29. The Basket
3.7.2023 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
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Note: I read a lot of Substacks each day. The Basket is intended to be a collection of the money quotes from the best of what I read. My goal is that you enjoy this service because it saves you time and quickly informs you. And my hope is that you find one or two articles that you click into because you want more.What you can find in this collection (these are my headlines, not the authors’):
What Happened To Viral Interference On Hispaniola? by Martin Neil
NYC 2020: How Many Nursing Home Patients Died? by Jessica Hockett
Bureaucrats Killing Art by Matt Shapiro
Fighting A Spirit Of Abuse by Celia Farber
ONS Data Favors Vacinated by Brian Mowrey
AI Won’t Cause Unemployment by Marc Andreessen
Topol Misreads Another Study by Vinay Prasad
We Must Act Now by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
Santa Clara Surveilled Church by David Zweig
Near-Bottomless Public Appetite For Restrictions by eugyppius
Concerns Over Cat Vax by Darby Shaw
Fauci Killed Evidence Based Science by Celia Farber
Jail For Non-Maskers In SF by Steve Kirsch
Israel Out To Get Its Citizens by Matti Friedman
Covid Multi-Drug Home Treatment by Dr. Peter McCullough
Age Adjusting ONS Data by USMortality
UK’s Hancock Outed By Journalist by el gato malo
Fear Is The Key by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
It Wasn’t A Centralized Coup by eugyppius
Managing The Risks Of AI by Alex Berenson
What Happened To Viral Interference On Hispaniola? by Martin Neil
So, India and Nepal have no flu but three neighbouring counties report cases beyond spring 2020 and into 2021. But how could the flu only spread within these countries and not cross the border into the immediate neighbours?
So, here we have two neighbouring countries separated from the rest of the world, sharing the same island but where the flu virus doesn’t circulate on one side of the border but does on the other. And what is even odder it appears to be happy spreading in the predominantly Muslim countries neighbouring India but not in India itself, or neighbouring Nepal.
NYC 2020: How Many Nursing Home Patients Died? by Jessica Hockett
Looking at the sheer number of deaths in those 11 weeks —nearly 38,000 😳— we see far more people died in hospitals and in the decedent’s own home than died in nursing homes & long-term care facilities.
it looks like nursing home resident covid deaths comprise between 20% - 30% of all deaths credited to the virus.
the majority of deaths occurring in nursing homes in spring 2020 did not involve a positive covid test or determination that the virus contributed to death.
Nearly three years later, we still don’t know how many New York City nursing home residents died in one of the deadliest morality events the city has ever experienced.
Bureaucrats Killing Art by Matt Shapiro
Any movement that aims to hide any form of art of information from me is suspect. Any effort to hide, alter, or destroy a work of art is to be viewed with skepticism. This is why the last few months have me reeling from every side as the value and integrity of art is being attacked from so many directions.
I think most people have misidentified the villain of this movement. It isn’t the woke mob, nor the overly sensitive students, teachers, and online scolds. The great villains of this movement are the bureaucratic nail-biters. The people demanding rewrites are neither the artists who create nor the executives who lead but the middle-management bureaucracy who make the marginal decisions.
It isn’t even that they are fearful of a backlash nor eager to implement the demands of a woke audience. It is that they have no respect for art as art. To them, art is a product to be altered at will, traded for a 2% bump in sales, abandoned when it is no longer valuable.
Fighting A Spirit Of Abuse by Celia Farber
The realization I had, so late, was that we were fighting a spirit of abuse/degradation, expecting it to transform into respect by way of just the right scientific paper being waved under its Beast nose.
I suddenly understood that the spirit of abuse is never trying to not be the spirit of abuse. It’s never trying to understand what is in your scientific papers that it had not yet fully absorbed as in “Oh, aha! Now I see it!”
These phenomenon: AIDS, and Covid, (for a start) are examples of, and cathedrals of “abuse as medicine.”
ONS Data Favors Vacinated by Brian Mowrey
I have previously argued that the ONS-included “unvaccinated” might have a bias for unhealthiness based on requiring General Practice Extraction Service inclusion; however, this doesn’t seem to be an actual requirement (the only requirements are the census overlaying with NIMS). There might not be such a bias here after all.
