68. The Basket
7.3.2023 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’):
Wreaking Untold Havoc by Rob Jenkins
When Public Health Went Medieval by EL GATO MALO
3 Suggestions For New CDC Director by PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA
No Man’s Land by David Thunder
Pneumonia Spikes From Mis-Treatment by JESSICA ROSE
Exiting The Matrix by DR TESS LAWRIE, MBBCH, PHD & DANIEL RUSHFORTH
University Systems Self-Destruction by EL GATO MALO
Double-Jabbed Mouse ‘Dies Suddenly’ by ASHMEDAI
The Vast International Communist Conspiracy by MICHAEL P SENGER
#DiedSuddenly Is Real by ALEX BERENSON
Direct Access To The Brainstem by WALTER M CHESNUT
Destroy To Save by JOHN LEAKE
In Defense Of Viral Interference by EUGYPPIUS
There Was No Pandemic by Joel Smalley & Denis Rancourt
Push Back Against Smart Cities by LEO HOHMANN
RSV Vax Trial Disaster by ALEX BERENSON
Let The Mice Live by IGOR CHUDOV
Moore Vs United States by EL GATO MALO
Illusion Of Vax Effectiveness by Eyal Shahar
Addressing Vaccine Concerns by VINAY PRASAD
Forever Masking In Japan by GUY GIN
Wreaking Untold Havoc by Rob Jenkins
when you read that more than 1.3 million students have disappeared from our campuses over the last three years, consider what that means in terms of lost income, not to mention dreams dashed and aspirations thwarted. How many young people who wanted to become doctors, nurses, lawyers, accountants, architects, or teachers will now never achieve those goals?
For well over one million families, the American dream of sending their kids to college so they can make a better life for themselves has all but ended, thanks to our hysterical institutional response to what, for the overwhelming majority of young people, amounts to a mild cold
By closing our campuses for extended periods of time, we did great mental and physical harm to the young people in our care, probably leading many to commit suicide who otherwise would not have done so.
in our unhinged pursuit of a covid-free fantasyland, we wreaked untold and immeasurable havoc on the entire higher education ecosystem.
When Public Health Went Medieval by EL GATO MALO
covid policy did become entirely medieval. it was rooted in superstition, not science and it tossed 100 years of evidence based medicine out of the window in order to chase a bunch of absurdist “doing something” tactics to look proactive.
the parallels to “the spanish flu” were everywhere and also oddly apt as that was the last time medical science got misused and turned pandemic into something far more deadly through severe mishandling and pharmaceutics misapplication that drove massive iatrogenic (cased by medical treatment) deaths in healthy people who should not have died.
and they just fell for it again.
because authoritarians invariably choose the path that lets them assume authority and they put forward whatever claims they must to justify it and call themselves the hero.
and so we got an entire world organized around “doing the wrong thing” by abandoning modernity and adopting the dark thinking of the dark ages. and even now, the more strident of “team lockdown” are trying to twist history and invert outcomes.
3 Suggestions For New CDC Director by PIERRE KORY, MD, MPA
As the secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services during COVID, Mandy Cohen marched in lockstep with Dr. Anthony Fauci through the pandemic.
Cohen’s critics have every reason to be skeptical about her ability to chart a new course. Since her appointment is not subject to Senate approval, here are three commitments Cohen should make to restore the CDC’s credibility.
First, submit to a full congressional investigation of pandemic decision-making.
Second, Cohen should decry the politicization of agency recommendations.
Finally, Cohen must demonstrate a commitment to medical freedom.
The role of CDC is not to police and shame people who don't follow agency recommendations. It's to give people practical guideposts for health care concerns based on comprehensive and transparent scientific data, and then trust them to make decisions for themselves. The one-size-fits-all approach simply does not work.
No Man’s Land by David Thunder
we now live in an informational No Man’s Land, in which every man must fend for himself, to the best of his ability, without the backing of an impressive Official Source to do his thinking for him.
We each have to scrape together whatever information we can from unofficial sources that have gotten important things right and are not defending the indefensible: coerced vaccination, vaccine-based segregation, involuntary population-wide lockdowns, etc.
It puts many of us in the peculiar position of placing more weight on the words and recommendations of individual journalists and scientists whose character and intellect we trust, than the pronouncements of national governments, official regulators, or international bodies like the World Health Organisation.
