Open Thread

I wish rumble had an automatic transcript feature, like youtube does…..

In “Dr. Janci Lindsay: “Halt the vaccine IMMEDIATELY”, Lindsay relates how doctors are scared of losing their jobs, hence self-censoring, about the dangers of covid vaccines. Furthermore, she says you need either trials on humans or great apes to make correct inferences about effects on human fertility.

Apparently, it’s easier than giving the vaccine, then tracking birthrates. You can test for antibodies related to a specific protein that is involved in reproduction.

Ah, but no news is good news if you’re all aboard the vaccine train! Possibly sterilizing the human population? – who needs to worry about that when you’ve got a covid pandemic raging, that KILLS .003% of children (i.e., less than flu). Sure, you could bludgeon 80% of covid cases with just ivermectin – and let’s not even mention hydrogen peroxide – but gene therapy vaccines are so 21st century! Yay!

I’m not sure, but I think Lindsay is probably talking about the mRNA vaccines, only.

This reminds about controversy, years ago, about removing the Delaney clause, which forbade use of a substance if it could be shown to cause cancer, in any dosage, whatsoever.

While I’m generally for natural foods, I remember thinking how stupid it was to be so stringent about a cancer that might have a miniscule incidence, at normal levels of exposure, but other substances that might be fine wrt Delaney could still be mutagenic, or disrupt normal brain function or hormone function at a normal dose.

Would not a prudent society look to evaluate all known risks, and make sure they are tolerable, instead of just one risk, and ignore everything else? Isn’t it insanity to do otherwise?

So, if you’ve been manipulated into feeling ‘safe’ from a virus that has many therapeutics, but you’re the tip of the spear of a huge depopulation, you may not feel quite so satisfied that you’ve been ‘saved’ as you see your children struggle to bear their own children, and come to realize they’re the last generation of their family.

“What finally prompted it, this post that is, was a comment made at Ian Welsh’s venue by one of the groupies there who pretends to be by and for the unwashed Essentials but in actuality can be no such thing, in the least by virtue of their comment. This was in the midst of a group of these NonEssentials backslapping each other as they endeavor to commandeer yet another comment section on the blogosphere.”

So I spent the last twenty years of my work life holding down two full-time jobs, neither of which paid more than $10/hr, both of which were Essential and thankless, so that I can be lectured about my privilege by a person who expects to support himself better on a Substack account than I did working two Essential jobs?

I think what we have here is a dishonest, manipulative source.

Consider the case of Craig Murray, currently awaiting a jail term for reporting on a “public trial” of a public figure in Scotland.

The pathology of the “liberal-left” and its authoritarian potential is on stark display in this (for an American) distant mirror.

The disinterest of the American media in the fate of Assange was a late warning sign in a way of something that became blindingly obvious when Russiagate was foisted on us in 2016 and sustained for years after (still being renewed routinely). The quality of news reporting in the U.S. is abysmal now, with groundless opinion and speculation flooding CNN for example. The New York Times is being written by children for children.

The collapse of journalism has an economic basis, of course, and I am not saying the heyday of local real estate magnates financing boosterism and friendly mayors with classified ads was some kind of golden age, but it did set some limits on politics that are gone now and some (hypocritical) praise of reason and deliberation.

People adjust to the new normal remarkably fast — any new normal — but this affects the shared sense of sharing a common reality as well as expectations concerning what norms will be enforced in the workplace and in social space. Anxiety about how to behave and how reliable authority is have to be rising as the legitimacy crisis shifts into this new space with only untrusted and untrustworthy narrators flooding the public noise.

It was always risky to insult the King, as did Craig Murray.

I believe that is covered in the Book “3 Felonies a Day,” which asserted that even while peacefully going about one’s life onn continually broke the Law.

Three Felonies A Day By Harvey Silverglate. Available from Bezos World.

