33. The Basket
3.15.2023 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’):
Upcoming Pfizer Lawsuits by Aussie17
CDC Gaslights Ladapo by Steve Kirsch
Woke NHL Losing Gen Z by Ethan Strauss
Stanford’s Vax Propaganda “Virality Project” by John Leake
Long Covid From Spike In Blood by Dr. Peter McCullough
The Mental Collapse Of The Gen Z Girls by Jonathan Haidt
Pro Lockdown Was Pro Harm by Jennifer Sey
Idiocy Of Mask Zealotry by Vinay Prasad
The Trans-Medical Complex by The 21st Century Salonnière
Fraudulent Vaccine Approval by A Midwestern Doctor
Journalism Is Dying by Bill Rice, Jr.
German Health Minister Admits by Dr. Byram W. Bridle
Democrat Interrogation Tactics by Matt Taibbi
Restricting Free Speech Not The Answer To Bank Runs by Luke Burgis
Follow The Science Money by Paul D. Thacker
Exogenous Moral Orientation (EMO) by eugyppius
The Inherent Hate Of Modifying A Noun by Heather Heying
Data Says Covid, Not The Vax by Brian Mowrey
8 Spike Exposures By Age 10 Months by Igor Chudov
Excessive Plasmid DNA In Bivalent by Anandamide
Upcoming Pfizer Lawsuits by Aussie17
doctors, politicians, and experts have a small window of opportunity to make a U-Turn because evidence of harm is piling up and is continuing to pile up.
The most significant case to watch is Brook Jackson’s case vs Pfizer.
Brook found many issues with the clinical trials (i.e. fudging data, breaking protocols etc.), which voids the “safe and effective” claim. In short, the whole world was fooled by Pfizer’s 95% safe and effective claim.
Pfizer desperately wants to stop the case from going into “Discovery” because that’s the part of the process where they need to show all their cards.
Brook Jackson’s case is not the only lawsuit coming up. There is a whole TSUNAMI of cases coming in all directions, and not only is Pfizer screwed but every organization and individual who participated in this horrific lie in the last 2+ years that caused countless deaths, side effects, people losing of jobs and livelihoods etc.
CDC Gaslights Ladapo by Steve Kirsch
Joe Ladapo is pretty much the only trustable public health authority in America today.
After noticing that the VAERS reports in his state were off the charts, he wrote a letter to the CDC and FDA asking them to explain his observations.
Rather than directly answering Dr. Ladapo’s questions, the heads of both agencies sent him a “safe and effective” sales pitch.
They also criticized him for spreading vaccine misinformation (i.e., they tried to gaslight him).
The FDA/CDC didn’t even attempt to directly address his concerns in their response. They avoided the numbers he cited like the plague. They changed the topic instead of addressing his very legitimate concerns.
This just shows you how corrupt the top officials of both organizations are. They can’t answer simple questions without changing the subject.
Woke NHL Losing Gen Z by Ethan Strauss
Not only is the NHL obsessed with issues of race, gender and sexual orientation, but it is visibly uncomfortable with those who are typically obsessed with its sport.
the NHL…desperately wants to be different. It is ashamed of a culture that some see as replete with racism. It is stung by certain incidents and accusations.
So, the old, provincial ways will not do.
Few outsiders thought it a scandal that the NHL workforce was 84 percent White because the sport had always been, for obvious reasons, more popular in freezing Northern regions, i.e. places that tended to be pretty pale. Whatever the cause, the NHL was here to tell us that the status quo wouldn’t do.
Gen Z did not warm up to sports as previous generations did, and those younger than Z are even more sports-apathetic.
The overall youth rejection of sports, combined with their propensity for avoiding cable packages, seems to massively outweigh any other factor.
Stanford’s Vax Propaganda “Virality Project” by John Leake
A Stanford quango that styles itself the “Virality Project” has appointed itself to stamp out COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy by issuing policy prescriptions to social media platforms.
