34. The Basket
3.17.2023 The best of Rational Ground, Team Reality and many others...
Click HERE to see The (prior) Basket and HERE to see The (next) Basket
Click HERE to see The Conspiracy Basket
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’):
DEI Is Bad For Free Speech by KW
Point/Counter-Point: Excess Deaths From Covid? by Thomas Verduyn
Silicon Valley On Purpose by Mathew Crawford
England: December Antibiotics Spike by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
Smeared With “Anti-Semite” Epithet by Margaret Anna Alice
Zeynep Tufekci The Fake Mask Expert by Paul D. Thacker
The 4 Main Covid-19 Theories by Mr Law, Health and Technology
Lack Of Nuance In Mask Discussion by Kelley K
The Test Behind The Testdemic by Martin Neil
The Sick Approach To Sick Chickens by Joel Salatin
NY Governor Appeals Quarantine Camps Verdict by John Leake
Forcing The Woke Into A Definition by Wokal Distance
Homeless Faired Well During Covid by Dr. Peter McCullough
Socializing Capitalism by Alex Berenson
Soros’ Version Of Democracy by Dr. Robert Malone
Ozempic Mandates Coming? by Vinay Prasad
Three Years Later by Justin Hart
Virus Communism by Celia Farber
DeSantis’ Obama Foreign Policy by Andrew Sullivan
Japan’s Increasing Mortality by Joel Smalley
DEI Is Bad For Free Speech by KW
DEI sounds like a bedrock institutional commitment and operational blueprint for protecting free speech on campus. It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to expect that the increasing size and significance of university DEI bureaucracies might significantly improve the speech climates on college campuses.
Jonathan Haidt pointed out that universities were now attempting to simultaneously pursue “two incompatible sacred values”: truth and social justice. Haidt argued for a schism in higher education, with universities explicitly adopting either a John Stuart Mill-style commitment to the pursuit of truth through unfettered speech or a Karl Marx-ian commitment to the pursuit of “social justice” (even if it occurred at the expense of free expression)
Colin Wright claimed that “DEI departments, statements, and initiatives must be abolished at every school and university that receives public funding. They are costly cancers that stifle free speech and viewpoint diversity. Reform is not possible without first abolishing DEI.”
there is a significant amount of evidence that DEI is bad for campus speech climates and an even greater amount of evidence that DEI does very little to promote viewpoint inclusion.
Point/Counter-Point: Excess Deaths From Covid? by Thomas Verduyn
Will Jones’ Daily Sceptic article thesis is that “the main thing driving excess deaths over the last three years... is the new SARS-like virus....” He offers three principal arguments in support of this thesis, namely:
SARS-CoV-2 is special, and unusually infectious.
There is no proof that non pharmaceutical interventions caused excess deaths.
Medical metrics all rise and fall in unison.
Four alternative theories are:
Pneumonia and other respiratory infections were treated inappropriately, resulting in the death of vulnerable people (this is the theory put forward by Dr. Rancourt).
Harmful and damaging societal interventions coupled with massive amounts of testing with a faulty PCR test sent many people to an early grave.
Major and regional disruptions to health care caused the excess deaths.
So many monumental changes have happened since early 2020 that it might be impossible to attribute the excess deaths of the following three years to one singular change. Rather, excess deaths might be the sum of many different factors, including but not limited to: deaths of despair, improper treatments, care home mismanagement, fear of seeking medical attention, poverty, mandatory injections, and so forth.
Silicon Valley On Purpose by Mathew Crawford
There is no reason why Ground Zero had to be in Silicon Valley. The banking system was doomed to collapse because it has been a very long time since the health of the system was the priority of anyone in charge.
the Fed specifically encouraged banks to buy longer maturity bonds, despite the fact that they were raising interest rates through an inflationary period. Yes, the Fed encouraged the actions that turned into a massive liquidity crisis.
We are in a World Currency War now—one that may be far more deadly in the medium-run than any past or present pseudo-pandemic.
But was the beginning of the inevitable banking crisis (yes, the Bitcoiners have always been right on this point) intentionally sparked in silicon valley?
I can't say for certain, but somehow I feel pretty certain.
England: December Antibiotics Spike by Carl Heneghan & Tom Jefferson
roughly 1.3 million more antibiotics were prescribed in December compared to the previous month
a substantial scarlet fever outbreak occurred across Europe from September 2022 onwards - up to 30 UK children died by the end of the year.
the usual approach of riding out the illness went out the window, and a massive increase in children presenting to primary care ensued. At one point in the month, half of all the urgent care base visits were filled by children under 12.
When they did get to be seen, GPs lowered their threshold for treatment, and as a consequence, antibiotic prescribing rose dramatically.
