28. The Basket
3.5.2023 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
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What you can find in this collection (these are my headlines, not the authors’):
Japan: 2022 Higher ACM by Guy Gin
Small Victory In Canada Courts by Dr. Byram W. Bridle
Childhood Vaccines Increase Infant Mortality by Steve Kirsch
Excess Death By Policy by Martin Neil, Norman Fenton, Dr Jonathan Engler & Nick Hudson
Participation In Clinical Trials Down by Sasha Latypova
Califf’s Letter Of Misinformation by Vinay Prasad
Woke’s Perspective On Systems & Power by Wokal Distance
The Anti-War Right Wing by Isaac Grafstein
The Benefits Of Vaping by Sally Satel
GEC’s Digital Blacklisting Project by Matt Taibbi
Excess Mortality Oddities by Witzbold
Flu Vax Comparison by Joel Smalley
Healthy User Bias Means Vaccine Efficacy = Zero by Mathew Crawford
Australia: Vaxes Causing Excess Death by Steve Kirsch
Saftyism And The Path To Intolerance by Gummi Bear
England: Birth Rate Drops in 2022 by Naked Emperor
Natalizumab For Long Covid by Walter M Chestnut
Aussie Review Goes Scorched Earth on Vaxes by Steve Kirsch
Vax Injured: Jen by Team Humanity
Missing Suffering by Katherine Boyle
Japan: 2022 Higher ACM by Guy Gin
Nikkei has reported the annual number of deaths was 8.9% (129,744) higher in 2022 than 2021 (1,582,033 vs 1,452,289).
the experts think Japan may have had tens of thousands of cryptic Covid deaths last year. So what will the Japanese government do to prevent such deaths in 2023? Offer the elderly two more Covid jabs!
Those will be 6th and 7th shots for the majority of over 65s. Let’s see how long they can keep going for.
Small Victory In Canada Courts by Dr. Byram W. Bridle
A mother wanted her three children to get COVID-19 shots. The father asked for the court to allow the decision to be made in a future case based on the overall weight of the scientific evidence. The mother asked the court to take judicial notice to overrule the father. The court ruled that the father and his children should get their day in court.
It throws out the concept of judicial notice, which has been abused in the context of COVID-19. One of the arguments for not taking judicial notice was that public health messaging has represented a continuously moving set of goalposts. This decision also shows respect to the Constitution.
Childhood Vaccines Increase Infant Mortality by Steve Kirsch
Perhaps it is now time to re-think all those childhood vaccines
whistleblower Gary Goldman and Neil Miller did a re-analysis of their original 2011 paper and find that their original conclusion was correct: “A positive correlation between the number of vaccine doses and infant mortality rates (IMRs) is detectable in the most highly developed nations.”
A lot of vaccine activists immediately prior to the lockdowns predicted that the decline in infant vaccinations during the lockdowns would result in a decrease in SIDS and that ended up being exactly what happened.
Excess Death By Policy by Martin Neil, Norman Fenton, Dr Jonathan Engler & Nick Hudson
The central thesis advanced…is that "the main thing driving excess deaths over the last three years... is the new SARS-like virus....".
We are hereinafter referring to this as “the default hypothesis”
We believe that an alternative hypothesis—that excess deaths were primarily driven by changes to healthcare and other policies—cannot and should not be dismissed.
We and a growing number of others are perplexed at the official, default narrative (in relation to the main cause of deaths). We believe that the many and varied possible factors contributing to excess deaths, from 2020 onwards, should be subject to continued forensic examination.
it is impossible to overstate the unusual nature of these peaks. Excess deaths of 800 to 1000% have never been seen before with a respiratory virus, and are totally incompatible with the qualities of a “novel” coronavirus which is supposed to have been quietly spreading for many months beforehand.
fear and panic building in society and reported by the media is capable of inducing dysfunction in health or social care provision. We say that this dysfunction is a plausible explanation for at least some additional mortality before the governments formalized their response into legal restrictions or official policy.
Viruses and society exist in a kind of adaptive symbiosis and one affects the other via complex and poorly understood interactions that evolve over time. Thus, when a viral infection spreads through a population, which itself responds by suddenly and radically adapting its behaviour, the effects of the virus become difficult to extricate from the effects of the societal response. However, if there is little evidence of viral pathogenicity before the behavioural change in the society, one must consider the possibility that at least some of the subsequent morbidity is attributable to those changed behaviours.