Wow, so js and someofparts are effectively saying, if you don’t work, if don’t have any money, you can have no opinion. How’s that for Progressive? People who aren’t earners should relinquish their right to express their opinion openly in public. Better yet, they should not exist.

Nonchalance is a consequence not a comment. None Nonchalance intended. I believe calling truth to Power an important freedom.

I’m just pointing out the risks of calling Power to Account in the UK.

In the US such speech appears protected by freedom of speech. Not so in the UK, due to what appears to be a complex set of legal contortions, which I find difficult to follow.

It remains an unspoken irony of his situation that Assange may not be prosecutable in the U.S. for the offense for which he is being extradited, but whether he is or not prosecutable depends in large part on how far gone in its principles is that same class in the U.S. Media and legal domains, not on the provisions of law, per se.

British law does not generally protect either speech or written publication in the same absolutist way the U.S. does. Britain has an Official Secrets Act, prohibitions on blasphemy and even lese majesty laws. None of that directly affects either the case of Assange or Murray.

There were plenty of opportunities in law for an application of facts in sane and just judgment, which were deliberately not taken. It is those “legal contortions” that negate the protection the operation of law ought to provide. The willingness of judges to engage in such contortions and the unwillingness of commercial journalism to expose the malpractice of law to public attention allow it to go forward unchecked.

someofparts, it had to do with something you said, but in a good way, not the way you’re interpreting it. You’re obviously not a groupie and the comment is not leveled at the entire commentariat.

You yourself made a comment about the johnny-come-latelys and their antics. That’s the focus of that quote, not you.

I could very well have named the last two posts Confessions of a Former Recovered Former NonEssential.

For the overpopulation mavens, the New York Times has long been fretting over the declining birth rate in the US and Europe. Now, in its wisdom, it has noticed that birthrates are declining all over the world (except Africa for the moment, and it frets over that). There’s even the prediction that China’s population will decline by nearly half by 2100 (!). Of course as Covid rages in India unchecked, India’s population could be cut by almost as much much sooner.

The story to ponder:

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-shrinking.html

Yet another paradigm shift, no?

Ché Pasa, if birth rates decline , where will all the workers come from to work in the automated factories?

The NYT article is really just a mass of anecdotal material, no real primary sources besides a couple of nearly invisible references to US and Chinese censuses. There was a similar spate of articles in July 2020 based on a study from the Gates founded and funded Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

The problem is that we already know that population is falling big time in a few countries like Germany, Japan, and Russia (Russia the NYT leaves out) and also beginning to in places like S. Korea, Eastern Europe, and China. I tend to look at projections only going out to 2050 because they still are at least somewhat tethered to the actual world we live in. When authors start invoking 2100 there are just too many unknowables for anything other than BS articles like the one in the NYT.

Could the Americans clarify something for me? What is the ongoing angst on both sides regarding covid vaccination? It seems the US has reached the perfect solution for Americans: those who want to be vaccinated have been, and those who don’t want to be vaccinated don’t have to. What’s the problem?

My left-leaning friends tend to answer with “In order to reach herd immunity…” but that was never on the table. The vaccines don’t make you immune to catching it. They just lessen your chances of having a severe case should you catch it. The people who don’t get vaccinated are willing to risk catching it without having been vaccinated. The people who do get vaccinated want to have been vaccinated should they catch it. It’s a weighing of risks, so I don’t see the problem.

I ask this with complete civility as an outsider, so please answer civilly. And 450, please don’t accuse me of watching American TV again, thank you.

Joan, a vaccine primes the immune system so that if there is a subsequent exposure to the pathogen the body will mount an effective immune response to it. That’s it.

Viruses are not good at preserving their genetic material, and I would think that was even truer of an RNA-based virus like covid because RNA is less stable than DNA. If fewer people are vaccinated there will be more copies of the virus out there and a bigger chance for mutations that can put the already vaccinated back at risk.