Smeared With “Anti-Semite” Epithet by Margaret Anna Alice
I have been given the honor of hosting a letter written by Jews around the world who unequivocally condemn the weaponization of “anti-semite” to character-assassinate people guilty of nothing but questioning approved narratives; exercising free speech; exposing corruption, lies, and harmful policies; and practicing independent, critical thinking.
At the foot of the cliff lay the body of Clemens Arvay, a forty-two-year-old Austrian biologist, health ecology author, musician, and father of a special-needs son.
What line did Clemens cross? The same line Andrew Bridgen, Neil Oliver, Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Dr. Daniele Ganser, Vera Sharav, and many other dauntless individuals crossed: They exposed the totalitarian and demonstrably dangerous COVID policies and experimental products, in some cases drawing comparisons with the actions of the Third Reich.
Zeynep Tufekci The Fake Mask Expert by Paul D. Thacker
Neither scholar nor journalist, Tufekci ignores academic rigor by posing as professor and then peer reviewing research in her own Times’ essays. She then flouts journalistic ethics by failing to report facts that don’t fit her academic opinion.
Tufekci lamented that the public had been misled about masks once again, this time because commentators misinterpreted a Cochrane review—often referred to as gold standard evidence in medicine—that found no evidence that masks stop community transmission.
Tufekci then demonized the Cochrane review’s lead author Tom Jefferson for getting the science wrong, and provided readers with her own scientific review that found masks, well, work.
Tufekci began promoting herself as a mask expert, long before she had co-authored this single paper in 2021. As the New York Times reported, a March 2020 Tufekci tweetstorm followed by a Tufekci New York Times essay convinced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to alter federal guidance and advise all Americans above the age of 2 to wear masks.
The 4 Main Covid-19 Theories by Mr Law, Health and Technology
Natural Batcave Virus Zoonosis: This theory posits that a bat virus emerged from a cave in China and got into humans maybe from a bat taken to a wet market, or maybe it somehow jumped from a bat to us via a pangolin (here and here).
Laboratory Batcave Virus Zoonosis: While there was still a virus that came from a bat in a cave in China, this theory proposes that the virus didn’t so much emerge as was leaked from the Wuhan laboratory. The virus still travels around the world and systematically mutates into the different variants.
No virus: In their scenario the disease never existed and the global response to the disease is entirely manipulated and directed by rich globalists like Klaus Schwab and Bill Gates with organisations like the World Economic Forum who want to take over and impose a socialist or Marxist regime.
Previously Endemic Background: This theory still contains a lab-leaked but weak virus that potentially even had a pre-existing viral sequence and test kit. This may explain how governments like USA and Australia could claim to have identified their first cases of Sars-CoV-2 with certainty in January 2020, even before any of the supposed test kits had been developed and manufactured. In any event, the virus is leaked either in the Wuhan wet market or possibly at the 2019 World Military Games that were held in October 2019 in Wuhan, and allowed to propagate around the world.
Lack Of Nuance In Mask Discussion by Kelley K
As most everyone is aware, US public health initially didn’t recommend masking, then they suddenly reversed course in early April 2020, citing concerns about asymptomatic spread.
Who knows if this claim by the CDC insider is even true, but if it is, it’s troubling that key CDC recommendations were made based on a New York Times editorial.
I suspect that when the CDC got a strong message from mask advocates that everyone should mask, they would have recommended it to literally everyone of all ages, but then they realized it would be a suffocation/choking hazard for children under 2. If it weren’t for existing CDC guidance about suffocation and choking, we may have required masking infants in this country.
One of the biggest problems with mask advocacy in this country, from Zeynep and others, was the complete refusal to discuss harms.
This kind of rhetoric that masks are harmless and there was no need to worry about them providing a false sense of security is exactly what led to the nuance-free recommendations from CDC, which later became nuance-free mandates in many places, both via government mandates and requirements from private businesses, public schools, and more.
The narrative quickly strengthened behind this idea that masks had no harms whatsoever, and that it was your fault if you or your child struggled to wear one.
The Test Behind The Testdemic by Martin Neil
in September 2020 no credible voice was shouting to the world that “there is no novel & deadly coronavirus” and I certainly couldn’t persuade anyone of this
something had to be causing the false positives, and if it wasn’t a deadly novel coronavirus then what was it? Well, the cross reactivity and non-specificity of the PCR test maybe tells us the answer: other coronaviruses and perhaps other pathogens.
in early 2021…I revealed that the false positive rate for covid PCR testing was much higher than anyone could ever imagine in their worst nightmares - up to 65% of positive tests were false positives, by the ONS’s own published statistics. However, this wasn’t caused by high PCR cycles but was because the laboratories abandoned using the WHO guidelines and manufacturer standards for testing. What did they do? Rather than require two out of three gene positives to define a positive for covid, they decided only one was enough!
