essential hypertension (50.4%), disorders of lipid metabolism (49.4%), and obesity (33.0%) were the most common. The strongest risk factors for death were obesity (adjusted risk ratio [aRR] = 1.30; 95% CI, 1.27–1.33), anxiety and fear-related disorders (aRR = 1.28; 95% CI, 1.25–1.31), and diabetes with complication (aRR = 1.26; 95% CI, 1.24–1.28), as well as the total number of conditions, with aRRs of death ranging from 1.53 (95% CI, 1.41–1.67) for patients with 1 condition to 3.82 (95% CI, 3.45–4.23) for patients with more than 10 conditions (compared with patients with no conditions).
The peer-reviewed medical studies overwhelmingly show masks don’t stop infection or spread. Civil disobedience would tell you to just not where them and ignore the stupid regulation. All laws are not holy and passed down from some prophet off the mountaintop.
If you are fat, your risk of death goes up. Still not an excuse for lockdowns or anything like that.
When there was a mask mandate in Nevada, I walked through a casino on my way to a restaurant and didn’t wear a mask. No one said a peep. If everyone just takes off their masks recognizing they do nothing, no one can stop you. In Grand Marais here, there is one shop that has a mask mandate. I don’t patronize it. The guy that runs it is stupid.
I have called for Civil Disobedience for a long time now. It’s action time.
POINTS AND FIGURES:Leading from fear. “Worth dissecting where we are with Covid. Instead of watching the television, or listening to blowhard politicians, it is best to look at data and statistics. Unfortunately, most people do not understand stats. Most of the stats you see in the news are manipulated in some way to drive an opinion.”
They can’t count on foreign journalists the way they can count on the lapdog U.S. press. Or maybe there’s some other reason, but it certainly looks bad and it’s not like you can trust these guys.
HR4 IS SO MUCH WORSE THAN YOU KNEW: Attorney Cleta Mitchell has been in the front lines of election reform battles for decades, so she knows a thing or thirty-three about how the Left has corrupted the ballot box over the years. And she warns today that HR4, just passed by the House of Representatives, is not about protecting voting rights.
“Instead, the bill cynically adopts into federal law every losing argument advanced by the vast leftwing elections industry to courts across the country for years. Every theory rejected by the courts has been enshrined in HR 4. The bill also hands control of our elections over to the radical leftwing attorneys in the Voting Section of the U.S. Department of Justice.
“Most importantly, the bill codifies congressional districts as ‘protected’ under federal law even if those districts do not have a majority of minority residents. Courts have recognized the importance of majority-minority congressional districts, but have rejected partisan efforts by Democrat lawyers to extend that recognition to congressional districts that do not have a majority of minorities in the district. HR 4 would put into the federal statute protection for districts with more white voters than minorities, thus expanding legal protections to — you guessed it — Democrat House seats.”
This piece is essential reading for anybody who cares about what happened in the 2020 presidential election and could happen again and again and again in future elections.
I'm getting the feeling that Biden was always intended to be a scape goat on this and that Kamala was supposed to get the gig by default once he'd taken the fall. Of course there's always the law stating that incompetence is hard to distinguish from malice, so maybe this is just the outcome of woke leadership.
The paper is not just Open Access but Creative Commons as well. I urge you to read the whole passionate cri de coeur by an author who had the misfortune of growing up in the former USSR, remembers the way science was corrupted there in the name of ideology, and is horrified to see the same happening in the USA now. Let me give you a taste:
I came of age during a relatively mellow period of the Soviet rule, post-Stalin. Still, the ideology permeated all aspects of life, and survival required strict adherence to the party line and enthusiastic displays of ideologically proper behavior. Not joining a young communist organization (Komsomol) would be career suicide—nonmembers were barred from higher education. Openly practicing religion could lead to more grim consequences, up to imprisonment. So could reading the wrong book (Orwell, Solzhenitsyn, etc.). Even a poetry book that was not on the state-approved list could get one in trouble.
Mere compliance was not sufficient—the ideology committees were constantly on the lookout for individuals whose support of the regime was not sufficiently enthusiastic. It was not uncommon to get disciplined for being too quiet during mandatory political assemblies (politinformation or komsomolskoe sobranie) or for showing up late to mandatory mass-celebrations (such as the May or November demonstrations). Once I got a notice for promoting an imperialistic agenda by showing up in jeans for an informal school event. A friend’s dossier was permanently blemished—making him ineligible for Ph.D. programs—for not fully participating in a trip required of university students: an act of “voluntary” help to comrades in collective farms (Figure 2).