I think the anti-vax crowd is anti-science and anti-responsible. They want the right to keep the rest of us at risk. And their argument make no sense. The risk of dying from covid in the US is around one in 700. The risk of a bad reaction even to the J&J vaccine was a 100,000 times less likely than that, and for the Moderna and Pfizer shots a lot less than that.

Hugh
“I think the anti-vax crowd is anti-science and anti-responsible. They want the right to keep the rest of us at risk. And their argument make no sense. ”

Hugh, one word — Theranos. Sure, it is an extreme example, but the flip side is ‘how many less brazen cases are out there?’ Two more words — Purdue Pharma. Please don’t mix a corporate product and science. Maybe some science went into that product, but in the end of the day it is a product to earn profit – as simple as that. So, Hugh, please, hold your horses with bold generalizations (I almost replied with a profanity to the above sentences), some are merely cautious, that all. And you should be too, unless of course you are paid for posting corporate PR and psyop.

I think guys at Bloomberg are geniuses — always staying on the top of things. Today, they are having an interview with one Kenneth Whyte, who wrote a book “The Sack of Detroit: General Motors and the End of American Enterprise”. His view seems to be that the tort courts must be abolished and corporate malfeasance must be dealt with quietly so as not to alert the customers to the fact that they are being taken for a ride!

KW: “What I’m talking about are repeated incidents where the social harm that’s identified, as with automobile safety — and later with opioids and tobacco — becomes an opportunity for crusaders to attack corporations and blame them for what are essentially social failures. That to my mind is counterproductive and harmful for business and industry in America.

They [opioid companies] did behave badly. And tobacco companies behaved badly. Companies behave badly in every industry. It’s a fact of life and it’s something that, again, we need to be concerned about. But these attacks on companies, the way we go about trying to solve the problem by suing them and punitively regulating them, does not work. A more nimble and sensible approach could be taken to solve problems without doing harm to the private sector.”

Hugh, the guy is telling you in simple words: ” Companies behave badly in every industry. It’s a fact of life…”

In this regard, it is prudent to wait and see what the pharma is hiding regarding this product called the vaccine, especially when you are not really in much a danger. India is unwilling to grant Pfizer indemnity protection, and pfizer is unwilling to provide the vaccine — if the vaccine is so safe, except for an occasional case, why seek the protection? What are they hiding? Pfizer made $3.5 billion on this thing, and bunch of new billionaires showed up. Sure, sure, scientists said that the vaccine is safe, but does Drew Weismann know how this actual product is made, does he carry any personal responsibility? No and no.

Does any one out there carry responsibility if the vaccine turns out be ineffective or even harmful? The answer is NO. The companies are protected from indemnity. There are governmental funds allocated to compensate families of children with adverse reaction to childhood vaccine. No such fund exists for COVID. The government is not responsible either. We are on our own and without any recourse.

Well, let’s just shut down the whole healthcare system because Theranos. And science too because I’m sure a scientist made an error sometime somewhere, so we can zero out science. Not sure how NL gets on the internet since electricity and electronics are such obvious conspiracies. But that’s the problem with knownothingism. Once it starts, it can’t be turned off. Question Theranos as much as you want. Question the issues it raises. But use it as an excuse to question whatever you want or is on your agenda, and you and science are done.

@Hugh, thank you for the reply. Strangely enough, I’ve read the same interpretation from an anti-vax perspective, that vaccinated people are pushing the evolution of new strains and endangering everyone else. By then my brain was melting.

@someofparts, that makes a lot of sense. Since my only view of America is through the internet, that must be why things were coming off as skewed to me. Of course in real life people are much more reasonable, thankfully.

The government here changes its approach to covid on practically a weekly basis, so they always do a period of warnings before anything is implemented. I remember a year ago, an officer on the tram announced to the whole car “Starting next week, we will issue fifty euro fines to anyone on public transit without a mask. Everyone in this car would be fined, except this grandma, because I wouldn’t dare.”