Participation In Clinical Trials Down by Sasha Latypova
Participation in clinical trials is based on trust. It takes a lot of trust to convince someone to participate in an experiment on their body. There must be a clear benefit to the subject (not some made-up societal “greater good”), and a transparent, honest effort on the part of the recruiting physician, the manufacturer and the regulators to prevent potential harms. What we have witnessed in the past 3 years is the complete opposite of that.
“From 2017 to 2021, there was a 44% drop in recruitment of patients to commercial clinical trials and a 48% decline in the number of Phase III industry trials initiated in the UK.”
I expect the clinical trials industry to collapse world wide as the world begins to grapple with the betrayal of the public by what was formerly called the “public health”.
Califf’s Letter Of Misinformation by Vinay Prasad
In response to Paul Offit’s NEJM editorial Peter Marks and Robert Califf from FDA have a reply that argues— falsely— that good evidence shows boosters benefit young people.
Robert Califf likes to say, “misinformation is the leading cause of death”. The irony of that statement is that he invented it, and has no data to support it. The same is true for bivalent boosters in people aged 18-49. Many European nations are not doing it. As seroprevalence rises, the harm/ benefit balance will shift towards harm. And at present, and when they gave EUA, they had no good evidence benefits outweigh harms.
This letter is emblematic of the FDA’s caliber of analysis— very poor quality analyses used to push conclusions for policy decision it has already reached.
Woke’s Perspective On Systems & Power by Wokal Distance
when the Critical Social Justice activists talks about “systems” they are talking about all the social elements of society which structure society. This means that they analysis of every social phenomena that the woke do is about how various social phenomena interact with these systems.
Wokeness thinks power is the thing which primarily mediates relationships and that power is the fundamental thing that governs all social interactions.
According to woke theory…Such things as facts, science, standards, norms, rules, decisions, law, legislation, policy, and so on are not neutral matters we decide on the basis of what is true. Instead, what is true is decided by people who have the power to decide what is true and those decisions are warped by the biases and interests of those who decide what is true.
Taken together, we can now see that when the Critical Social Justice activist talks about systemic power, what they are talking about is the various ways in which society is built, and how the structuring of society allows for the creation, allocation, validation, and legitimization of the use of power.
The primary concern of wokeness is not finding out what is true, right, good, useful, helpful, beautiful, moral, etc, and trying to use that to make the world better. Rather, the chief end of wokeness is the redistribution of power within society.
The Anti-War Right Wing by Isaac Grafstein
the Republican base—are among the most vocal opponents of an interventionist foreign policy.
They have lost trust in the whole security state: the FBI, which infiltrated the January 6 storming of the Capitol; the CIA, which had tense relations with Trump (former director Michael Hayden seemed to imply Trump should be executed for the Mar-a-Lago classified documents fiasco); and, more recently, the Pentagon, which many Republicans fear has gone “woke” in its effort to remain in the good graces of elites.
Increasingly, the anti-war right views this debate as an either/or proposition: either Washington stops intervening in foreign conflicts and repairs our infrastructure, forces manufacturers not to off-shore jobs, breaks up Big Tech, ends progressive dominance of the social media algorithm, and restores sanity to our politics and culture. Or it keeps wasting blood and treasure overseas, and America continues down its path of decline.
No one summed up this choice better than Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri when he said last week: “I would just say to Republicans, ‘You can either be the party of Ukraine and the globalists, or you can be the party of East Palestine and the working people of this country.’ ”
The Benefits Of Vaping by Sally Satel
Public health authorities in England, where harm reduction as a general policy has long been embraced, endorse and promote vaping as a harm reduction strategy for smokers.
The vast majority of teens, about 86 percent of high schoolers, don’t use e-cigarettes at all. If anything, vaping has displaced smoking in high school youth (even been a gateway out of smoking for some)
I would argue that healthy skepticism is one thing, but a failure to promote the benefits for adult smokers because of a worry about the effects on youth was, and is, misguided.
As nations that embrace (or at least do not actively discourage) vaping save smokers’ lives -- and as illicit vaping markets take root here -- American policymakers will be forced to notice and adjust their risk-benefit calculus and their policies accordingly.
GEC’s Digital Blacklisting Project by Matt Taibbi
In 2015-2016…Barack Obama…signed Executive Order 13271, establishing a “Global Engagement Center” (“GEC”) to “counter the messaging and diminish the influence of international terrorist organizations.” This act got almost no press and even within government, almost no one noticed.
kick-started the process of shifting the national security establishment’s focus from counterterrorism to “disinformation.”
GEC funded a secret list of contractors and employed a more surreptitious approach to “counter-disinformation,” sending companies like Twitter voluminous reports on foreign “ecosystems” — in practice, blacklists.