Judging by the content of its reports and e-mail advisories about “Vaccine Misinformation,” the Virality Project’s team started its work with the presumption that there is absolutely nothing about the COVID-19 injections to be concerned about, and anyone who questions their safety and efficacy is a crackpot.
By their calculus, severe injuries and deaths caused by COVID-19 vaccines are the price we as a society must pay for the purportedly greater number of lives saved by the vaccines.
Never in the history of medicine has this calculus been used to evaluate the benefit of a medical product. Only in a military context—that is, commanders in the field must accept a certain number of casualties in order to achieve the greater benefit of vanquishing the enemy—has this logic been applied.
Long Covid From Spike In Blood by Dr. Peter McCullough
measurement of viral RNA and Spike protein was valuable in describing a relationship between the presence of post-COVID symptoms (fatigue, lethargy, etc.) and persistent Spike both free and circulating in vesicular particles. The amount of Spike was most strongly correlated with 1) severity of symptoms in the hospital, 2) duration of hospitalization, and 3) blood d-dimer level.
It is reassuring to patients suffering with post-COVID or “long-COVID” that it is not all in their heads, the pathophysiology is pointing to persistence of Spike protein in the blood which is pathogenic and likely driving tissue/organ injury with associated symptoms.
Because COVID-19 mRNA vaccines further load the body with genetic code and more Spike protein, it is likely that vaccination worsens post-COVID syndromes despite raising antibodies against the Spike protein. I have not found claims that vaccination reduces long-COVID syndromes valid in bias papers that are pushing vaccines.
these alleged philosophies of inclusion are, in fact, ideologies of exclusion.
and what they seek to exclude is excellence and meritocracy.
A’s hire A’s and B’s hire C’s.
the B’s who wish to remain atop the game will erect a legal system to thwart excellence and a bogus moral code that makes it seem like justice and progress.
this is literally what “woke” is.
the whole point of DEI (diversity equity inclusion) is to place and sustain in positions of power those who could not otherwise attain them
choosing leaders for the color of their skin or their sexual orientation and not the content of their capability set demeans and debases them. it renders their achievements suspect and their positions less trusted for always will a whiff of nepotistic stink accrue to them.
the disease itself is the elevation and glorification of mediocrity and incapacity.
the pathogen is the drive to disallow thought and reason by replacing it with doctrinaire dogmatism.
the suicide was putting a bunch of bloviating B’s in charge.
and their goal is to keep being a B-boss by cultivating a society of C’s and vilifying and silencing anything that looks like actual excellence.
The Mental Collapse Of The Gen Z Girls by Jonathan Haidt
data, showing three main effects: gender (women higher), age (youngest groups higher), and politics (liberals higher). The graphs also show three two-way interactions (young women higher, liberal women higher, young liberals higher). And there’s an important three-way interaction: it is the young liberal women who are highest. They are so high that a majority of them said yes, they had been told that they have a mental health condition.
“Technology, not politics, was what changed in all these countries around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word ‘selfie’ entered the popular lexicon.”
“progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”
Gen Z has become more external in its locus of control, and Gen Z liberals (of both sexes) have become more self-derogating. They are more likely to agree that they “can’t do anything right.”
Pro Lockdown Was Pro Harm by Jennifer Sey
the “woke” view — the this is what good people do view — was: lockdown forever until no covid. That was caring. Anything else was “only caring about money,” being greedy, racist, eugenicist, evil. And companies, whether they agreed with lockdowns or not, were burnishing their image as good and caring.
But in reality, the actual empathetic position would have been to challenge the logic and efficacy (or better said: assert the illogic and ineffectiveness) of lockdowns. And to advocate for opening. To let people work. To allow everyday people to earn a living, just as those in corporate were, as C-suiters were.
Idiocy Of Mask Zealotry by Vinay Prasad
Some people have written to me saying they mask in grocery stores to prevent their loved ones from getting even a cold. I would contend that is absolutely unproven. If you want to do that, you should have done it in 2017 b/c the high quality evidence is the same: absent.
with enough time ~100% of people will get COVID, and most will get it many times over.