This evidence again pointed to cross reactivity and non-specificity of the PCR test…So, rather than find residue of Sars-cov2 virus fragments perhaps it seemed to be quite brilliant at finding any coronavirus. Hence, maybe the test worked perfectly well but just not for the purpose, or in the way they told us it worked.
The Sick Approach To Sick Chickens by Joel Salatin
of the nearly 60 million claimed deaths, perhaps no more than a couple million have actually died from HPAI
Very few of the birds killed are in pain or even symptomatically sick. If one chicken in a house of a million tests positive for HPAI, the government brings full law enforcement force to the farm to guarantee all live birds die. Quickly.
The policy of mass extermination without regard to immunity, without even researching why some birds flourish while all around are dying, is insane. The most fundamental principles of animal husbandry and breeding demand that farmers select for healthy immune systems. We farmers have been doing that for millennia. We pick the most robust specimens as genetic material to propagate, whether it’s plants, animals, or microbes.
But in its wisdom, the US Department of Agriculture (USDA—Usduh) has no interest in selecting, protecting, and then propagating the healthy survivors. The policy is clear and simple: kill everything that ever contacted the diseased birds.
If a farmer wanted to save the survivors and run a test on his own to try to breed birds with HPAI immunity, gun-toting government agents prohibit him from doing so.
NY Governor Appeals Quarantine Camps Verdict by John Leake
The case (Borrello v Hochul) went to the NY State Supreme Court, and on July 8, 2022, Judge Ronald Ploetz ruled that the “Isolation and Quarantine Procedures” regulation is unconstitutional and “violative of New York State law as promulgated and enacted, and therefore null, void and unenforceable as a matter of law.”
At the event last Friday in Rochester, we applauded Ms. Cox for her victory against Governor Hochul and New York Attorney General, Letitia James. She graciously thanked us, but also reminded us that her adversaries had a few days left to appeal. As Ms. Cox just reported, appeal they did.
Forcing The Woke Into A Definition by Wokal Distance
every time we try to name this ideology: woke, Critical Race Theory, Socialism, neo-marxism, cultural Marxism, Critical Social Justice, The successor ideology, and we are told none of this is appropriate or correct.
This inability to give the ideology in question a name prevents people from being able to talk about the project of social, cultural, and political change coming from the left.
Once a worldview is named and defined, it can then be pointed out, highlighted, and subjected to criticism. Once you can *IDENTIFY* a worldview or set of ideas you can focus on it.
Using labels like "woke," "CRT," AND "Critical Social Justice," lets us tag woke ideas so we can hold them up to the light and examine them. Labels help us point out wokeness to other people so they can see it too.
Woke: (sometimes called Critical Social Justice) is a type of social justice politics that claims systemic identity based discrimination such as racism, sexism, homophobia, white privilege, and other sorts of injustice are baked into the fabric of society. In short, society is oppressive.
Homeless Faired Well During Covid by Dr. Peter McCullough
Richard and coworkers reported on 736 homeless individuals in Toronto, Ontario during 2021 and 2022. The majority managed through the illness with no reported difficulty over the time period, most with the Omicron variants. There were no reported severe cases, hospitalizations, or deaths.
Despite approximately two thirds taking a COVID-19 vaccine, the shots appeared to be useless in this population with no statistically significant vaccine efficacy.
homeless populations have much higher rates of hospitalization for a variety of reasons including drug abuse, alcoholism, aspiration, pneumonia, and neuropsychiatric reasons.
if the highest risk derive no reduction in hospitalization or death, then even lower risk individuals are not worth the effort for public health interventions such as vaccines.
Socializing Capitalism by Alex Berenson
For a person who owns a bond and just plans to hold it until it matures, interest rate risk doesn’t matter much.
But for a bank, interest rate risk matters hugely.
A bank takes money from depositors and uses it to make loans or buy bonds (or other, more esoteric financial instruments). If the depositors want their money back, the bank has to give it to them. If it has to get that money by selling bonds when their value has dropped because interest rates have risen, it will lose money. A bond for which it paid $100 might only be worth $90.
But not to the Federal Reserve.
The Federal Reserve just told the world that it will pretend that a bond which is really only worth $90 is actually worth $100 - “par.” That’s what “these assets will be valued at par” means.
though they aren’t worth par. The Fed will lend money on them, and if banks have to pay back depositors, they can do so with that borrowed money.
The program lasts a year. What then? Everyone will hope that by this time next year interest rates and inflation have fallen and the bonds the banks have pledged to the Fed are actually worth par.
If not, maybe the program will be extended another year, or another 15 years.
Soros’ Version Of Democracy by Dr. Robert Malone
the liberal movement worldwide has veered towards progressivism, globalism and marxism to find solutions to world problems, so has the the Open Society Foundations. Or maybe Soros has influenced the liberal movement and his organizations in this direction?
