Open Thread

“Without pain, without sacrifice we would have nothing. Like the first monkey shot into space.” –Fight Club

“The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what is a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?”― Jeff VanderMeer

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The child population had been followed with 3-monthly nutritional weighing sessions since 1978.
From June 1981 DTP and OPV were offered
the children were allocated by birthday in a ‘natural experiment’ to receive vaccinations early or late

Among 3-5-month-old children, having received DTP (±OPV) was associated with a mortality hazard ratio (HR) of 5.00 compared with not-yet-DTP-vaccinated children.
All-cause infant mortality after 3 months of age increased after the introduction of these vaccines

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28188123/
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Data were used from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey on infants aged 2 months through adolescents
Logistic regression modeling was performed to estimate the effects of DTP or tetanus vaccination on each allergy.

The odds of having a history of asthma was twice as great among vaccinated subjects than among unvaccinated subjects
The odds of having had any allergy-related respiratory symptom in the past 12 months was 63% greater among vaccinated subjects than unvaccinated subjects

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10714532/
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a nationwide, multicentre, prospective birth cohort study that included 103,099 pregnant women and their children.

Results:
There was a dose dependent relationship. The more vaccines someone had the higher likelyhood they would develop asthma, wheezing and eczema.
Those receiving 3 vaccines had a 1.4 times higher chance verse those receiving 1 vaccine
This increased to a 1.5 increase chance for those receiving 4 vaccines.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7341599/
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“Silence creates its own violence.” ― Jeff Vandermeer, Annilhation

“A sane person to an insane society must appear insane.” ― Kurt Vonnegut

“That’s how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.” –Jeff Vandermeer

If I so “something” my chances of getting heart disease are one in a million. If I do “something else” my chances of getting heart disease are two in a million, which my chances of getting heart disease increased One Hundred Per Cent by doing “something else”.

But did my chances of getting heart disease really go up very much? Twice of “almost nothing” is still “very little”. But if that “something else” reduced my chance of getting a “different thing” from three-in-a-hundred to two-in-a-hundred ( a fifty per cent reduction if I am doing the numbers right in my head), then that “something else” made a real difference in my chances of getting that “different thing”.

Word on the street is there’s some accelerating mean spiritedness hitting the public sphere from the highways and byways to the internet, the galactic stratosphere and beyond.

Tell me it ain’t so. Don’t get around much anymore so I don’t know. But Credence Clearwater was right about that bad moon on the rise, or was it a bathroom on the right?

Anyway, prominent alt blogger, the madam of NC has cut comments, and her commentariat were a major feature, no matter one’s own opinion of other peoples’ opinions.

Kinda doesn’t matter one way or the other. People come and go.

As a regular visitor to Ms Smith’s site I could be dubbed a fan, though I don’t think so.
Anyway, reading her recent reactions to comments, I have difficulty following her vituperative, not that I know what that word means.

What’s the beef? Getting the hasbra troll treatment perhaps.

I don’t know. What I think is it’s good to calibrate the quantity and quality of whatever your drug intake may be.
Just my opinion.

I wish we knew what stocks Elon is shorting right now.

That would tell us his next moves… once he’s destroyed any department investigating him and his interests, of course.

“the madam of NC has cut comments”

As another NC reader, I’ll say that every time that happens I get less likely to go to the site and much less likely to comment.

It would be one thing if the site proprietor simply said, “The comments have been heating up lately so I think it’s time for a cooling off period” and left it at that but, instead, it’s high dudgeon time. She basically gets all testy and says things like “I resent being asked to perform that role [of fact checker]…I’ve really had it,” when, in fact, it’s a role she’s taken on entirely on her own—no one’s “asked” her to do it. (If people try to set up an alternative comment venue on Reddit, she gets “deeply offended” about that, too.)

Meanwhile, a few commenters (on the older posts, where the comments haven’t been shut down yet) fall all over themselves, saying how much they “miss” the comments but they “understand”—which I’m not sure helps matters. It’s all very off-putting—not the disabling of the comments so much (although that’s unfortunate) but all the other “stuff” being played out around that. (Ian seems much more grounded and sensible when it comes to things like site moderation, but not only that.)

Vaccines have saved about 154 million lives globally since 1974
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“Real critical thinking means uncovering and questioning social, political and moral assumptions —Disciplined minds, Jeff Schmidt

Vaccines have saved 154 million lives! Amazing how was that number obtained?

Well a vaccine funded “study” done by vaccine funded “scientists” concluded. Literally go to page 11(link below) and read the conflict of interests declaration. Then ask yourself? Should I use critical thinking or just blindly accept what people with conflict of interest say?
Here is how that 154million number was obtained:
“estimate vaccine impact per fully vaccinated person over time, synthesising the results of 22 models (these models were done by you guessed it vaccine manufactures)”
So yes if vaccine manufactures assume vaccines are safe and effective and assume they will save millions of lives you can conclude that vaccines have saved 154 millions lives since 1974.