Figure 2. Fourth-year chemistry students from Moscow State University (the author is on the right) enjoying a short break in the potato fields during mandatory farm labor, ca. 1987. The sticks were used as aids for separating potatoes from the mud.
Science was not spared from this strict ideological control.(6) Western influences were considered to be dangerous. Textbooks and scientific papers tirelessly emphasized the priority and pre-eminence of Russian and Soviet science. Entire disciplines were declared ideologically impure, reactionary, and hostile to the cause of working-class dominance and the World Revolution. Notable examples of “bourgeois pseudo-science” included genetics and cybernetics. Quantum mechanics and general relativity were also criticized for insufficient alignment with dialectic materialism.
Most relevant to chemistry was the antiresonance campaign (1949–1951).(7)The theory of resonating structures, which brought Linus Pauling the Nobel prize in 1954, was deemed to be bourgeois pseudoscience. Scientists who attempted to defend the merits of the theory and its utility for understanding chemical structures were accused of “cosmopolitism” (Western sympathy) and servility to Western bourgeois science. Some lost jobs. Two high-profile supporters of resonance theory, Syrkin and Dyatkina, were eventually forced to confess their ideological sins and to publicly denounce resonance. Meanwhile, other members of the community took this political purge as an opportunity to advance at the expense of others.(7,8) As noted by many scholars,(7,8)including Pauling himself,(9) the grassroots antiresonance campaign was driven by people who were “displeased with the alignment of forces in their science”.(7) This is a recurring motif in all political campaigns within science in Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and McCarthy’s America—those who are “on the right side” of the issue can jump a few rungs and take the place of those who were canceled. By the time I studied quantum chemistry at Moscow State University, resonance theory had been rehabilitated. Yet, the history of the campaign and the injustices it entailed were not discussed in the open—the Party did not welcome conversations about its past mistakes. I remember hearing parts of the story, narrated under someone’s breath at a party after copious amounts of alcohol had loosened a tongue.
Fast forward to 2021—another century. The Cold War is a distant memory and the country shown on my birth certificate and school and university diplomas, the USSR, is no longer on the map. But I find myself experiencing its legacy some thousands of miles to the west, as if I am living in an Orwellian twilight zone. I witness ever-increasing attempts to subject science and education to ideological control and censorship. Just as in Soviet times, the censorship is being justified by the greater good. Whereas in 1950, the greater good was advancing the World Revolution (in the USSR; in the USA the greater good meant fighting Communism), in 2021 the greater good is “Social Justice” (the capitalization is important: “Social Justice” is a specific ideology, with goals that have little in common with what lower-case “social justice” means in plain English).(10−12) As in the USSR, the censorship is enthusiastically imposed also from the bottom, by members of the scientific community, whose motives vary from naive idealism to cynical power-grabbing.
Go read it all. The footnotes, BTW, contain links to many other treasures — as well as cringe-inducing examples of the pathologies she is taking a stand against.
She concludes:
Why did I devote a considerable amount of my time to writing this essay? […] The answer is simple: our future is at stake. As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce.Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange of ideas—and continue our core mission, the pursuit of truth, focusing attention on solving real, important problems of humankind.
The lessons of history are numerous and unambiguous.Despite vast natural and human resources, the USSR lost the Cold War, crumbled, and collapsed. […]
Today, STEM holds the key to solving problems far more important than the nuclear arms race: reversing climate change, fighting global hunger and poverty, controlling pandemics, and harnessing the power of new technologies (quantum computing, bioengineering, and renewable energy) for the benefit of humanity.
Normalizing ideological intrusion into science and abandoning Mertonian principles will cost us dearly. We cannot afford it.
It'll be fun to look back at this moment in 10 years when we're all standing 20 feet apart from each other in the gulags, scratching at our government-injected microchips.
What? BIDEN: "She [Kamala] happens to be in Asia for me right now, but that's why we have a female Vice President of the United States of America, who's gonna be, we're gonna have some presidents pretty soon." 😬 pic.twitter.com/kQrjY6ZjUc — Twitchy Team (@TwitchyTeam) August 23, 2021 “She Kamala happens to be in Asia […]
Just hours before leaving office, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo granted clemency to five men, including the commutation of the 75-years-to-life sentence of David Gilbert, a former member of the radical Weather Underground who in 1981 took part in the robbery of a Brink’s armored truck in Rockland County that left two Nyack police officers and a security guard dead.
