“Friends, friends! This is supposed to be a happy occasion! Let’s not argue about who killed who...”

Finally we can get back to the business of life!

Let the young ones among us lead the way!

This investigation of yours into the Pfizer delay for a week of the announcement of this virus is one of your most important (on-line) scoops ever! Per your column, Dr. Bourla’s book confirms your story with no explanation given by the man.

I don’t think it was worthwhile to put those fraction-of-a-percentage-point figures on what would have supposedly won Georgia and Nevada for the GOP. This is not at all to detract from your main point, but the D-squad can overcome numbers like 0.13%. Did you not see what they did from the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the 3rd through a few days later, for multiple States? All they need are goals for each of the number of close States needed by a certain deadline on those Red/Blue maps given by their Media, with no calls of victory made. They can go from there.

See, this does not negate your point, though, Steve. You give us the numbers Trump needed, not what he might have gotten with a day-before (or anytime before) announcement about the Pfizer vaccine. What he might have gotten was 5% more of the popular vote, I don’t know.

As you well know, at that time people were still freaked out, many near hysteria, about this latest bug out of the Orient. That went well across party lines, as much as the blue-squad wanted to bad-mouth the virus. It could have overcome the ’20 CheatFest even.

Let’s say this big news would have swung the election. That’s not a stretch. But so would the major media if they hadn’t suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop. Remember Twitter suspended the New York Post until after the election for daring to discuss its contents.

What else? These things come in threes, right? I’m still waiting for a polling precinct captain to go rogue and admit to misbehavior in Georgia.

And why don’t we hear anything nowadays about Hunter and Joe Biden and their many contacts in the Ukraine? Not relevant?

And what about the FBI persecuting James O’Keefe and Project Veritas, even though they didn’t even publish Ashley Biden’s diary? Is this the proper business of the FBI?

https://thepostmillennial.com/breaking-project-veritas-reveals-bidens-doj-spied-on-journalists-with-secret-warrants

Now it’s come out that the Biden DOJ got secret warrants to compel Microsoft to turn over Project Veritas
Emails

A few more points about your column:

1) Aren’t you being somewhat naive about why Dr. Bourla of Pfizer would have not only caused the delay in that announcement till after the ’20 election, but also not write one bit about it in his book about the vaccine development? Was Deep State pressure, blackmail or bribery, not a possibility?

2)

My guess is that Bourla was mainly thinking: Winter is coming. There’d be another bad Covid wave in the winter of 2020–2021.

My guess is Bourla was thinking “Beat out Moderna.” “Keep on the good side of the government/Deep State.” “Keep pushing for the vax to be mandatory.” “How much will my bonus be?”, and “How hot a trophy wife can I get after this?”

3) I think you are mistaken about the Moderna diversity delay’s being caused by Trump’s administration. Ha, by strict definition, I suppose it was, but the HHS was not working for President Trump, ever. He never did get around to draining the swamp, if you recall.

S/B: “… announcement of the vaccine…”

AND

… bad-mouth the vaccine.”

Sorry.

Plus a % for Hunter’s laptop, which the left was slightly concerned about until they breathed a sigh of relief to learn it was “Russian distinfo” and they could dismiss it… for 17 months.

Read the whole thing there.

Why should I waste my time?

A new CDC report

If it comes from the CDC, it’s useless, like their flip-flop mask studies.

finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious

I thought at first they said “99%”?

Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

LOL. I’m sure they will revise that one later on.

Look, how “efficient” can be a vaccine that you need to take “boosters” for it every three months, in perpetuity?

It’s crap, it was only forced on everyone for the money, and that’s the benevolent view.
Bourla is a richer Jew than he was before, so there’s that.

Meanwhile in Thailand, the government (not Pfizer!) is paying $45.65 million to 12,714 people who reported bad side effects of the vaccine (including amputations, etc).

https://www.phnompenhpost.com/international/thailand-pay-45m-over-vaccine-side-effects

12,714 doesn’t seem like many people, but supposedly only 24,000 people died in Thailand from Covid, and most of them over 80 years old. So I’m not sure which risk is worse.