The scary angle on GEC is not so much the agency as the sprawling infrastructure of “disinformation labs” that have grown around it.
The Hamilton 68 scam in this sense was perfect. It used digital alchemy to create streams of news stories tying ordinary Americans to “foreign” disinformation. With headlines like CNN’s “Russian bots are using #WalkAway to try to wound Dems in midterms” in hand, a “Disinfo Lab” or a noble journalistic enterprise like the “extremism” desk at USA Today can finish the important work of calling up strings of Internet companies to “ask” why this or that person is still allowed to use credit cards, advertise on Amazon, etc.
What organizations like GEC and subcontractors like DFRLab do are just subtler versions of those same schemes.
Excess Mortality Oddities by Witzbold
Just as the Delta wave followed the 2nd dose rollout, the first Omicron wave followed the 3rd dose/booster rollout and positivity shot up with Omicron’s rise to dominance.
The leading mainstream theories which try to explain away the unusual excess deaths data seem to be as follows:
Covid-19 and long-term effects, i.e. the pandemic is not over
Missed or delayed treatments from 2020 and 2021, e.g. cancers, cardio related, etc.
Increased levels of poor health due to pandemic lockdowns (stress, lack of exercise, poor nutrition, etc.)
Overwhelmed medical services (staff shortages, funding shortages, return of flu and other infectious diseases
Unsurprisingly vaccines are reflexively rejected as having any connection with excess deaths
Flu Vax Comparison by Joel Smalley
England & Wales…the ‘flu vaccine was “freely” available only for over 65s. This has been the situation since the year 2000
I could not see how the ‘flu vaccine has improved mortality outcomes for the 65 to 69 year olds who have been eligible since 2000, compared to the 60 to 65 years olds, who were not.
Wrong About ADHD & Ritalin by Yaakov Ophir
ADHD is currently the most common childhood disorder in Western-oriented countries. Its ever-increasing rates are now skyrocketing. The documented prevalence of ADHD is not about 3 percent, as it used to be when the disorder was first introduced in 1980. In 2014, a survey by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) revealed that over 20 percent of 12-year-old boys were diagnosed with this “lifelong condition.”
The ‘brain deficit’ and the ‘chemical imbalance’ that have been associated with ADHD are unproven myths. Stimulants do not ‘fix’ biochemical imbalances
ADHD…seems to be a ‘seasonal disease’ (despite endless efforts to exaggerate and extend its negative outcomes to non-school-related settings). When schools are closed, its daily medical management is often no longer needed.
If regular use of Ritalin and alike is so safe, why not place them on the pharmacies’ shelves, next to the non-prescription pain relievers, moisturizers, and chocolate energy bars?
ADHD medications are not fundamentally different from other psychoactive drugs that cross the blood-brain barrier. At first usage, they may trigger intense sensations of potency or euphoria, but when used for prolonged periods, their desired effects subside, and their unwanted negative effects start to emerge.
Healthy User Bias Means Vaccine Efficacy = Zero by Mathew Crawford
All correlation between vaccine uptake and COVID-19 mortality rates by county appears to be completely explained by income and education status. The correlations are almost perfect mirror images of one another!
HUB = WUB = EUB (health is wealth is education, as variables, in aggregate)
It may very well be that HUB accounts for all of VE in U.S. county level data, but may be a small or moderately-size part of the illusion in other nations.
If VE is effectively zero in any one nation, then there is likely no complete mechanism for effects of these biological products at all, so any VE in any data set is an illusion. I focus my primary data argument on the U.S. county data via the CDC.
Australia: Vaxes Causing Excess Death by Steve Kirsch
[Wilson] Sy recently published a paper, Australian COVID-19 pandemic: A Bradford Hill analysis of iatrogenic excess mortality which uses the Bradford Hill causality criteria to prove that the COVID vaccines are causing massive excess deaths in Australia.
there are no papers showing any alternative explanations. Therefore, the health authorities in Australia, should follow the precautionary principle of medicine and assume the paper is correct until such time as another paper can apply the Bradford Hill criteria using a different hypothesis and show a stronger association.
Furthermore, the death data from New Zealand shows that the % of unvaccinated people dying each month (from the FOIA request) is roughly proportional to the % of people who are unvaccinated suggesting that the vaccines are having a negligible impact on all-cause mortality. In short, if they are paused, no harm will be done.
And we know from the Cleveland Clinic study that the vaccines increase your likelihood of getting COVID.
Saftyism And The Path To Intolerance by Gummi Bear
As the Milgram Experiment showed, we are far too malleable and adaptable for our own good. Now, add safetyism on top of that and you have a dangerous combination: Scared, Compliant and Malleable.