* * * * * * * *
Gilbert’s son, Chesa Boudin, was elected district attorney for San Francisco in 2019. His mother, Kathy Boudin, was also incarcerated for decades for her part in the heist, and received parole in 2003.
Knowledgeable observers argued a system like ours was far from feasible. After many false starts, we built a working prototype. But we encountered a glaring problem.
Our system could be easily repurposed for surveillance and censorship. The design wasn’t restricted to a specific category of content; a service could simply swap in any content-matching database, and the person using that service would be none the wiser.
A foreign government could, for example, compel a service to out people sharing disfavored political speech. That’s no hypothetical: WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app, already uses content matching to identify dissident material. India enacted rules this year that could require pre-screening content critical of government policy. Russia recently fined Google, Facebook and Twitter for not removing pro-democracy protest materials.
We spotted other shortcomings. The content-matching process could have false positives, and malicious users could game the system to subject innocent users to scrutiny.
Apple threw away years of carefully cultivated privacy reputation for this.
The drug, made from a combination of two antibodies, was initially developed as a treatment for those who had already been exposed to the disease.
A new trial of 5,197 participants who had not been exposed showed a 77-percent reduced risk of developing symptomatic disease, with no severe cases recorded, Astra said in a statement. . . .
The data show that one dose could “quickly and effectively prevent symptomatic COVID-19”, said Myron Levin, principal trial investigator.
“With these exciting results, AZD7442 could be an important tool in our arsenal to help people who may need more than a vaccine to return to their normal lives.”
It is hoped that the drug could be used alongside vaccines for those who need more protection, affording up to 12 months of defence.
Participants in the trial were adults who were poor responders or intolerant to vaccines, or who had increased risk of infection because of their locations or circumstances.
State Department spokesman Ned Price told the Daily Caller News Foundation and other news outlets late Thursday afternoon that the Biden administration has “no intention of seeking any reimbursement from those fleeing Afghanistan.”
However, the online form American citizens are directed to fill out to secure their evacuation from Afghanistan continued to state well into Thursday evening that they travelers will have to pay their own way out of the country.
“Repatriation flights are not free,” Question 14 of the form stated when accessed by the DCNF around 10 p.m. Thursday, over two-and-a-half hours after Price issued his statement.
“All passengers will need to reimburse the U.S. Government for the flight. A promissory note for the full cost of the flight, which may exceed $2000 per person, must be signed by each adult passenger before boarding,” the form stated.
TOMORROW’S CLEAN ENERGY OR PERMANENT WILL O’ THE WISP? Fusion experiment breaks record, blasts out 10 quadrillion watts of energy. “Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Northern California said they had focused 192 giant lasers at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) onto a pea-size pellet, resulting in the release of 1.3 megajoules of energy in 100 trillionths of a second — roughly 10% of the energy of the sunlight that hits Earth every moment, and about 70% of the energy that the pellet had absorbed from the lasers. The scientists hope one day to reach the break-even or ‘ignition’ point of the pellet, where it gives off 100% or more energy than it absorbs.”
Back in 2014, the Obama administration traded five key Taliban members who were being held in Guantanamo for a U.S. soldier named Bowe Bergdahl who had deserted his post and gotten captured by the Taliban in 2009.
TEXTS FROM A FRIEND WITH A LOT OF MILITARY EXPERIENCE:
Remember 2010? While the Obama admin was in the process of pissing away the win in Iraq, and giving that place to the Iranians, predictably precipitating the rise both Iran and ISIS, Biden was given the job of deciding what to do with Afghanistan.
Afghanistan was the war the lefties liked. But only to beat up on Iraq. They said all the resources should go to Afghanistan.
But when Petraeus put forward a surge/anti-corruption reform plan for Afghanistan, Biden, directed to look at that, dithered for six months. Or maybe it was nine, I forget. Then he cut the request in half.
Trump had the Taliban at the table. Biden dropped the ball on that.
Trump would not be leaving the people who helped us to be slaughtered by the Taliban.
It’s going to be a fucking blood bath, and all that blood is on Biden’s hands. But whoever is actually running the Biden admin is shrugging about that. All they care about is it will make Biden look like shit.
