2: The Basket
11.25.2022 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
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Stochastic Terrorism: Dr RollerGator PhD
By labeling someone as a Stochastic Terrorist you can influence others to associate some of the most immoral and violent acts imaginable with the person being labeled regardless if any violent acts have occurred.
While the term can obviously have meaning, it is just a term that popped into existence because someone recently made it up in order to accuse Sarah Palin of being responsible for the shooting of Gabby Giffords. And since it is constructed to appear academic, people can claim to be experts who study it.
By labeling someone as a Stochastic Terrorist you can influence others to associate some of the most immoral and violent acts imaginable with the person being labeled regardless if any violent acts have occurred.
The ‘Stochastic’ part of Stochastic Terrorism is a benefit to the experts. Because, as is essential to the idea, violence can be expected “stochastically,” they can rest assured something will occur eventually. The more they assert certain people are Stochastic Terrorists, the more those people are immediately to blame the moment any incident occurs, no matter if the violence was related to them in any way or not.
Totalitarianism: CJ Hopkins
Everything is back to normal, right?
Wrong. Everything is not back to normal. Everything is absolutely New Normal. What is over is the “shock-and-awe” phase, which was never meant to go on forever. It was always only meant to get us here.
Where, you’re probably asking, is “here”? “Here” is a place where the new official ideology has been firmly established as our new “reality,” woven into the fabric of normal everyday life.
The War on Dissent didn’t start with Covid and it isn’t going to end with Covid. GloboCap (or “the Corporatocracy” if you prefer) has been delegitimizing, demonizing, and disappearing dissent and increasingly imposing ideological uniformity on Western society since 2016. The New Normal is just the latest stage of it. Once it gets done quashing this “populist” rebellion and imposing ideological uniformity on urban society throughout the West, it will go back to destabilizing, restructuring, and privatizing the rest of the world, which is what it was doing with the “War on Terror” (and other “democracy”-promoting projects) from 2001 to 2016.
Miscarriages: Jessica Rose
The numbers of miscarriages are higher for each month except for November 2021 (we don’t have December data yet). The numbers are the same for April and May. Now these miscarriage numbers are the numbers of miscarriages per number of new patients per month so when we plot the rates, it becomes abundantly clear that the miscarriage rates are twice that in 2022 than they were for 2021 as shown in Figure 3 on average.
RSV Severity: Igor Chudov
Note that the RSV virus is not exactly new. It appeared in 1956 due to an accidental lab release while “scientists” worked on monkeys to develop polio vaccines, as the Naked Emperor explained.
There was an interesting article in Cell magazine showing that Covid vaccine destroys all-important hematopoietic (blood-related) stem cells responsible for the development of immunity and much more.
While these hematopoietic stem cells are somewhat mysterious and have many uses, they are protective against severe outcomes in RSV, per an article published in Haematologica in 2019.
Detecting Propaganda: Ethical Skeptic
…one should maintain watch for the handiwork of the Social Skeptic in support of the official position. This is a key indicator that the full array of tools of propaganda are being deployed. In order to ascertain this, one merely need read an article by a regular source of such ‘science enthusiasm’ (Shermer, Fidalgo, Novella, etc.). This is the general script this type of professional liar will follow. They will habitually:
Straw man and bucket characterize opposing viewpoints.
Call the opposing voices ‘conspiracy theorists’. Employ copious amounts of snark or untalented humor.
State or imply that what they are about to tell you is obvious to any rational person.
Mention the ‘evidence’ and ‘facts’ often, but rarely if ever actually cite any.
Appeal to a ‘complete’ or ‘total’ lack of evidence for opposing claims.
Appeal to a club researcher, logical fallacy, or an external authority quote.
Cite the subject as having been long debunked and the people therein discredited ‘many times’.
Claim made up harm resulting from opposition voice advocacy or claims.
Claim how these same conspiracy theorists were the cause of some recent horrible event.