On the Covid issue, Sailer is just a boomer idiot, his opinions are useless.

WWT update (T for Tipping):

Pulitzer Dope Nikole 1619® has now come out with a treatise on why black people don’t tip.

Spoiler alert: It’s because they don’t have to! And why’s that? Three guesses, and, if you know what’s good for you, your first one had better include a reference to 400 years of slavery!

https://mol.im/a/10640883

Read just slightly between the lines and it becomes clear that Nikole believes slavery never existed anywhere before 1619.

What’s a few lives to stop Trump?
Personally I am waiting for one of the unvaccinated military personnel to say, “Like the C-inC I don’t trust any Trump vaccine”!

If only Blompf had won, we’d have gotten four more years of tax cuts for corporations like Pfizer and bragging about how well “our corporations” were doing in the stock market.

Bourla’s book is way down at #8966 on the Amazon charts, selling fifty copies a day in a country of three hundred million. This, in spite of a big pr campaign. The demand for the boosters has collapsed with only 80,000 people a day now getting them here in the U.S. The British Guardian reports that hundreds of thousands of booster shots will need to be thrown away over in Britain when they soon reach the expiration date due to lack of demand. The same thing is likely to happen here in the U.S., a massive waste of government spending. Many of the vaccine proponents here at Unz.com have fallen silent about the vaccines and are now playing “look, a squirrel” and redirecting attention over to the Ukraine-Russia conflict.

A more interesting question than the announcement date, to me at least, is why the big pr campaign for the vaccines has failed. It recently came out that the U.S. government passed out a billion dollars to various media organizations to push the vaccines. This same government also pressured Big Tech to censor any negative information about the vaccines and any positive information about alternatives like early treatment programs involving off label uses of already approved drugs.

The biggest factor was probably greed. They attempted to sell the vaccines to everyone, thereby increasing Big Pharma profits, by claiming they would prevent transmission of the disease. Some combination of the vaccines and boosters quickly losing efficacy and the virus mutating to get around them caused this not to be true. Everyone could see the huge numbers of cases in multiple countries where most of the adult population was vaccinated. They could also see vaccinated people, like Justin Trudeau and now Jen Psaki, getting it a second time. The vaccines do reduce deaths among the elderly so vaccine proponents should probably have focused on encouraging older people to get vaccinated, along with attempts to protect the elderly from infected people. This sort of focused protection was advocated by epidemiologists at places like Harvard, Stanford and Oxford but they were labeled “fringe epidemiologists” by government bureaucrats like Fauci and Collins and their advice was ignored.

Our good friend Dr Bourla deserves commendation for quickly bringing a product to market that was beneficial, however slightly, to high risk groups.

He deserves condemnation for subsequently trying to maximize his profits by pushing the product on lower-risk (or no risk) groups for whom the data was quite clear that the harms outweigh the benefits, especially children.

Then again, he’s only a veterinarian, so he’s not really bound by pesky medical ethics issues.

Trump’s hope that an economic recovery, a Covid vaccine or a Biden scandal could shake up the race faded with the last light of October.

——————

He actually had two of three and they were actively denied to him by the gatekeepers because he’s obviously so evil and badly orange.

From what I’ve read- he didn’t “explain” anything.

Without going into unnecessary details, his vocal silence & beating around the bush are strong indicators it was all about derailing Trump’s chances.

Run before you can walk. Always working in emergency mode. Everything due yesterday. That’s the Pfizer way. Bourla will be long gone, enjoying his island retreat, when the consequences of all the shortcuts that shouldn’t have been taken are realized.

I must apologize to Mr. Steve. I didn’t mean to be mean or offensive.

But he has been so wrong or superficial on this issue, that I really have no time anymore to hear what he has to say on that issue. He should probably just change the subject. Since Russia invaded the Ukraine, no one is talking about Covid anymore, it is as if it hadn’t even existed. And maybe it didn’t.