Instead, and as I have argued for a year, the biggest bias seems to be against giving Covid vaccines tothose who are about to die. This results in the unvaccinated “performing” like the last kids selected for a basketball team — the unvaccinated contain all the people who weren’t expected to “help the team.”
Elderly UK nursing home residents who are receiving end of life care are:
Likely to die soon.
A large driver of human deaths at any given moment.
Unlikely to receive Covid vaccines.
The problem with declaring this bias a “flaw” in the ONS data is that leads to the wrong solution.
AI Won’t Cause Unemployment by Marc Andreessen
We are heading into a world where a flat screen TV that covers your entire wall costs $100, and a four year college degree costs $1 million, and nobody has anything even resembling a proposal on how to systemically fix this.
Why? The sectors in red are heavily regulated and controlled and bottlenecked by the government and by those industries themselves. Those industries are monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels, with extensive formal government regulation as well as regulatory capture, price fixing, Soviet style price setting, occupational licensing, and every other barrier to improvement and change you can possibly imagine. Technological innovation in those sectors is virtually forbidden now.
The prices of regulated, non-technological products rise; the prices of less regulated, technologically-powered products fall.
AI is already illegal for most of the economy, and will be for virtually all of the economy.
Topol Misreads Another Study by Vinay Prasad
Eric Topol recently tweeted out a Jama Health Forum article, but he has made several errors in its interpretation.
It is basically saying: people who have more diagnostic codes placed in the 5 to 12 weeks after a covid diagnosis have more diagnostic codes placed in the first 12 months after a covid diagnosis. That should be in the journal of DUH!
The paper is saying people who get medical diagnoses placed in EHRs after COVID diagnosed in EHRs get more medical diagnoses in EHR than healthy people who may or may not have had covid.
Absolutely, 100% useless analysis, and yet it is broadcast widely & uncritically by Eric Topol.
We Must Act Now by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
This is why we now call for legislation to prevent the Coronavirus Act and any similar Act from ever being enacted again. To avoid individual ministers from having the power to intervene directly in the day-to-day lives of their citizens.
We should also ensure that no government can openly or covertly persecute its citizens, lawfully expressing doubts about its policies. Those who prevented critical debate and parliamentary votes and acted in self-interest should be held accountable for their actions.
We should never again give up our individual rights, and particularly our children’s rights, to individuals who, in haste, created botched policies that will have repercussions for decades to come.
If we don't act swiftly to prevent legislation akin to the Coronavirus Act, there is nothing to stop the debacle of restrictions and lockdowns being handed to a few ministers again.
Santa Clara Surveilled Church by David Zweig
Santa Clara County, California, imposed some of the harshest Covid restrictions in America. A church and its members defied them — and became the targets of an unprecedented surveillance operation
On May 24, 2020, McClure stated publicly that he would reopen the church the following week, regardless of the health department’s orders, and that he would never close the church again. After two months of isolation, many congregants were teetering toward despair.
at the end of May Calvary began holding indoor gatherings, often with hundreds of worshipers, a large portion of whom were without masks, in breach of distancing rules, and singing. This set off a collision between the openly defiant church and the county that culminated in two lawsuits.
county, and its health department, that went to extraordinary, and potentially unlawful, lengths to enforce its decrees. These efforts include levying more than $2 million in fines against Calvary, and a multi-faceted surveillance program of the church and its members, breathtaking in scope and reminiscent of totalitarian regimes
Near-Bottomless Public Appetite For Restrictions by eugyppius
The earliest pressure for lockdowns came from within public health institutions, government-adjacent scientific advisors, and the bureaucracy more broadly – not the political arm.
Western governments feared non-compliance with lockdown measures and took very deliberate steps to terrorise their citizenries to ensure their cooperation. In this they enjoyed the wholesale collaboration of the press.
Cabinet officials and other politicians channeled bureaucratic pressure and growing popular alarm (in which they were complicit) to seize initiative and power from rival governmental actors. They regarded public panic as a resource and an opportunity to be exploited accordingly.