Pneumonia Spikes From Mis-Treatment by JESSICA ROSE
I wanted to go one step further and to check what pneumonia deaths looked like historically so I downloaded more data and plotted it against the existing pneumonia and COVID-19 data. Again, this is looking a lot like COVID-19 deaths are nothing more than pneumonia deaths that were seriously inflated - likely due to withholding of antibiotics that normally would have spared lives.
The deaths are ebbing and flowing as they always do seasonally; the only difference here is the magnitude which is explained by withholding of standard antibiotics and medications. The mis-treatment of humans, especially elderly humans, during the ‘pandemic’ killed a lot of people.
Our elders were isolated and abandoned and left without life-saving drugs.
So, why? Why on Earth would they do this? Why would they make up a definition of a COVID-19 death, make it depend on a fraudulent PCR ‘text’, request doctors to write-up COVID-19 as the cause of death in cases where it was not, and swap in the pneumonia data and call it COVID-19?
Exiting The Matrix by DR TESS LAWRIE, MBBCH, PHD & DANIEL RUSHFORTH
The best way to reject dystopia is to stop feeding the corporate beast and invest in our own better way and actively engage with solutions to help co-create a better world. For those wanting to disengage from a corrupt system and disrupt the globalist agenda, we hope these ideas will help.
Let’s put our money where our mouth is, and let’s use less of it! Let’s put our money towards what nourishes us, our families and our communities, and not feed the beast that would have us shackled, diminished and bled dry, reduced to mere shadows of our divine selves.
Use cash as much as possible
Stop using Amazon
Use supermarkets as little as possible
Use second hand stores for clothes shopping
Stick to small and family run restaurants and outlets when eating out
Be selective about the company we keep
Be as local as possible
Disinvest from corporate giants
Move our money from big banks
Stop paying for things we do not need
University Systems Self-Destruction by EL GATO MALO
the cathedral cannot compete with the bazaar and the bazaar is now well and truly open.
the level of access and education available to any who seek it and engage with it is almost impossible to overstate and is certainly impossible to compete with. it just takes desire, diligence, and application. 3 years of arguing economics in earnest on twitter probably has more value than most econ degrees.
i do not think the university system can, without massive revision and renovation, hope to survive the shift to the reputation economy. it’s too venal, too corrupt, too bereft of the basic checks imposed by a real market of ideas and adversarial engagement, and too hooked on federal money and grant grubbing to fund fiefdoms of fakery and bought and paid for conclusions rooted in ideology and not inquiry.
so long as universities continue to play the role of paid for pipers playing the tune demanded by the gold givers, they will continue to be reduced in relevance and reputation because they’re going to keep being wrong and their “science” is going to get pulled apart and eaten like offal by the lions and hyaena of the real open savannah that now dwarfs their petty and insular villages.
they have become corrupt, delusional backwaters and the real game has moved out into the open.
Double-Jabbed Mouse ‘Dies Suddenly’ by ASHMEDAI
the scientists came into work only to discover that lo and behold one of the mice had unexpectedly “died suddenly” a few hours before they had planned to euthanize the mice.
Being good scientists, they performed a thorough autopsy of the dead mouse, whereupon they discovered that there were massive amounts of cancerous blood cells that had penetrated into all of the organs they took samples of, including the heart, liver, kidneys, spleen, lungs and skeletal muscles.
The proliferation of the cancer cells was so extensive that they described it as “often completely obliterating the normal parenchyma” (‘parenchyma’ is the functional tissue of an organ; i.e. the “active” part of the organ that carries out the functions of that organ). In other words, the cancer cells had pretty much destroyed the organ tissues.
The Vast International Communist Conspiracy by MICHAEL P SENGER
it all sounds ‘too clever by half.’ But it’s really not terribly original. This is how organized crime organisations have always recruited—albeit on a much larger scale.
In general, criminal organisations don’t recruit through applications and interviews; rather, they recruit through a process of manipulation and entrapment, gradually estranging individuals from what they believed to be their values, until all that’s left is nihilism, self-interest, and complete loyalty to the organisation. And, with its century of history, no one has more experience in this process than the Chinese Communist Party. In that sense, the response to COVID may be seen as the CCP’s largest-ever recruiting event.
To see the leading instigators of lockdown getting away with all this, at least so far, is admittedly a bit deflating. But ultimately, there is an objective reality, and the reality is that these policies destroyed countless millions of lives and transferred trillions in wealth from workers to the very richest for virtually no human benefit.