Maybe I was just naive, but until 2020 I thought it was possible to vote for a candidate who could improve things, that the scientific method would reveal the truth that COVID was not as bad as we were being led to believe, that doctors were honest, and that the American people would stand up to the bullshit they were being fed and refuse to comply with the idiotic masking and the forced injections of a substance that was not an actual vaccine for which the pharmaceuticals were given immunity from liability.

I was wrong. Every institution in this country is corrupt, including medicine, there is no free speech, and the people are sheep.

“This extraordinary freeze may well have denied Donald Trump his much-feared “October Surprise” upon which his vaccine-centric pandemic and reelection strategies hinged.”

Looks like you moved the goalposts. In a previous post, you opined “Both Pfizer and Moderna Could Have Announced Their Vaccines’ Efficacy Before the Election, Which Likely Would Have Meant a Trump Victory”.

So deep down even you are not that convinced. It’s just that you don’t like being wrong…

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/11/18/fact-check-pfizer-received-covid-vaccine-data-after-election-day/6267242002/

And Pfizer did not have access to the data until the Sunday AFTER the election and was not privy to the results before then. It was a double blind study—neither the trial participants nor the company knew who was getting the vaccine. An examination of decisions made by Pfizer and the FDA in the aftermath shows that while their actions inevitably affected the timing of the clinical trial results, there is NO proof decisions were made with the intent of imperiling Trump’s reelection prospects. In other words, the Taki’s article is speculative grist mill.

‘Would that have changed the political outcome? Perhaps.”

Can we spot the homage to Noo Yawk Times burying the lede? Yes, we can. It’s who we are. And here was a nice finishing touch with “immense pressures would have been exerted on Republican Representatives—ideology, blackmail, bribery, riot, insurrection, and perhaps a coup—to break ranks and elect Biden. So, we’ll never know.” This is Mr. Sailer’s tacit acknowledgement that Trump’s various war rooms exerted the same political pressure which led to January 6.

Let us also NOTICE Trump turned the vaccines into a toxic highly partisan political issue similar to hydroxychloroquine. As I had stated earlier…

Mr. Sailer is assuming here:

1. there was a subset of voters who were awaiting news about a potential vaccine under Trump’s watch, and were ready to change their mind the moment there was an announcement;

2. there was a subset of voters who up until the election day were uncertain who they were going to vote for, and needed “good news”, in particular on the vaccine front, and decided not to vote for Trump because he failed to deliver.

The problem with Sailer’s peddling of this vaccine political conspiracy theory, while possible, is that there had been tens of millions of mail-in votes already casted before Pfizers alleged malfeasance, and thus they would have been unaffected compared to those going in person to the polls. More than likely, people had already made up their mind about who they were going to vote for.

Of course, while we should give Trump for authorizing Operation: Warp Speed to find a vaccine for a global scourge, is that not what a president should be doing anyways? Besides, let us NOTICE that Pfizer notably did not accept government money to develop, test, or expand manufacturing capacity under Trump’s Operation Warp Speed initiative to quickly find a vaccine. Pfizer had partnered with the vaccine’s original developer, Germany’s BioNTech, in March 2020. The White House announced Operation Warp Speed in May 2020.

‘It’s hard to remember at this point, but in 2020, Trump was the pro-vaccine candidate”

Not quite. Remember, Trump had passed on ensuring more vaccine doses would be made available for American citizens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/us/trump-covid-vaccine-pfizer.html

“From an ethical standpoint, however…”

Mr. Sailer, you are selective about what is and what is not ethical. Get off your sanctimonious high horse. You know damn well Trump before, during, and after his presidency respected the line of what is acceptable legal behavior and what is self serving corruption. And recall it was Trump who stated he was going to win no matter what, and he primed his supporters into that type of thinking. When he won, no fraud. If he lost, there was fraud. That is insane.

Finally, let us assume Biden had lost narrowly instead of winning narrowly. And suppose the Pfizer vaccine had been a total failure. Would we now be reading your narratives about how Pfizer delayed announcing the failure to *help* Trump?