Their lapdogs in the media will cast it as Bush and Trump’s fault, though. They’ll say Biden just inherited it. So they aren’t too worried about it
They’ll also wring hands and point fingers at their pals in the intelligence community, throw some blame that way.
Hey, in fairness, maybe if those guys hadn’t been so busy cooking up bs vs Trump the last four years …
There’ll be plenty of blame to go around. Go being the operative word.
Locals would have be crazy to cooperate with us in hostile zones, given our track record. That’s like marrying a wifebeater. Going on a carefree roadtrip with a serial killer.
Hey hey, Big Guy
How many Afghans did you kill today
I’m nauseated.
It’s a debacle. But a sure sign that it won’t go well for Biden is that the military brass have already thrown him under the bus with “he didn’t take our advice” leaks.
And, from another knowledgeable friend:
For what it’s worth, my thoughts on the latest defeat in detail for the US and especially for the Uniparty:
Multiple things can be true at once.
—The decision to stay in AfPak 20 years ago (as compared to punishing those who perpetrated 9/11) was a bad one. This is the first and hardest leason.
—Having made it, the Powell Doctrine—“you break it you buy it”—only applies as long as there’s political will.
—Afghans cannot be governed the same way as Western traditions hold as a model. Whatever way works isn’t that.
—Pretending it can does not help. The mass delusion of everyone thinking it could, the “clap harder if you believe in fairies” model of wishcasting that has dominated the mission there, wasn’t as deadly as Ypres, but is just as dangerous.
—The last twenty years show the US intelligence and military communities are led by no one you’d want there. The last year, especially.
—Given the decision to stay, having attempted to help the Afghan peoples build a working government and army, at some point the Powell Doctrine expires. A decade was probably enough. I will stipulate “at some point” and leave it there.
So, then, two things can simultaneously be true in the above:
—Americans are tired of forever wars, and
—Americans assumed that the exit would look less like a complete hiding and defeat in detail, given the assurances to the contrary they heard from those in charge.
Ok, three: it IS a complete hiding and defeat in detail, with the news of mass murder and the usual Taliban slavery reinstated. Plus bonus gifts of an entire war machine given to seventh century mass murderers.
Then, on to the bonus round of things that are true:
—There have not been US official casualties for over 17 months in theatre. That’s not to say operators didn’t eat it or that the Vietnamization repeat, echoes of 1971-75, didn’t play out horrifyingly fast. Not even four months, let alone four years. That there was, that it happened exactly that way, shows the mass failure of the USG and the Afghani power structure.
—The Taliban didn’t even have to use a mass tank attack to make the Afghan “government” fall, a la Saigon. Does that mean the US should have kept propping up the wretched and corrupt Afghan government forever? I say “no”. Let’s say our lesson is: “insurgencies win when no one opposes them”, for now. What else we might learn from all this blood and treasure, I don’t know yet. But that, at least.
—The Taliban’s new buddies are the ChiComs. Belt and Road. Whether they will fare better in the Graveyard of Empires than anyone else in the last 200 years is yet to be determined. But they sure are going to look to make a buck there.
—As Africa, the West Pacific, and much of the ME show, the ChiComs don’t have to be world cops. World Ferengi works just fine for them. As HK, the Spratlys and Uighurs show, they don’t much care what anyone thinks or says.
—The free people of Taiwan now know the US guarantees aren’t enough. Whether they remain free through the end of the year is yet to be seen.
And, most ominously for anyone who thinks the USG should do better, we know one very troubling thing: those who are willing to fight and die for our freedom will think at least one more time before they enlist.
This is very convenient for the Chinese, of course.
And I want to emphasize this bit: “The last twenty years show the US intelligence and military communities are led by no one you’d want there. The last year, especially.”
Yes. After this record of failure, there should be mass purges and elimination of whole agencies. But no one will be fired.
One other implication: This makes an actual domestic insurgency (not some BS larping “insurrection”) somewhat more likely, because the government, being weak and inept, looks weak and inept, yet seems to be doubling down on making Americans dislike it, while treating its own troops with disrespect. Historically, that’s a very bad formula. You may hope that American civic institutions remain strong enough to prevent that — I do — but hope is not a plan, and our political class has spent the last few decades trying to tear down those very civic institutions. We’re not yet at the point where the United States could fall as quickly as Afghanistan, and we’re not even very close, but we’re getting steadily closer and the people running the country seem oblivious.