Appeal for censorship of these opposing voices, as an expression of science, virtue, and justice.
If you spot this formula, know that the person employing it is both afraid of their opponents’ message, and is lying as well.
Committing New Outrages: el gato malo
the deep awful irony here lies in the adverse selection: because the best way to get out of trouble for whatever the last outrage was is to commit a new one and so, perversely, those who keep rising to the top of this system are those most proficient at committing scandal and affront.
if you want the public to forget the awful thing you did last year, do something awful, and then do something else that’s worse. no one can even remember 3 back. draw the attention to the new and get everyone pouncing on the novel instead of solving the past. keep them too myopically angry to see the big picture.
it’s how you get humans to chase a laser pointer instead of cleaning up previous messes.
Updated Respiratory Charts: Woodhouse
Pediatric Respiratory Illness: Josh Stevenson
The problem with using exposure avoidance as a means to prevent sickness is you have to keep doing it forever. This was always the issue with the illogical push for restrictions with no endpoint.
As Sars-Cov2 perpetuates in it's endemicity, its clear that it's weaker now than it ever has been. Ironic now that we're now seeing that it was so weak even during pandemic phase that overall respiratory illness was lower in 2020/21 than 2022.
New Religion of Viruses: Celia Farber
I remember saying, often: If they can get away with this, with HIV as the cause of AIDS, with no proof, they can get away with anything. I even remember being sick with anxiety about it. We all were.
This is not a post about history that doesn’t matter, that is water under the bridge. I think it’s a post about how dodo eggs full of specious ideas spawn entire occultic-druidic religions around “viruses.”
The Dodo Egg had many crazy bad ideas in it, not just one:
—Viruses cause cancer—A retrovirus causes AIDS
—Proof not needed. Woke and emergency-ism supplants evidence.
CDC V-Safe Data: Aaron Siri
V-safe’s data shows that 7.7% of its approximate 10 million users reported having to receive medical care after receipt of a Covid-19 vaccine, and over 70% of those users sought outpatient/urgent clinical care, emergency room care, and/or were hospitalized.
I can already hear the retort: surely these were anti-vaxxers reporting the need for medical care! Far from. All v-safe users received the Covid-19 vaccine. Anti-vaxxers don’t get the shot. Not only were these folks not against the shot – again, because every one of them got the shot – they are likely mostly vaccine enthusiasts. This is evidenced by the fact that most of the individuals who registered for v-safe did so between December 2020 and April 2021; in fact, around 9 million of the approximate 10 million users registered during this period.
Excess Mortality Post-Vax: Robert W Malone MD, MS
If our concerns about what is causes the excess mortality and morbidity are right, vaccinated individuals (the majority of the population!) will be confronted with a dilemma: Either they A) face reality and go through the phases of grief associated with such realisations or; B) try to ignore reality and hope for the best.
we started investigating excess deaths for Europe, the UK and the USA, using total mortality from official sources.
A broad observation for looking at the totality of the data is that there was a general trend of increased excess mortality once the Covid-19 vaccinations were introduced. Mortality is due to different causes, but a systematic increase in excess mortality is difficult to justify from anything but the introduction of a systematic external factor (such as mass inoculations of an experimental biological product). Additionally, excess mortality seems to be phased from older to younger age groups, as the vaccinations for the different age groups were rolled out. When looking at weekly data, we can almost guess the start of the vaccination by looking at the excess mortality alone.
Outdated Booster: Jordan Schachtel
…by the end of the month, the booster shot targeted variants will likely appear in fewer than 1 in 10 cases. If it follows the trajectory of other strains, the mutations targeted by the bivalent booster will be entirely nonexistent by the end of January 2023.
Given the rapid mutation rate, the mRNA injections don’t appear serve a positive outcome for anyone looking for long term protection. Additionally, the shots are known to present a significantly increased risk for serious side effects, especially among young adult males.