But what if you actually looked at the data and compared the change in mortality associated with vaccines? Well then you find there are “approximately 100 million vaccine-rollout-associated infant deaths 1974-2024″

So one side is telling you to ignore the evidence and blindly accept assumptions from people with conflicts of interests. The other side is telling you to look at the evidence, read the science and use critical thinking.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command” -1984

https://correlation-canada.org/opinion-childhood-vaccination-mortality-averted/

Oakchair,

Go look around at any pre-1900 cemetery that hasn’t been ripped up to make way for a freeway or a suburb.

Count the number of baby and child graves by year. Up through today.

Compare.

There’s your goddamned science.

Check out what is happening today in Texas.

Watch how many innocent children die because they have ignorant, conspiracy-ridden parents.

My favorite anti-vaccine conspiracy is the one about the Covid vaccines, how “the Secret Masters created the vaccines to kill off billions of people.”

Here’s the thing. If the “Secret Masters” wanted to kill anyone off, it would be the people who *did not do what they were told* as those are the troublemakers.

So, if anything, it is the folks who are *not* vaccinated against Covid that have something to fear.

Those are the troublemakers.

Those are the ones that the next round of “diseases engineered by the Secret Masters” will kill.

Because they do not do what they are told. And they are just outright ignorant, “I Googled” it damnfools.

I went back and read Yves Smith’s ” We are disabling comments” post. This is the first paragraph . . . ” The caliber of discourse has degenerated at Naked Capitalism in the wake of Trump taking office and his multi-front attack on government operations and legal agreements, from trade pacts to requirements for firing Federal employees.”

She then cites some things which may indeed be from the few weeks after the Trump return. And she cites other things which seem long standing but which she takes the opportunity to write about.

When some commenters noted that the defeat of Harris led to the entirely-predicted plan to destroy public governance in America being carried out just as Trump and the Project 2025 community announced and as concern-voicers/ fear-mongers predicted; many commenters over there were deeply offended at having that pointed out. There is a deep seated group-think silo there summed up by a favored phrase ” a plague on both their houses”. I still remember Yves Smith herself deriding and dismissing fears over Project 2025 as so much TDS about a mere collection of Republican grievance expressions.

If Trump’s return really does stop the genocide in Gaza without restarting it at some opportune moment, then voting or non-voting to permit Trump’s return may well end up being an effective vote against evil and the coming liquidation and disappearance of America may have to be accepted as the price to be paid. But if Trump supports Israel in resuming the genocide anyway from where Israel left off for the moment, then what will the coming liquidation and disappearance of America even have been for ( from an American viewpoint?)

The commentariat over there does not like that kind of questioning. Some people got very sensitive when someone referred to “a plague on both their houses” believers as ‘puristocrats’.

So that would be what is behind the “degradation of discourse since Trump” over the last few weeks would be based on. Since a steady stream of hasbara comments would have been coming in ever since two Octobers ago, it wouldn’t be due to that.

I remember Colonel Lang once writing that he would not permit any hasbara comments on his blog because Zionists and Zionism-supporters had so much of the public square already that he would keep his own blog free of that. But he never said that he wished he could prevent believers in Zionism from even reading his blog. He once wrote in another context that his Catholic faith informed him that every human being is potentially redeemable, whereas those of Calvinist faith believe that the pre-damned stay predamned and are not redemption-possible. Yves Smith’s stated wish that she could prevent believers in Zionism from even READing her blog seems very Calvinist in its approach. I wonder if her first settler colonialist ancestors were either Puritan or Puritan-adjacent. ( She also once condemned the concept of Universal Basic Income because she felt that such ‘free money’ would be bad for the souls and discipline of people recieving it. Hence she preferred Federal Job Guarantee only and NO Universal Basic Income. More Calvinism I suppose).

In all fairness, it is Lambert Strether who was so pleased with the commenters in general that he said several times that ” we have the best commentariat”. Yves Smith never said that anyway. So I don’t think we can accuse Naked Capitalism of hypocrisy on that score because it was one co-blogger saying it and not the official site AS a site.

I again offer my prediction that when Lambert Strether is all the way gone, that even if comments come back up, that the rate of bannings will vastly increase. If comments never come back up, that prediction will never be tested.

I think Yves Smith’s approach to things and stuff will be the cinder block ceiling which puts a hard limit on any growth in readership or money which might have been hoped for. She may indeed decide to close the blog itself all the way down as she offhandedly threatened to do in a reply to a particular commenter. And that would be sad. But it is her business and it is her property, and if she decides to burn it all down or to brick up all the doors and windows and put super-glue in all the locks and fill up the sinks and toilets with concrete, that is her perfect right.

Go look around at any pre-1900 cemetery that hasn’t been ripped up to make way for a freeway or a suburb.
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https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4829a1.htm
If you took your own advice instead of making snide comments you’d know the fact that deaths from infectious disease fell by over 95% before vaccines for those diseases were even introduced.

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Count the number of baby and child graves by year. Up through today.
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Currently 4% of children have autism, and 60% have a chronic illness. Up from 0% and 10% since 1970.
Do you have the courage and humanity to care enough about them to engage in the topic outside of insults and logical fallacies?

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Watch how many innocent children die because they have ignorant, conspiracy-ridden parents.
Those are the troublemakers.
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Do you know what an ad-hominem logical fallacy is?