Don’t answer that, Mr. Sailer, we already know…

However, from the standpoint of the higher morality of denying Trump an October Surprise, it’s saintly.

From a shareholder wealth maximization standpoint, I’d criticize Bourlas only for not realizing earlier how rabid the front-running Democrats and the media were to deny Trump any sort of vaccine October Surprise.

We’ve seen intense bias for years. But we’ve never seen a campaign like this across all sectors
— openly ridiculous, economy crashing “covid” policies
— riots, civic destruction and cancelling rule-of-law … all over a lie (lies big and small)
— blatant news suppression
— de-platforming regime opponents
— illegally changing election laws for the “pandemic” to promote vote harvesting and fraud
— direct vote counting fraud (who knows how much?)
along with all the usual media lying and spinning…

all to elect an elderly, obviously declined and mentally unfit candidate–who was at best a so-so midwit even when he was young and healthy–and his odious, unpleasant, mentally deficient/unserious (IQ and/or work effort) AA hire sidekick … who’d launched her career whoring herself out to a married politician–the most appallingly unfit ticket to ever (or at least during my life) run on a major party ticket.

Bourla can pat himself on the back for cheating on his ethical duty as CEO to be part of it.

~~

And the really amazing thing … if Trump was even a marginally better candidate–less of a bozo–he would have won anyway.

Rather, “You know damn well Trump before, during, and after his presidency does NOT respect the line of what is acceptable legal behavior and what is self serving corruption.”

A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant. Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

The CDC puts these numbers as preventing hospitalization. The Omicron variant was much weaker than the previous strains, so it is hard to say this with any certainty. The vaccines were originally sold as being able to prevent infection, we were told they would end the spread of Covid. Many vaccine zealots still think this is true. They believe if everyone American took the vaccine the moment he or she became eligible the virus would have stopped circulating. Even Bouria admitting the Pfizer vaccine doesn’t prevent infection isn’t enough to convince them. Why are Pfizer and Moderna being allowed to change the narrative in this regard?

Pfizer ill make money regardless of who runs any country which tolerates them. I don’t think they cared about Trump. Maybe there was a need for data massage, or enrollment of less risk trial participants, or who knows.

Patent owners, such as Moderna, wanted to prove that RNA is safe to inject, in order to use it in other products. To my amusement, they managed to create far more suspicion than if they tried RNA in a less salient trial. On the plus side for them, they instilled, in pharmacists and doctors, the false idea that RNA can be stored in places warmer than -80 Celsius.

The other positive development is that, failing to do squat to the virus, they are now further pushed towards the niche they already were looking for – cancer prevention. But governments will have a much harder time pushing citizens to vaccinate against cancer (see the HPV fiasco). Also, normal humans disdain even the few things they can do to avoid cancer, such as stopping smoking. So, the upcoming anticancer vaccines will never be used in significant numbers.

Conversely, a more successful vaccine would have led to antidiabetes and antihypertension vaccines. We hardly have treatments for the effects of these diseases. Yes, one can take insulin, but that is really working only for the few who have childhood diabetes. Everybody else takes useless drugs, and would have been provided with another, equally useless shot. The stakes were much higher than US presidency.

OT – Steve: The Biden administration is tackling the problem of blacks and latinos not having expensive enough homes.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-administration-fight-racial-bias-us-real-estate-appraisals-2022-03-23/

The election was stolen, COVID was blown way out of proportion, and the vaccines are an abject failure.

I’m not going to say that you will always be right if you assume that the mainstream media is always lying, but you will be more right.

The delay was a strategic business decision by Pfizer. If they didn’t delay the vaccine, they would have been seen as Trump boosters and the media would have been fear mongering against big pharma and discussions of myocarditis, blood clots, and other negative health effects would have gotten significant airtime. This would have caused local politicians to fight harder against vaccine mandates and created a huge amount of doubt, leading to a much smaller percentage of people getting vaccinated, meaning a smaller revenue stream. By waiting, they were able to get the media on their side and sell the vaccine to the public and create huge profits.