#DiedSuddenly Is Real by ALEX BERENSON
South Korean researchers just offered powerful evidence that the #DiedSuddenly phenomenon is real. The researchers reported on sudden deaths from mRNA-caused myocarditis in people under 45. Even though seven deaths came within three days of the jabs, none were linked before autopsies.
And the Korean researchers were not alone. Two previous and until now unreported studies offer even stronger evidence that the mRNAs caused thousands of sudden or very quick deaths from cardiovascular catastrophes in people under 50.
pathologists found myocarditis - likely from mRNA jabs - as the underlying cause of death in two out of the three deaths under age 40.
Direct Access To The Brainstem by WALTER M CHESNUT
The saying goes “All roads lead to Rome.” However, in the case of the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2, one might say “All roads lead to the Brainstem.” If we look at the two major routes of infection, digestive and respiratory, we can observe that direct access to the brainstem is achieved by the Spike Protein in both cases.
Inhibitory neuron death can also contribute to sudden cardiac death, especially if the vagus nerve is also involved. What does this tell us? That in addition to the sudden cardiac deaths due to myocarditis, there are also sudden cardiac deaths with a neurogenic component. It is not just athletes under performance stress or the very fit and young that are dying suddenly.
Destroy To Save by JOHN LEAKE
In order to “Save the Climate,” the Biden Administration has leased gigantic swaths of coastal seabed between Martha’s Vineyard and the New Jersey Shore for the construction of colossal wind turbine farms. The huge blitz of sonar for ocean bottom mapping is inflicting grave harm on whales and dolphins, who desperately flee from the maddening noise. Some dive to perilous depths; others run to the shoreline and beach themselves, suffering cruel and painful deaths.
Votaries of the Climate Cult—and the financial and industrial interests who exploit their foolish religiosity in order to enrich themselves—seem to have lost all contact and feeling for actual nature—that is, the birds, whales, water, and sky, unmarred by the despoliation of man.
In Defense Of Viral Interference by EUGYPPIUS
The problem isn’t that lockdowns do nothing. It’s that they’re just effective enough to be dangerous. Endemic viruses that have been around forever face the standard constraints of seasonality and the drastic limitations our innate immune systems place on susceptibility, but they’re also boxed in by adaptive immunity. They face antibodies everywhere because they’ve been infecting billions of people since childhood. A newer pathogen, like SARS-2, faces fewer adaptive immune constraints.
When you lock down and put hand sanitiser on every corner, it’s the old endemic viruses that take the hit first. In preventing these infections, you effectively reserve precious susceptible respiratory tracts for the somewhat faster novel virus. We know that SARS-2 was circulating widely as early as Fall 2019, and yet it only coincided with serious mortality as influenza infections collapsed in the course of February and March.
The chronology suggests that influenza, already at the end of its season, was being out-competed in many places by Covid as early as February. Lockdowns are far from the only factor in play here, but everywhere the story is the same: Collapsing influenza is a precondition for pandemic mortality.
There Was No Pandemic by Joel Smalley & Denis Rancourt
a virus, was circulating the globe in 2019/20, which may or may not have been the result of gain-of-function research, which nevertheless was not particularly novel and otherwise, if ignored, would not have made any material impact on mortality in any particular country
the response to news of this virus was responsible for the deaths of millions of people worldwide
those deaths were attributed to the virus due to inappropriate use of the PCR test on too high a cycle threshold
[had] any other virus…been singularly tested in the same way, their presence in the deceased would have produced the same alleged deaths as COVID
“vaccine” deaths were falsely attributed to COVID in the same way as the original pandemic
Push Back Against Smart Cities by LEO HOHMANN
The outfitting of America’s cities with 5G technology, which took place largely with federal funding appropriated under the Trump administration, set the stage for our cities to be converted into “smart cities.” That’s a cleverly deceptive term for “surveillance cities,” in which no human activity takes place outside the watchful eye of Big Brother. Because these cameras, speakers, facial-recognition scanners, etc., are all connected and available for monitoring online, some have referred to 5G smart-grid technology as the “Internet of Eyes.”
The San Diego Police Department’s proposal would make San Diego the largest city to use street lights with license-plate readers and cameras.
But the City of San Diego’s Privacy Advisory Board voted unanimously last Thursday night to send to City Council the Option 2 plan, which rejects San Diego PD’s proposal, according to Seth Hall with the Trust San Diego coalition.