For this reason: you should not mask any harder in 2023 than 2017.
no new evidence emerged justifying masking
The totality of the evidence fails to find benefit (in medicine this is usually when we say it ‘doesn’t work’)
You will get COVID anyway, many times over
The more zealots who remain in society, the more likely they will again force toddlers to mask, which is a net harm intervention, and the more likely they will again force us sensible people to mask.
The Trans-Medical Complex by The 21st Century Salonnière
Our profit-driven health care system in the US presents an obstacle to those who might be interested in the truth of the evidence. Those who support medical transition of children and youth are not incentivized to look closely at whether medical transition helps kids.
If you’re skeptical of the benefits of transitioning children and adolescents, you might have already heard that many nations, such as the UK, Finland, Sweden, France, Australia, New Zealand, and Norway, after many years of giving affirmation and transition a try, have examined the evidence, leading them to move away from transition and toward psychological treatments.
those providing “gender-affirming care” are profiting a lot from these procedures: In September 2022, Dr. Shayne Taylor, a doctor affiliated with Vanderbilt’s Clinic for Transgender Health was quoted as saying, “These surgeries make a lot of money.” As the linked article describes it, Dr. Taylor mentioned that
a “chest reconstruction” can bring in $40,000 per patient, and someone “just on routine hormone treatment, who I’m only seeing a few times a year, can bring in several thousand dollars … and actually makes money for the hospital.”
There’s simply a lot of money to be made on transitioning kids in the United States, where the medical system is profit-driven.
The drug companies profit nicely too. Figures published in 2015 (no doubt significantly higher now) estimate that the cost of two years’ worth of the puberty blocker Lupron was $20,000 to $40,000.
Fraudulent Vaccine Approval by A Midwestern Doctor
Numerous individuals have bravely come forward to provide testimony that severe research misconduct occurred throughout the COVID-19 trials. This misconduct resulted in a high human cost. The misconduct observed is similar to what has happened in previous trials, and proves that the COVID-19 vaccine approval was fraudulent.
One strategy used by Big Pharma to gaslight those injured by pharmaceuticals is to insist that there is no data linking the injury to the drug. Frequently however, these injuries were, in fact, observed in the trial but simply covered up to create the illusion the pharmaceutical was safe
For Big Pharma to hide injuries that occur within a clinical trial requires them to aggressively gaslight the injured participants. Despite the fact that this ongoing practice had produced decades of bad data and severely harmed countless trial participants, nothing has been done to address this issue
Journalism Is Dying by Bill Rice, Jr.
the number of journalists at big-city newspapers is evaporating at a stunning rate.
Even if journalists did cover taboo topics (which they don't), there's no longer enough journalists in newsrooms to devote the time to complex and time-consuming investigations.
What really stuns is the sharp decrease in employees in recent years.
Gannett has eliminated half of its jobs in four years.
Today, in central Alabama, one has to search long and hard to find a print copy of any of these newspapers that still exist.
This means there’s virtually no “watchdog” press watching over any powerful figures in government or business … which probably means any official who might be inclined to scam the public has a good chance of getting away with it.
There’s certainly not enough journalists to devote time to complex and time-consuming investigative journalism.
German Health Minister Admits by Dr. Byram W. Bridle
Karl Lauterbach is Germany’s Federal Minister of Health. Yesterday, he dropped a bombshell on Germans in an interview.
In 2021 he claimed in a Tweet that COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ had no side-effects. Remarkably, his current admission is, “That was an exaggeration that I once made in an ill-considered Tweet. It did not represent my true position.“! It is egregious that a federal Minister of Health is admitting this AFTER coercing most people to get the shots and claiming everyone gave fully informed consent.