Unethical? Yes, but extremely profitable.

Did you read Steve’s linked article? Because if so, you need to work on your reading comprehension. I’ll just pick a couple points for response. Anyone else with some time please feel free to do the same. Corvinus posts are a target rich environment.

And Pfizer did not have access to the data until the Sunday AFTER the election and was not privy to the results before then.

Steve noted the reason the data was unavailable in this quote: “Gruber said that Pfizer and BioNTech had decided in late October…to stop having their lab confirm cases of Covid-19 in the study, instead leaving samples in storage…. It also means that if Pfizer had held to the original plan, the data would likely have been available in October, as its CEO, Albert Bourla, had initially predicted.”

See how it works if you actually read and understand the linked article?

Mr. Sailer, you are selective about what is and what is not ethical.

You talking about selectivity of focus is funny. Thanks for the laugh.

Would we now be reading your narratives about how Pfizer delayed announcing the failure to *help* Trump?

Interesting counterfactual. But deeply stupid (h/t ic1000, IMHO that Corvinus comment was a great example of his point). How would that have “helped” Trump? Steve laid out his argument. All you are doing is throwing feces at it.
https://babylonbee.com/news/senate-to-be-replaced-with-room-full-of-monkeys-throwing-feces

it remains effective at reducing the odds of dying or being ventilated due to Covid.

Or perhaps not. There are intelligent, numerate people on the internet who suspect that the efficacy is an illusion, brought about by the details of the methods used to present the data.

Of course even if it does reduce the risk of dying of/with Covid that’s not much use to you if the vaccine kills you. Nor is it much use to your neighbours if the vaccination makes you a better spreader of the virus. That too seems to be a real possibility.

The reluctance of government agencies to make “granular” data available to independent analysts is a scandal. But a few governments have done better than average. Unfortunately two of the better ones – Scotland and “UK” (which may mean England & Wales for all I know) – have announced that they are going to stop publishing those data.

How would you interpret those decisions?

Just a note, an election was, in fact, thrown into the house, in the so-called Corrupt Bargain of 1824 that made John Quincy Adams president.

Powerful pressure can be put on corporations from the Left/Deep State. The Right is without power in this regard. And that is why we are where we are.

Galling and truly shameless that the NYT would crow about there being no Biden scandal, when they lied to the public about the information revealed on Hunter Biden’s laptop and only admitted in passing that it was true in the 24th paragraph of a story published a week ago. As always, the Times didn’t bother to apologize to its readers for having hidden the truth from them. Apparently, the paper still has a core of readers who appreciate having their news curated so as not to undermine their worldview.

I have a question about the 2020 election. I’ll use as an example the recent effort in California to recall Governor Newsom. As in any recall effort, the signatures to authorize the recall election were scrutinized, making sure every address was correct, the person was a registered voter, etc. Many signatures were invalidated as a result. However, in the 2020 presidential election, in many states voters were allowed to vote without showing a photo ID and mail-in ballots were could not be validated in an audit because once they have been separated from their envelopes it is nearly impossible to do so. (I believe this is the case but since it is almost impossible these days to know what to believe, I’m open to further information.)

I’ve noticed this discrepancy in several such situations: the votes to nominate or unseat politicians are subjected to far greater scrutiny than the votes to elect them. Funny system we have.

Thanks. The underlying report is interesting.

News article: https://freddiemac.gcs-web.com/news-releases/news-release-details/freddie-mac-research-explores-causes-appraisal-valuation-gap

Full report: https://www.freddiemac.com/research/insight/20210920-home-appraisals

It appears to be a thoughtful piece without any obvious “Doh!”s like comparing mortgage approval rates without comparing assets. But this has potential in that area.

A challenge in this exercise is to properly account for unobserved changes in housing quality over time and housing quality differences across race and ethnicity.

That in reference to blacks and Latinos possibly overpaying. Note footnote 16 which did find black overpayment of 1.6% in four cities.

Can anyone else come up with explanations for the appraisal-sales gap other than overpayment by minorities?