Some citizens have voiced concerns to the city council, saying they are worried about privacy.
RSV Vax Trial Disaster by ALEX BERENSON
Big Pharma is chasing billions from new products for another airborne illness: respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV.
Two European drug companies, AstraZeneca and Sanofi, want the Food and Drug Administration to approve a costly new treatment called nirsevimab for RSV for kids under age 1.
The companies’ own trials show far more deaths in infants who received nirsevimab than those who got either placebo or a competing older treatment.
In the most important trial, of healthy near-full-term and full-term infants, three out of 994 infants given nirsevimab died within a year. None of the 496 infants who received a placebo shot died.
In all, 12 infants treated with nirsevimab died in the trials, compared to four who were treated with an older antibody or a placebo. Even accounting for the fact that more infants received nirsevimab than placebo or the older antibody, infants given nirsevimab had a nearly 50 percent higher risk of death.
Let The Mice Live by IGOR CHUDOV
In the Frontiers mouse study discussed, one mouse out of 13 developed a turbo-cancer (a lymphoma).
[mice] physiology is similar to humans - except that mice age 25 times faster. So, a month in the life of a mouse is over two years in terms of human life
if mice could be followed for just 14 months, it would be roughly equivalent to following people for 38-47 years.
They did not have time to wait with Covid vaccines, they say. It was a huge emergency, they say. Okay. Why could not they keep a few dozen vaccinated mice for a year?
Was the decision to kill test animals based simply on considerations of cost? Or did greedy vaccine developers know that they better prevent the long-term consequences of Covid vaccines from becoming evident?
Moore Vs United States by EL GATO MALO
the government is flat out arguing for a right to tax undistributed income as well as unrealized gains.
as SCOTUS winds down its session this year, a seemingly abstruse case whose ramifications may be profound pops as one to watch next term (commencing in october).
it is, quite literally, an income tax on income you never got. retained cooperate earnings are being ascribed to you despite never being transferred to you.
“income” has, since the time the first income taxes were levied, always been defined as money paid and realized. it does not apply to unrealized or undistributed income (except as parts of specific/specialized pass through corporate structures like S corps)
will they apply this to home prices so you’ll need to take out a HELOC to pay the taxes on your house if it appreciates in price?
this will literally make inflation into a taxable event.
Illusion Of Vax Effectiveness by Eyal Shahar
The prevailing narrative tells us that vaccinating the frail and elderly against Covid had a dramatic effect on mortality. How strong is the presumed effect of a Covid vaccine in that vulnerable population? Is it as strong as many believe, or perhaps much closer to zero than to the other end of the scale?
Consider three facts:
Almost one-third of the elderly (over the age of 80) do not develop antibodies after vaccination against Covid
Vaccine-induced immune response is known to attenuate with aging
Flu vaccines do not offer high protection in the elderly
How could Covid vaccines have been highly effective in the frail and elderly?
They were not.
Addressing Vaccine Concerns by VINAY PRASAD
Whether anyone likes it or not, covid-19 policy mistakes mean that more and more people are going to be critical of routine immunization for children. They are also going to be critical of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors for depression, cancer medications, cancer screening tests, and most public health advice.
The current surveillance system for vaccine safety is so bad that other countries had to alert the United States to myocarditis. We did not detect myocarditis in young men.
In order for public health to regain credibility,
We must recommit to only authorizing or approving medical products after randomized trials show benefits on hard outcomes (living longer or better) and in populations that look like America.
We need a new safety system that is capable of detecting very rare vaccine adverse events.
Older vaccines and medical products which are subject to growing public distrust— even those whose distrust is unjustified in the opinion of experts— should be re-examined for safety.
Trials of vaccine should contain at least 2 control arms. One a placebo arm of salt water, and another placebo arm perhaps containing adjuvant/ preservative/ or a different vaccine.
FDA officials must be legally banned from revolving door politics for 5 years after service.
Forever Masking In Japan by GUY GIN
A survey of 500 parents of children of elementary school age and under was recently published which gives insights into the how Japanese mums and their kids think about child masking now it’s optional. Key finding: mums like it much more than their kids do.
66% want their kids to mask when necessary and 4.6% want them to mask all the time. Only 23.8% of mums want their kids to mask as little as possible and just 5.6% are against them masking at all.
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Another interesting and timely selection. Thanks for your efforts.