Measures were determined not by Science, or even by educated guesses or coin tosses – but by the limits of what was practically and politically possible at any given moment. Maximum masking, maximum lockdowns, maximum vaccination, everywhere and always.
Every slight uptick in infections set off a self-reinforcing cascade of messaging and restrictions. Bureaucrats and politicians struggled to satisfy what they perceived as near-bottomless public appetite for restrictions by issuing new rules, which required still more propaganda to enforce, and radicalised public sentiment still further.
The formulators of lockdown policy were increasingly disabused of SARS-2 risk after the first wave, but continued to press for all possible closures, above all because they feared the political consequences of failing to contain infections.
This entails that they had some measure of faith in their policies, in part because they were not immune to their own propaganda. Measures like masking, introduced because they were “effectively free” and have “a very visible impact” came to be trusted as genuine infection-controlling interventions.
Concerns Over Cat Vax by Darby Shaw
it has been known for decades that the universally recommended and widely administered vaccine for feline distemper likely contains cell proteins with the potential to cause CKD in cats. While no one knows exactly how common CKD is because the necessary studies have not been published, scientists have recognized for many years that this disease is prevalent in cats and that the numbers are on the rise.
until scientists can answer definitively whether the FVRCP vaccine causes chronic kidney disease in cats, I consider this vaccine a non-starter.
Fauci Killed Evidence Based Science by Celia Farber
“In fact, he is a revolutionary — a very dangerous one, who slipped behind the gates when nobody understood what he was bringing in.
“What was he bringing in? He was bringing in — as a trained Jesuit, and committed Globalist — a new potion that would achieve any and all aims for Pharma and the powers he served. The potion was then known as Political Correctness — now called “woke.”
“Fauci switched the entire linguistic system of American science, from classical “speak,” to woke “speak.” He brought in Cancel Culture, essentially, before anybody could imagine what it was.
“What Fauci did was he made political correctness the new currency, of his funding empire.
“Peter Duesberg was not ‘wrong’ about HIV and AIDS, he was politically incorrect about it and that was how Fauci banished him
Jail For Non-Maskers In SF by Steve Kirsch
On February 28, 2023, Susan Philip, MD, MPH, Health Officer of the City and County of San Francisco, issued this order requiring people who work in healthcare and in jails to be vaccinated and wear a mask at all times when in a room with other people.
Violation of or failure to comply with this Order is a misdemeanor punishable by fine, imprisonment, or both.
Israel Out To Get Its Citizens by Matti Friedman
what’s going on is simply that we had an election in November. A coalition led by Netanyahu won, and a blitz of right-wing legislation ensued, drawing protests from liberal Israelis.
But what’s actually going on was best expressed this week by a friend of mine, a career army officer, religiously observant and a political centrist. “I’ve had governments I disagreed with,” he said, “but never one that was out to get me.”
I knew exactly what he meant. Israelis are used to being surrounded by enemy states. But right now, for the half of Israel’s citizens who didn’t vote for this government, our own country is starting to feel like one.
The new system, which is supposed to be set in law by next month, will allow the government to select judges and overrule the court’s decisions.
Covid Multi-Drug Home Treatment by Dr. Peter McCullough
Palazzuoli et al have published an approach that focuses on optimal heart failure management and early COVID-19 therapy that allows management to be started in the home. Even if hospitalized, patients who receive standard of care multidrug home treatment are expected to survive the hospitalization.
the paper has a select table of drugs that can be used in heart failure. Listed and safest is ivermectin, which has no drug interactions or other problems to worry about in heart failure patients. So whether vaccinated or not, when acute COVID-19 respiratory illness strikes in heart failure patients, please remember this
Age Adjusting ONS Data by USMortality
All-cause ASMR [age-adjusted mortality rate] by vaccination status appears to be similar in 2021, but lower in 2022 for the unvaccinated.
No significant vaccine efficacy can be seen from the all-cause mortality data, despite ongoing excess deaths.
The numerator for the mortality rate calculation is provided in the ONS dataset. However, the denominator, i.e. the population by vaccination status, is not provided.