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My favorite anti-vaccine conspiracy is the one about the Covid vaccines, how “the Secret Masters created the vaccines to kill off billions of people.”
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So far they only killed 20+ million people and even the manufacturers clinical trials show the vaccines increased the chance of dying, being hospitalized and becoming ill but again that’s me discussing the science while you do whatever you’re doing.

https://correlation-canada.org/covid-19-vaccine-associated-mortality-in-the-southern-hemisphere/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/356248984_Worldwide_Bayesian_Causal_Impact_Analysis_of_Vaccine_Administration_on_Deaths_and_Cases_Associated_with_COVID-19_A_BigData_Analysis_of_145_Countries

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Here’s the thing. If the “Secret Masters” wanted to kill anyone off, it would be the people who *did not do what they were told* as those are the troublemakers.
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Do you know what a red herring logical fallacy is?

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So, if anything, it is the folks who are *not* vaccinated against Covid that have something to fear.
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Oh, so it’s not fear that you and billions of people have been harmed that’s preventing you from seriously engaging in the topic and reading the science? What is it then?

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Because they do not do what they are told. And they are just outright ignorant, “I Googled” it damnfools.
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Preach it brother! Tell all those people who can and did read the science how dumb and crazy they are for not following orders so they could get back to the TV.
War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Oakchair, if you want to “discuss the science,” you have to be willing to critically evaluate so-called scientific sources and engage with criticism of them, not just post anything anybody writes and call it “science” because it agrees with your ideology.

https://science.feedback.org/review/analysis-claiming-covid-19-vaccines-killed-17-million-people-flawed/

The analysis, titled “COVID-19 vaccine-associated mortality in the Southern Hemisphere”, examined all-cause mortality in 17 countries. The analysis claimed that all-cause mortality data didn’t indicate any benefit from COVID-19 vaccination.

The analysis attributed spikes in excess mortality before vaccines were rolled out to “sudden changes in medical and institutional protocols and government responses, tied to the declaration of a pandemic”, claiming that these deaths “cannot be due to a globally spreading viral respiratory disease”. Put simply, the analysis denied the fact that COVID-19 had caused a pandemic.

In addition, it claimed that all-cause mortality only began to rise after COVID-19 vaccines were deployed.

…

Jeffrey Morris, a biostatistician and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, questioned the validity of the conclusions by Rancourt et al. in a tweet. He pointed out that the spikes in excess mortality tended to line up with surges in COVID-19 deaths much more closely than vaccinations did (see Figure 1 below), yet the analysis didn’t acknowledge or consider COVID-19 as a possible explanation for the observed spikes in excess mortality.

https://science.feedback.org/review/scientific-evidence-shows-covid-19-vaccination-reduces-risk-infection-mortality-analysis-cases-deaths-from-145-countries-methodologically-flawed-steve-kirsch/

Beattie claimed to have analyzed the “causal impact” of COVID-19 vaccines on COVID-19 cases and deaths. To do this, he obtained data from Our World in Data, a public COVID-19 database, for the total cases and deaths in more than 140 countries for the past 12 to 16 months before vaccine administration began in those countries. He then used the data to create projections of what the numbers of cases and deaths at the current period would have been like without the vaccines. He then compared these numbers with the actual cases and deaths after COVID-19 vaccines came into use. This type of analysis, which uses aggregated data at the population level, is also known as an ecological study.

Because his analysis showed that countries had a higher number of cases and deaths after COVID-19 vaccines came into use, relative to the projected numbers based on the pre-vaccine period, he concluded that the vaccines were the cause of these increases.

But this conclusion is erroneous. Beattie’s analysis is fundamentally flawed because he failed to account for other variables that also directly affect cases and deaths (confounding factors), such as the spread of virus variants with increased transmissibility like Delta, public health measures that were applied at different times, and healthcare capacity. Indeed, one of the limitations of ecological studies is that it’s difficult to adjust for confounding factors.

Beattie also didn’t account for the fact that countries in general have a mixture of unvaccinated and vaccinated people. In order to know whether there is a basis for attributing changes in infection or deaths to vaccination, it’s necessary to know the vaccination status of the cases and deaths, and distinguish outcomes based on vaccination status during analysis, which Beattie didn’t do. Given that the data used by Beattie didn’t indicate whether the cases and deaths were predominantly in people who were vaccinated, it isn’t possible to attribute the cases and deaths to vaccination based on his analysis alone. The failure to recognize this limitation is known as the ecological fallacy.

Contrary to Beattie’s claim, we know from analyses comparing the proportion of cases and deaths based on vaccination status that the vaccines reduce the risk of illness and death, not increase it. For example, Our World in Data performed such an analysis for Switzerland, Chile, the U.S., and England, and found that for all ages, unvaccinated people had a greater likelihood of dying from COVID-19 than those who were fully vaccinated (see below Figures 1 to 4).

Of course for people who only care about ideology, rather than science, no evidence or arguments will every be persuasive.

War is peace
Freedom is slavery
Ignorance is strength

Meaning to add: I could be wrong re: a protest. But NC actually acting in the world would be highly out of character for them.