No, in real life people are not more reasonable. If anything, they’re even more fake. My son works at Target. I have cajoled him to continue to were his mask despite the new company policy. He’s vaccinated. Most of his coworkers are no longer wearing the mask. Most are black. Most are uncannier. In fact, pretty much all of them are unvaccinated. My son and one other fella are vaccinated. His coworkers questioned him as to why he was still wearing the mask, He tried to inform them about the “science.” It was likened to informing a wall. They couldn’t believe he was vaccinated. They were holding magnets up to his arm where he was vaccinated because they believed the vaccine magnetized you. The fact the magnets didn’t stick did not convince them they were wrong. This is what happens when people don’t discuss these things critically with an open mind. Misinformation and disinformation flourishes unchallenged. Just what the Russians and Chinese want for maximum American deaths and maximum American chaos in their endless endeavor to collapse America. America’s elite apparently want the same thing.

@Joan

I never got into the vaccine data that much. I’ve been exhausted with just my investigating PCR defects, epidemiological signal vs. noise, vitamin D, and hydroxychloroquine claims. More recently, some about ivermectin; and also using electrolysis for O2/H2 production (see HHOplus.com for what looks like a real gas saver; 2 of their truck units should have provide enough O2, per minute, if you could only separate it), with some raw ideas (not based on detailed knowledge) about using centrifugal separation. (You can also ‘easily’ separate O2 and H2 via a 2 chamber solution, 1 per electrode, but I think you run into heat generation issues when you have to separate electrodes by a large distance).

That, and I have no intention of taking a vaccine. I may ‘escape’ by moving to Florida, if I have to. (And kind of want to, for other reasons.)

Even so, the “truth is out there”, though discerning it will require trusting SOME experts, over others. So, which do you chose?

Well, I think it’s kind of common sense not to choose any of them, before at least a basic “hear them out” process. That needs to be tempered by considerations of “past performance”, and motivations. Consider Fauci’s recent questioning by Sen. Rand Paul, wherein Fauci was denying Paul’s reference letter, co-signed by 200 experts, on “gain of function” research. If Fauci is “guilty as charged”, he’s very likely partly or largely guilty of destroying the lives of millions of people, by being one of the ‘fathers of covid-19’. IOW, he’s got lots of motivation to lie through his teeth. Hence, to accept his denial, based on blind trust of authority, is really dumb.

On the anti-vaccine side, beside my initial post in this thread, you can look at a recent interview of “Stephanie Seneff, Ph.D., a senior research scientist at MIT for over five decades” by Dr. Joseph Mercola.l In “COVID Vaccines May Bring Avalanche of Neurological Disease” @ globalresearch.ca, we learn

Five months into the vaccination campaign, statistics tell a frightening story. Seneff cites research2 showing deaths are 14.6 times more frequent during the first 14 days after the first COVID injection among people over the age of 60, compared to those who aren’t vaccinated.

Now, it’s quite possible that there’s a bi-modal distribution of mortality for vaccinated individuals in this age range. I.e., even though it’s (almost) a slam dunk that your chances of dying from the vaccine, for 14 days after vaccination, is higher than dying from covid (because they must be talking about “all cause” mortality; and covid will be a subset of that), IF YOU SURVIVE the vaccine, your odds dying prematurely are, in the end, less.

Or are they? How can anybody know? Let’s say that Seneff is correct, and that vaccinated individuals are going to be at risk for prion-like diseases:

the take-home here is that COVID-19 vaccines, offered to hundreds of millions of people, are instruction sets for your body to make a toxic protein that will eventually wind up concentrated in your spleen, from where prion-like protein instructions will be sent out, leading to neurodegenerative diseases.

If you’re over 60, and you find you’re losing your marbles in, say, 5 years, would you say that living for an additional 10 years as sort of a vegetable was worth reducing your risk from a covid death?

As per my comment above, regarding an analogy with the Delaney clause madness, what we should be seeking is a comprehensive risk assessment – which is probably impossible in the time frame that “Operation Warp Speed” gave us experimental mRNA vaccines.