With respect to severe COVID-19 ‘vaccine’-induced injuries, Lauterbach stated: “I’ve always been aware of the numbers. They have remained relatively stable. …1:10,000: some may say that’s a lot, and some may say it’s not that much.“
This statistic needs to be put into a proper perspective…
The AstraZeneca COVID-19 ‘vaccine’ program was suspended in Canada due to its risk of causing severe adverse events (the main one was blood clotting) in 1:55,000 inoculated adults, including the frail elderly!
Democrat Interrogation Tactics by Matt Taibbi
Steve Friend, a onetime FBI agent who lost his career after blowing the whistle on the Bureau.
Friend refused to participate in a bureaucratic scheme to put local agents across the country in charge of J6 cases that were really being run out of the Washington office
even though Friend had reservations about some of the cases, his main concern was procedural — that by playing bureaucratic games with who was running these investigations, and putting locals nominally in charge of cases where they were really in supporting roles, they put all of the court cases in jeopardy.
The Democratic Party response to Steve and his colleagues was eerily similar to tactics pulled out against myself and Mike Shellenberger:
— Mike and I were not real journalists, they said, but “so-called journalists.” Steve and his fellow agents “are not, in fact, whistleblowers,” according to the minority report, and “do not meet the definition of a whistle-blower,” according to the New York Times.
— I was told by Florida’s Debbie Wasserman-Schultz that “being a Republican witness certainly casts a cloud over your objectivity”; Democratic Party sources told the Times that Steve and fellow agents Garret O’Boyle and George Hill “have engaged in partisan conduct that calls into question their credibility”;
— Democratic questioners in our case asked us about our opinions on Russian interference, and one said openly that failing to agree with them on that issue disqualified us from the “nuanced convo”; Steve, George, and Garrett were repeatedly quizzed about their attitudes toward various right-wing movements, suggesting that their opinions about these matters made them ineligible to offer procedural complaints. Friend, for instance, was asked about statements by “Three Percenters”
Restricting Free Speech Not The Answer To Bank Runs by Luke Burgis
There were two signal events in the run-up to the bank run. The first was a tweetstorm posted in mid-January that called attention to a few red flags in the company’s finances.
The tweets brought to more people’s attention what some had already known: SVB management had severely mismanaged interest rate risk by investing their ballooning assets (the bank saw huge capital inflows during 2021–2022) in long-term bonds, which lost significant value as the Fed hiked interest rates.
A month later came a post that went viral by Byrne Hobart, a financial analyst and writer in Austin, Texas, who writes a newsletter called The Diff. Hobart called attention to the bank’s highly levered asset base
Within a couple of weeks after Hobart’s newsletter and tweet (which had 3.6 million views by the time of this writing), some highly influential venture capitalist firms, like Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, were advising portfolio companies to pull their money out of the bank.
the mimetic contagion has epistemic consequences. Being caught up in the process changes how we see reality. And it takes only a mere suggestion by the right person to put a panic into motion, one person at a time. It doesn’t matter whether the suggestion turns out to be true or false, or even the motivations of the person who made it. The effect is the same.
The answer is not restricting speech or the ability of people to have access to their money when they want it; both of those approaches would do serious violence to our freedoms, and would open the door to more.
Follow The Science Money by Paul D. Thacker
Scientists keep saying “follow the science” but scientists gamed the science. Just like tobacco did decades ago, pandemic researchers contrived studies to bamboozle the public. Specifically, virologists have been caught orchestrating three peer-reviewed papers to silence critics and mislead people about NIH virus research and studies at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.
Do not follow the science. Follow the documents, follow the money.
Congressional investigators can get to the bottom of how this pandemic happened, but they must gather evidence in a systematic fashion:
Release documents the NIH is hiding from reporters;
Investigate criminal misuse of “government resources and position” by virologists at the USAID and their contractors;
Demand documents and financial records held by university virologists funded by the NIH.
Exogenous Moral Orientation (EMO) by eugyppius
The heatmap on the left is not “conservative.” It reflects the ordinary, unremarkable moral orientation of almost all human beings who have ever lived, and almost all currently living humans across the entire world.