P.S. Note the complete lack of mention of Asians in that article. Perhaps a clue?

All he had to do was build the wall and Trump would have been re-elected.

Only a highly motivated and tendentious mindset can think “may well have denied Donald Trump his much-feared ‘October Surprise’” is a massive shifting of the goalposts from “Likely Would Have Meant a Trump Victory.” These are both common phrases for asserting a hypothetical, and the arguments around these quotes make it clear they refer to the same assertion.

What actually happened is a collusion between FDA and Pfizer. The official story is that Pfizer decided to delay, informed FDA and FDA gave the delay green light. The real story, hopefully to be incontrovertibly documented in the future, is that never-Trumpists in FDA in no uncertain terms nudged Pfizer, which wasn’t in a position to refuse because the vaccine’s fortunes and the outcome of the competition with Moderna 100% depended on FDA’s good disposition toward Pfizer.

Help me to understand here: are appraisals made with full knowledge of the potential buyer? In that case, it is probably just bias–or reality seeping in–on the part of the appraiser that a black buyer will lower the value of the property somewhat. If the seller knows that they can get asking price from a white or Asian buyer, then there is no reason for them to sell to the black buyer, assuming that there exists a reasonable chance of attracting other buyers.

If the appraiser is unaware of the race of the potential buyer, then I would be curious to hear explanations for this.

A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant. Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

That’s not what Bourla said…

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2022/01/11/pfizer-ceo-our-vaccines-offer-little-protection-n2601670

This is a perfect example of how the fake left-wing “fact check” industry keeps people stupid and uninformed. Corvinus sees an article that mentions how Pfizer mysteriously refused to collect its data on schedule in order to avoid reporting the study results before the election.

Corvinus knows that the MSM has already created pre-loaded anti-Trump talking points for all occassions. So he just Googles: “fact check -Pfizer delayed vaccine to hurt Trump.” And, sure enough, USA Today pops up “fact-checking” the claim as “false.” Of course, the ground given for the “false” verdict is that Pfizer didn’t “know” the results because it had deliberately delayed collecting its own data. But the MSM said “false.” So case closed.

Lying “fact checks” are probably the most dishonest thing that the lying media does. They are genuinely awful people. https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/invasion-fact-checkers

Not everyone felt at ease with this at the beginning…. Pretty soon, though, the team’s passion to cross the line as fast as possible with a vaccine before October 2020 replaced hesitation…. Looking back, I think this attitude—Time is life—was the most important success factor for this project…. I didn’t ask people to do it in eight years. I asked them to do it in eight months.

Gotta say i’m utterly underwhelmed by the “speed” of the vaccine development.

This was not the Manhattan Project. Vaccines are a very, very established/developed technology. The mRNA technology was young and hadn’t been used like this but was sitting on the shelf. The target stabilized spike protein that was going to be used was figured out … in three days–three days!–after the Fauci virus structure was published in February–February!

Ok, you need a mad dash of a few months to ramp up production. But this delay … all summer long and all through the fall … was for trials.

C’mon. If this is “just the flu”–fine. But if you are claiming this is some sort of world historical crisis and you’re closing schools, shuttering businesses, throwing millions of people out of work–intentionally collapsing the economy costing trillions of dollars … then get on with it…

Pay some volunteers and do challenge tests–vax ’em and expose them to the virus. Heck, you can make part of the offer be $2m to your kids if you die–from the Fauci or the vax. Lots of people in the target demo would be ok with that deal–knowing their children would have money buy houses, start a family and get on with life. It fails. On to the next candidate.

Again, you’ve declared this to be an emergency that’s killing people left and right. And yeah, there were tens of thousands of Fauci deaths over the summer. Every month faster saves maybe 20,000 lives–scale up by 20x for worldwide. And you’re tanking the economy, destroying peoples lives and rolling trillions off the printing presses.