Soro’s version of Democracy comes with a hitch. A new and improved, a more progressive but less powerful democracy. A democracy that is not tied to a strong, national republic. A democracy where there is a globalized set of rules - a globalized republic that decides universal human rights and resource allocation. This puts the United Nations (UN) at the helm. This is the New World Order.
The fatal flaw with this logic is that more rules and regulations bring about more restrictions and governance. More power to the globalized union of administrators and corporations. This is seen as the way to paradise by the bureaucrat and administrative caste, and the road to autocratic totalitarian hell for all others (except the corporatist overlords).
Ozempic Mandates Coming? by Vinay Prasad
colleges were among the most relentless in mandating boosters for young men and women. Most made no exemption for having had and recovered from covid.
when colleges mandate these shots, they are saying: we are allowed to mandate interventions if we believe it is in the best interest of our students. We don't need benefits to third parties. We are allowed to embrace surrogate endpoints, and no one can question us.
By that logic, it is clear, colleges can mandate ozempic for overweight students
Consider the facts:
Boosters do not provide benefit to others/ Ozempic does not provide benefit to others
Boosters increase antibody titers/ Ozempic lowers weight
We don’t know if boosters reduce severe disease at these ages/ we don’t know if Ozempic makes you live longer at these ages
Expert groups recommend bivalent boosters (CDC) and experts recommend ozempic (AAP)
Both are FDA approved/ authorized
Ergo, by established precedent, colleges can mandate Ozempic.
Three Years Later by Justin Hart
Three years ago, Covid-19 struck the world. In the face of a rapidly evolving public health crisis, governments and institutions implemented policies to mitigate the spread of the virus. Today, we can look back and see the unintended consequences of these policies, which have had a lasting impact on public trust and our society.
Firstly, the healthcare system experienced significant disruption as a result of the disease but arguably more-so from Covid policies themselves.
evidence of collusion between the CDC, the White House, and big tech companies to suppress free speech and control the narrative surrounding the pandemic.
The massive spending on Covid relief programs also had significant consequences.
Lockdowns led to a distressing increase in infant abuse and a surge in anxiety among children. Notably, the restrictions had a devastating impact on teenagers, as well as causing developmental delays in babies.
The consequences of Covid regulations on education were equally severe.
The Covid policies and their aftermath have had far-reaching impacts on our society.
Virus Communism by Celia Farber
“Virus” is the new way to put humanity under the boot Orwell warned about in 1984.
The point is that “virus” is the new pretext and pretense for every imaginable form of oppression.
HIV/AIDS was not a disease, not a struggle against a disease—it was a revolution one was meant to surrender one’s mind, body and soul to.
Covid was the finale.
Does it not aim to liquidate millions of us, and finally, usher us into social credit scores, a Central Bank Digital Currency system that controls every aspect of our lives based on our allegiance to the state doctrine of “Covid?”
I could call it “Virus fascism.” It certainly draws its lifeblood from eugenics, de-population, technocracy, and 1984 end stage tyranny.
Are fascism and communism not kissing cousins?
DeSantis’ Obama Foreign Policy by Andrew Sullivan
DeSantis didn’t blame Ukraine for its self-defense. He didn’t defend Putin. He merely proffered a different view of vital US national interests in the medium-term.
The gall!
It is surely perfectly fine for a country to have two political parties that differ on foreign policy. In fact, it’s a critical advantage that democracies have over more rigid regimes: it helps us correct mistakes in time (and sometimes not), change personnel, and adjust to an always changing reality.
DeSantis’ position is pretty much where Obama was on Ukraine — and Obama was not some far-right fanatic.
DeSantis foreign-policy realism is being accompanied right now by a clear move by Biden back to the center on the crucial issues of crime and immigration (and even energy)
DeSantis may be overreaching on the anti-woke stuff; and he comes off as gruff and stiff, with a bully’s affect. But in the broader context of a top-down cultural revolution from the woke left, his attempts at pushback are hardly the stuff of fascism.
Japan’s Increasing Mortality by Joel Smalley
In the chart above, I simply plot weekly, observed deaths for Japan and the expected range of deaths according to the source researchers. I have highlighted the anomalies in the data - the stuff that sticks out - with red dots.
the mortality season 2020 (52 weeks to end of June), resulted in a 2.6% lower than expected tally. This was the year of epidemic COVID.
In season 2021, which caught the impact of the first round of the jab campaign, during which pretty much every adult was “fully vaccinated”, mortality was 1.4% higher than expected, in line with 2018 which was a notoriously bad flu year in much of the world.
In season 2022, which captures the impact of the first round of boosters, mortality is a whopping 5.3% higher than expected.
Season 2023, which captures the second round of boosters, is not yet complete but from early showing, it will easily eclipse 2022.
Great summary, I can't believe the ICC issues an arrest warrant for Putin, I can only assume the USA has never taken part in questionable wars? Another quick look over there moment?