The heatmap on the right, meanwhile, represents the anomalous exogenous moral orientation (EMO) of politicial and cultural elites in the developed West, which “liberal” cannot even begin to describe, and which applies primary moral emphasis to circles 13 and 14. These are “all animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms” and “all living things in the universe including plants and trees.” Substantial moral value is also attached to things in the twelfth circle, “all animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae,” and in the fifteenth circle, “all natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.” These are people who, strictly speaking, claim to feel morally bound to family, friends and relatives primarily to the extent that these fall within the “living things” or “things in existence” categories.
the EMO of Western governing elites has grown ever more extreme, to the point that it has begun to constitute an existential threat for human civilisation.
While people with these moral tendencies have always existed, they’ve never been so heavily concentrated in positions of influence before, and the more concentrated they become, the more aggressively they filter for like-minded radicals like themselves, even in the absence (and in excess) of any specific objective.
That elites increasingly treat their populations like cattle is a direct expression of their expanded moral universe. They have so many other things to care about.
The Inherent Hate Of Modifying A Noun by Heather Heying
Modifying a noun in the standard English way is now a kind of hate crime.
Referring to fat people is mean…but referring to individuals as “people of size” somehow solves the problem.
Regarding the various -isms—sexism, racism, ableism, all of it—we were moving in the right direction. Things were getting better. Now they most decidedly are not. Politics, medicine, and public health have all failed spectacularly and publicly in the last three years,
People aren’t disabled—they’re people experiencing disability. People aren’t mentally ill—they’re people living with a mental health condition. People aren’t addicts—they’re people with substance use disorders.
A big brown cow becomes a cow of size and color. A slow spotted cow is now a cow of reduced speed and abundant spots. That crazy wild-eyed heifer in the corner is now a cow of enthusiasm and femaleness who is experiencing a different mental state.
What language policing does is raises to consciousness the most mundane aspects of communication. This has at least two broadly negative effects. First, it makes it far more difficult to engage with people as the individuals that they are, rather than as an aggregation of demographic markers. And second, it makes it more difficult to discuss things of actual substance. Thus, we have the dumbing down of a population.
Data Says Covid, Not The Vax by Brian Mowrey
graph using the CDC’s records of deaths attributed to “diseases of the circulatory system” via standard codes for younger adults. Presumably, epidemics of “dying suddenly” would create a signal here due to imputed causes of stroke and cardiac disease. The only strong, apparent signal was for the virus known as SARS-CoV-2 in its various forms.
Circulatory deaths increased because of vaccine harms?
Perhaps. However, it is unclear why the youngest would not show a signal here; this group should have the most notable effect as baseline deaths were so low.
8 Spike Exposures By Age 10 Months by Igor Chudov
The FDA approved the FOURTH COVID shot for infants.
This vaccination sequence could be completed within four months after starting at six months. Therefore, a 10-month-old infant could have four mRNA Covid vaccine doses.
any mother crazy enough to subject her infant to Covid vaccines would also receive Covid vaccines while pregnant and while breastfeeding.
As Covid vaccines are shed via breast milk, a 10-month-old baby could have EIGHT COVID vaccine exposures in their entire lifespan, including pre-birth.
Excessive Plasmid DNA In Bivalent by Anandamide
significant evidence triangulates on excessive DNA in these samples and its roughly in the same order of magnitude as the RNA
If you like this, and have a tinfoil hat, you might like The Conspiracy Basket. Check it out!
And in case you missed it…
My research leads me to conclude that certain public health officials intentionally concealed evidence that the coronavirus was infecting many people as early as the fall of 2019. In this article, I list 27 ways officials likely accomplished this very important goal.
I don’t think any other Covid writer has looked at the question of HOW early spread was concealed from the public. And, in my opinion, officials HAD to conceal this evidence.
https://billricejr.substack.com/p/theory-officials-intentionally-concealed
Thanks, a very diverse but excellent set of stacks covered there.
A few new ones I signed onto.