Safetyism breeds authoritative tyranny through the expansion of the government's role in regulating behavior. When safety is seen as the highest priority, it becomes easy for politicians and bureaucrats to justify new laws and regulations that restrict individual liberties.
If safety is seen as the highest priority, any dissenting opinion or action that is perceived to put safety at risk can be seen as a threat. This leads to a culture of fear and intolerance, where those who question the safety orthodoxy are ostracized or even punished.
We’re living this reality today, where any speech or expression that is perceived as putting safety at risk is censored or punished. From the suppression of controversial ideas in academic settings to the policing of social media for content that is deemed unsafe or offensive, when safety is seen as the highest priority, it becomes easy to justify censorship and the suppression of free speech as necessary for the greater good.
England: Birth Rate Drops in 2022 by Naked Emperor
the updated data are here and they are still as worrying as before. The updated data has slightly decreased the number of births in 2021 and slightly increased the number in 2022 but not by much.
As the data only runs until November 2022, I compared the number of women giving birth up to November 2021 with the number in 2022. In total between January and November there were 478,382 births in 2021 and 421,284 in 2022. 57,098 fewer births in 2022 which is a drop of 11.9%.
Natalizumab For Long Covid by Walter M Chestnut
Given my recent findings that point towards the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 drawing immune cells into tissues and destroying them, I began a search for a treatment that could ameliorate this. I believe I have found one.
Natalizumab may help those suffering from long-standing Long COVID and may help those with acute infection by reducing severity of symptoms by preventing the chemotaxis of immune cells into the brain and intestinal lining.
Aussie Review Goes Scorched Earth on Vaxes by Steve Kirsch
COVID-19 vaccines – An Australian Review was published in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on Sept 21, 2022.
sentences from the paper that everyone should read:
“A worldwide Bayesian causal Impact analysis suggests that COVID-19 gene therapy (mRNA vaccine) causes more COVID-19 cases per million and more non-Covid deaths per million than are associated with COVID-19 [43].”
“An abundance of studies has shown that the mRNA vaccines are neither safe nor effective, but outright dangerous.”
“Never in Vaccine history have 57 leading scientists and policy experts released a report questioning the safety and efficacy of a vaccine. They not only questioned the safety of the current Covid-19 injections, but were calling for an immediate end to all vaccination. Many doctors and scientists around the world have voiced similar misgivings and warned of consequences due to long-term side effects. Yet there is no discussion or even mention of studies that do not follow the narrative on safety and efficacy of Covid-19 vaccination.”
“Medical experts that have questioned the safety of these vaccines have been attacked and demonized, called conspiracy theorists and have been threatened to be de-registered if they go against the narrative. Alternative treatments were prohibited and people who never practised medicine are telling experienced doctors how to do their job. AHPRA is doing the same here in Australia to the detriment and in ignorance of science.”
Vax Injured: Jen by Team Humanity
After Jen’s second shot in late October she started suffering from headaches and heartburn. She also had a weird reaction on the back of her neck. She developed a red, inflamed cyst. Intuitively she knew something was off in her body.
Jen laying on the ground semi-unconscious. Three off duty paramedics were at the gym and jumped into action calling 911. It only took 35 minutes from the time of Jen’s injury to be at the hospital undergoing a CT scan.
had suffered from a hemorrhagic stroke of her brain stem. This is the worst place to have a stroke because it affects all 12 pairs of cranial nerves. These nerves control eyesight; your ability to smell, taste and chew and swallow; your sense of hearing and balance; and motor control of your muscles.
Missing Suffering by Katherine Boyle
Left and right can’t seem to agree on anything these days, but on the subject of suffering there is near consensus: eradicating it in full is the common goal of government, technology, medicine, and science.
fifty years ago, when a progressive Supreme Court and a Republican president codified the right for men and women not to suffer as their forefathers and mothers had done.
Roe v. Wade effectively ended federal and state laws that required pregnant women to give birth.
Five days later, the Selective Service announced the end of conscription, at the direction of President Nixon. There would be no further draft calls, ending the expectation that all healthy American men at the age of 18 could meet their maker on the battlefield.
both young men and women were for the first time given the option to forgo these once-universal forms of sacrifice and suffering. The pain that the majority of Americans had felt in previous generations was no longer an inevitable requirement of life.
Though we may not realize it, nearly all of our modern cultural debates and ailments stem from the contemporary belief that suffering is not a natural or essential part of the human condition. The war on suffering has not only robbed us of resilience; it has sold us a mirage that is making us miserable.
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