There just seems to be this complete mismatch between the claimed “crisis of our lives” and the tepid “we must follow our established procedures, not place anyone at risk”. The whole response has been very passive–passive aggressive–and feminine. No aggressive let’s take good ideas and run with them. No “let’s try this”–HEPA filters, UV lights in everyone’s furnace, ventilation suggestions, vitamin D, zinc. Nope, the only action was demanding everyone be passive–stay at home and cower … and do what “the authorities” demand.

I had to read the BB article to see if they made a distinction between monkeys and apes. No mention of the distinction between the species but it is mentioned that both are included as the picture shows.

I think it is only monkeys that throw the poo. Apes are more civilized…..

Nope, the only action was demanding everyone be passive–stay at home and cower … and do what “the authorities” demand.

Would you have supported Chinese-/South Korean-style, aggressive (and privacy-intrusive/Big Brother) contact tracing and quarantining of the infected (especially early in the pandemic) in lieu of mass school/business closures and other broadly-enacted restrictions?

Do you think that a majority of Americans would have supported the same?

Do you think that the USG and state authorities had the capacity to effect such a policy well even if there were support for it?

These are not leading questions. I am genuinely curious what you (and other commenters) think on this.

OT:

Talking of Covid, Worldometers is showing U.S. death count at 999,792. Today they may cross 1,000,000.

“Did you not see what they did from the wee hours of Tuesday morning”

This. Mrs. Prude was stoked into the early evening hours of the election with Trump having momentum. I paid no attention and went to bed. The next morning she was strangely silent. They had stopped the counting. WFT.

That has never happened in any election ever. The count and the chatter and the excitement goes on all through the wee hours until there is a verdict or a “too close to call”.

I called B.S. right then. The election, from that point on was a fraud. Trump probably won. We will never know because it was never adjudicated.

Of course if Trump was declared the winner, we would be in our seventeenth month of rioting and mayhem and burning. So maybe it’s better to live under the illegitimate rule of retards and degenerates. It seems most people prefer that.

Corner the guy on his book tour and ask him directly about the gap.

The virus was beneficial to young people, in that public school shutdowns eliminated the pandemic of bullying within the institution. (Cov19 was taxpayer negative, in that the schools still received the per-warm body funds they had pre-claimed, ++)

That was then. NYC schools are now in a panic over the number of kids who left the system, during the shutdowns, who haven’t come back. NYC council members are leaning on the $360K school “chancellor” to make enrollment boosting a high priority goal. The government advertising for tax leeches.

I am so stealing that picture!

“Would you have supported Chinese-/South Korean-style, aggressive (and privacy-intrusive/Big Brother) contact tracing and quarantining of the infected (especially early in the pandemic) in lieu of mass school/business closures and other broadly-enacted restrictions?”

Seeing as how the cooties were never worse than Hong Kong Flu or Bird Flu, or Pig Flu or any of the other nasties for the past sixty years, NO; I would not support the wild over-reaction.

“Just the flu, bro” looks a lot better in retrospect than the very feminine hysteria that was the approved reaction.

I read Bourla’s Moonshot carefully in the hope of finally hearing a horse’s-mouth explanation of his curious decision in what he calls “the most important trial in the world” to shut down laboratory processing of samples from late October 2020 until the day after the election.

You may as well as read OJ Simpson’s biography and expect to discover the truth about the murders of his ex-wife and Mr. Goldman. Criminals or fraudsters don’t admit what they’ve done or discuss their motivations. Duh! The guy wanted and needed Trump out as under a replacement regime there would be significantly more emphasis on pushing vaccines. Full stop.

Hate to break it to you: no one except Trump voters cared about Hunter Biden and his crack-fueled d*** pix. If anything, Trump looked like an a-hole for bringing it up.

actually one of Steve’s worst and least important ‘scoops’ ever. pretty much everybody is aware that tons of corporations are against Republicans in general and Trump specifically, and had been operating that way for years before november 2020. dozens of companies were OPENLY against Trump as soon as he took office, posting to their official social media accounts that they were part of ‘the resistance’ literally for years since 2017. it’s not a surprise at all that one (probably most) of the pharmaceutical companies was also against him.