Ah, but that’s not really favorable to big Pharma profits, now, is it?

Joan
“that vaccinated people are pushing the evolution of new strains and endangering everyone else.”

The vaccine also alters the presentation of the disease, so it becomes harder to diagnose it. This has emerged in the so-called Leicester method/experiment in England. A doctor there, can’t remember his name now, implemented an identify/trace/isolate system to combat smallpox. Later they had a mixed system identify/trace/isolate + vaccine for those who want and medical personnel. They paid money for leads on the symptomatic and their contacts and then asked both to stay in a hospital outside of the city. The biggest issue they had was that vaccinated had different presentation of smallpox from the standard, and so doctors misdiagnosed smallpox as chickenpox and allowed the infected to stay in the community ,leading to infection spike. Overall, they did very well to the chagrin of the pro-vaccers. This was at the time when England had compulsory enforced vaccination laws. The better-offs could just pay the fine and get away with this, while the not-so-well-off went to jail.

Same will be here when compulsory vaccination starts, those who can afford will just leave the jobs, the laws will be selectively enforced avoiding imposing them on the upper management, company owners. Social strife will ensue, protest, all the more reason for the Chinese communists to gloat that the American system does not work.

disinformation is advantaged in a way by the flood of communication and the decline of reliable critics and funding for solid criticism and research. there is probably some variation on Gresham’s Law that applies, whereby bad info drives out or discredits the good.

i am still not inclined to blame the victims. being ignorant because you are made ignorant is not the same as being stupid, and “bad attitudes” are not necessarily an indicator of personal moral failings.

people often have a lot of beliefs. i am not sure why. maybe that is why “magic” is entertaining and on a deeper level frightening

COVID-19 showed me two things:

1.) the controlling shared beliefs of (public health in this instance) elites are untrustworthy and largely immune to criticism or the formation of critical public opinion

2.) ordinary people have a hard time figuring things out on their own (like wearing masks outdoors or when alone is unnecessary)

I have a comment in moderation commending NL’s “Progress happens when there are opposite sides.” I will not repeat it.

I just saw a news report about Iran cutting off the IAEA from a form of site monitoring. I think Iran and nuclear proliferation is an example of how “conservative” ideas of authoritarianism result in poor persuasion and cooperation. The idea that Iran must be punitively forced to forego the possibility of nuclear weapons is more than a little counterproductive to the non-proliferation project that was birthed in the recognition thru “liberal” enlightened self-interest that proliferation would certainly end in catastrophic war or terrorism. But people hell-bent on domination of others cannot hold onto an idea of mutual self-interest, I guess.

Progress happens when there are opposite sides. Without pushback from the public and skepticism from the customer, we would still be in the stone age.

I wonder how we got out of the stone age. Savvy customers?

I’m being snarky just because it’s the briefest way I know to make a point. The whole discussion assumes categories and principles that exist now. Corporations with the powers they have and the legal protections that top executives enjoy are recent. The use of lawsuit as a means of addressing corporate malfeasance is a conservative victory. Businesses argued that government regulation is always bad. So don’t regulate, but if the business damages you, you can sue. We’re now on our way to “tort reform” because Americans sue too much. Meanwhile, lawsuits are out of the means of most people, and even if they do proceed and get a major award from the jury, the judge gets to cut it. We can work on the problems of these issues now, but I’d still argue that we need a different paradigm.

My mantra here is “we live in a propaganda state.” What seems to be people being stupid is often people adapting to what they believe is the general opinion. We are a social species. Our lone hero ancestor probably ended up as saber tooth tiger cat food. Our sense of well being, our feelings, our happiness all invests in the relationship with our fellows. Propagandists have worked out how to use this.

As Terry Pratchett said, “The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.”

@nihil obstet,

Here is a political joke which is not funny and will leave you not laughing.

Q: Who killed Martin Luther King?
A: Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone.

Hey — he killed Kennedy, didn’t he?