Trump is no Reagan: William P. Barr
During the four years leading up to the 1980 election, Reagan pursued party unity with single-minded determination. He succeeded in uniting a GOP that was far more fractious than today’s party. Reagan understood that the purpose of a political party is winning elections. That requires building the broadest coalition possible compatible with the party’s core goals.
It is painfully clear from his track record in both the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms that Donald Trump is neither capable of forging this winning coalition or delivering the decisive and durable victory required. Indeed, among the current crop of potential nominees, Trump is the person least able to unite the party and the one most likely to lose the general election.
Protecting Free Speech & Kids: Jennifer Sey
Standing up for kids during covid, puts you in the bad/needs to be exiled column.
I’ll take my exiling then. Because if Quatar and China and Starbucks and Holmes are the good guys, I don’t want to be good. I’ll stay over here in the corner with the bad kids. Because I know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that my standing up for free speech and the rights of children to an equal education, are the right thing to do.
Viral Interference: eugyppius
The claimed interference mechanism, as always, is interferon. This is an antiviral protein released in response to virus infection, which limits the capacity of other infecting viruses to replicate for a refractory period that may last as long as a month.
I’m sure that interferon plays an important role, but it’s probably only one of multiple factors at work here. To begin with, there’s one of my favourite hardly acknowledged virus facts, namely that “the overall prevalence of any viral respiratory infection among patients with respiratory illness is relatively stable over time, despite strongly varying prevalences of individual viruses.” Relatedly, we know from fever gauge data that overall rates of respiratory illness appear to be capped at around 10% of the whole population, and that rates of infection tend to collapse directly after reaching this ceiling.
"Experts": Vinay Prasad
What a sad bunch of “experts”. Continuing to inflict restrictions on children. Leaping to get unproven boosters, and engaging in a plethora of actions with nearly no evidence that they improve any long term outcome. It reminds me of the old BF Skinner experiment. Give a pigeon a pellet at random, and it learns a bizarre dance. Here that pellet is a twitter ‘like’ or ‘RT’, and these are the dances that emerge.
Medical Profession Credibility Gap: Emerald Robinson
I’ve talked to quite a few people who don’t feel the same after getting vaccinated — and they feel even worse after they visit their doctor and get the cold shoulder. The medical profession in America has totally destroyed its credibility by pimping for Big Pharma. People are never going to forget the treason of their physicians. Never. They know those bastards tried to kill them. The bill for that betrayal hasn’t come due — but it will very soon. Nobody signed up to live in a banana republic where Nicki Minaj was a better source of health advice than the CDC — but here we are.
The Goals of Post Modernism: Wokal Distance
…wokeness comes out of an environment of academic postmodernism in which ideas from all over the spectrum of academic disciplines were fused together, not because they fit together intellectually, but because they were useful for the political goals of activist scholars…who were seeking to assemble a set of ideas that they could use to achieve their social and political goals.
…the goal…is not aimed at truth, it is aimed at overcoming oppression. In other words, the goal is social justice, not objective truth.
Advocating for the Vax-Injured: Team Humanity
…it occurred to Suzanna that her vaccine injury wasn’t a political issue. It was a humanity issue. It doesn’t matter if you vote blue or red-it matters that you are a human. And, humans take care of each other. Suzanna realized that she, too, could be a “neighbor” to the countless injured…
Censorship and Digital Rights: Andrew Lowenthal
Allegations of “disinformation” have become a tool to delegitimize opposition to orthodoxy and power, and have been weaponised to shield government and Big Pharma from scrutiny. Just as criticism of the automobile industry in the 60s and 70s led to improved car safety, today’s public fora must hold the powerful to account.
By aligning with Big Tech and Big Pharma, the “anti-disinformation” and digital rights sectors have neglected their responsibilities, and have come to serve power rather than people, contributing to a broader chilling effect.
Thank you for everything you do for opening people’s eyes to different opinions and views, and promoting critical thinking.
Nice Basket my friend. Interesting collection. Not a big b Barr fan. His thoughts are irrelevant in my world.