Here we can see that the crude mortality rate for all the vaccinated cohort is much higher than for the unvaccinated. Now, that is because the share of vaccinated is much higher in the older age groups (Simpsons paradox).
Analysis reveals missing data, and likely lower or similar mortality in COVID-19 unvaccinated.
UK’s Hancock Outed By Journalist by el gato malo
despite my general suspicion of people claiming to be “acting in the public good” while breaking promises, i take zero issue with her choice here. journalism is supposed to be for the people, not the government and (to my mind) the highest duty of the 4th estate is the check government corruption and malfeasance.
the picture that emerges here is just hideous.
matt is clearly stupid, craven, lacks any basic grounding in science, medicine, or epidemiology, and is thinking near totally in “politics, message, and narrative.” he’s also got a fun sideline going in crony capitalism.
more than anything, what emerges from this morass is just more proof of the proper frame for analyzing modern governance:
these are not the science kids working hard to be technocratic tutors.
these are the theater kids being drama queens.
all this shrill messaging with fear narrative, emotional appeals, and endless guilt from made up science like “stay home save lives” and “your mask protects me” was not an accident. it was military grade propaganda and weaponized behavioral economics. the UK in particular had a “nudge unit” of behavioral economists whose explicit job it was to help health agencies manipulate the public.
they care more about appearing to be “doing something” or being out of step with scotland than science, data, child welfare, or education.
they are neither brave nor wise. they are afraid of parents freaking out if they do not indulge in pandemic cosplay by forcing kids to mask in schools.
they want you masking in public to drive home the idea that it’s a crisis.
Fear Is The Key by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
From this morning and over the weekend’s release of further Lockdown Files, we learnt that fear is the key to controlling the unruly populous.
The leaked messages show Matt Hancock suggested the Government “frighten the pants off everyone” to ensure the rules were stuck to. We know variants were part of the plan to ramp up the fear: the Omicron variant was used to prompt another campaign of fear.
if you give a few people with no expertise in healthcare decision-making the power to make decisions in a very uncertain environment, what would you expect to happen next time? So it’s, for this reason, we consider the legislation has to change to prevent this scenario from happening again.
It Wasn’t A Centralized Coup by eugyppius
In general, the WEF merely echo current trends and policy fashions, which makes their real-world influence an obscure matter. It’s additionally important that Event 201, held in October 2019, explicitly rejected lockdowns and mass travel restrictions in the event of a deadly pandemic, preferring instead minimal measures like advisories.
Strictly speaking, none of what happened was all that new. Testing, contact tracing, lockdowns, accelerated vaccine development – all were discussed prior to 2020 as part of an increasingly elaborate and authoritarian pandemic toolkit intended to save us (mostly) from pandemic influenza.
Where this discussion often goes wrong, is the tendency to mistake the escalating mitigationist visions of western pandemicists for an incipient mass containment plot.
What happened in January 2020 in China, and then in March 2020 to the rest of the world, was an innovation in theory and practice. Pandemicists decided suddenly to ditch mitigation altogether and attempt virus containment not just in one apartment building, but en masse
mass containment had become a noxious cluster of autonomous, self-reinforcing policies across Western nations, devised and enforced by domestic scientific advisers and public health bureaucrats who were acting on nobody’s initiative but their own. This is what we see, in excruciating detail, in the leaked Hancock lockdown files
The people who don’t play any crucial early role, are our go-to globalist villains. The WEF and Bill Gates start demanding lockdowns at the same time as everybody else.
Managing The Risks Of AI by Alex Berenson
we need a serious conversation about where AI is going.
the risks here are real. We need - now - to convene a group of computer researchers and scientists with expertise in consciousness and figure out what exactly it is we are producing with these ever-more-powerful engines.
And no, we cannot trust the companies making them to judge the risks and benefits properly - any more than we can trust Pfizer and BioNTech and Moderna to be honest about the risks and benefits of their mRNA jabs.
They simply cannot make impartial assessments of technologies that could generate untold fortunes for them, and if even they could they have every incentive to play down the risks publicly.
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