almost all the government health officials were clearly against Trump. Fauci, Redfield, Birx, and every CDC staffer, every one a career democrat. the majority of ‘his’ own government team were working against him. almost every election official in America was against Trump since democrats run the elections in every state. every democrat state AG was against Trump. the CEO of every internet company was against Trump and ran a non-stop internet news campaign against Trump for 4 years and in favor of whatever democrats were running against him. do we even need to add that all television networks save one were fanatically against him for 4 years like i’ve never seen.

in the face of all that it’s pretty much nonsense to think this single vaccine trial by itself would have swung the election to Trump. first of all, does Steve think the internet companies and television companies can’t sit on a story? they can sit on CRITICAL stories for YEARS. all they had to do here was sit on a story for less than a month. even if they didn’t sit on the story, democrats make sure via early voting that late breaking stories are less relevant to the vote. another reason to eliminate early voting.

Trump could have swung the election to Trump if he had run a better campaign though. and had spent 4 years continuously hammering on election security instead of 4 months. that would have been enough to overcome the obvious, blatant election fraud campaign nationwide.

You posted articles from USAToday and NYTimes to prove your point you fool. Whatever is in those articles. The opposite is true.

Corvinus posts are a target rich environment.

The Crow is especially upset at the GOP at the moment because they are defaming his favorite artists along with a Supreme Court candidate’s mild treatment of them. She’s from the party of Joseph Rosenbaum, after all.

Nice false dichotomy you have there. Be a shame if someone translated it into Swedish.

Given the powerful forces against him, I don’t think Trump had a chance. Had he won he might well have been assassinated. Another mentally ill , frustrated lone gunman.

I don’t think America will ever have another Republican President. The judiciary which makes the laws and the civil service such as the FBI are totally White hating liberals. As is every big medium and small business in America.

FYI any business owner who votes republican but hires non White immigrants legal or illegal is anti White. From Microsoft to Mom and Pop restaurants.,

Steve moderating Jack D’s, Bardon Kaldan and Corvinus’ useless comments:

Steve moderating other commenters:

Me waiting for Steve to approve my comments:

What about an instance when popular opinion is insane? The current sentiment regarding war with Russia needs to be vetoed by the deep state and the military.
The part I find most insane is that Europe has essentially outsourced its foreign policy and military to US dominated and funded NATO. Great, until they want you to directly bear some risk.
The wild US enthusiasm has nothing to do with Ukraine, formerly a part of the USSR. But rather an overpowering desire to change the subject. From Trump, from Covid, from Afghanistan, from the establishment reaction to Trump or TDS, etc. And the cringeworthy virtue signaling.
The fact it is the first non Neocon provoked war in forever. At least Biden blurted out that we “aren’t doing WW 3”.
War never ages well. But the US impulse to endlessly double down on bad ideas makes this dangerous. If Ukraine is really winning, we don’t have to do anything. But the people arguing that the hardest want to do the most to get more involved.
American politicians need to remember that the best strategy is to let someone else do the fighting and dying. It can be popular too, but war is the crack of popular sentiment.

Be a shame if someone translated it into Swedish.

Then translate it from Swedish into Korean or even Finnish.

Sweden’s performance during the pandemic was unimpressive. It was better than the U.S. only because Sweden is generally a healthier country than America (fewer fatties, fewer people with co-morbidities, fewer dumb minorities, etc.).

South Korea’s performance was impressive. The other Nordic countries (sans Sweden) also did very well.

Sweden did not.

U.S. – 3056 deaths per million

Sweden – 1770 deaths

Denmark – 946 deaths

Finland – 534 deaths

Norway – 408 deaths

South Korea – 259 deaths

Of course these stats wouldn’t matter as much if Sweden’s greater relative freedom during the pandemic had allowed its economy to prosper more than that of it neighbors, but that didn’t happen, either. Sweden didn’t get a positive tradeoff for ignoring the pandemic. It just got more dead people.

All you have done here is rely on your crutch of “you cannot trust the media”, rather than specifically address the points made in the source.

The larger issue is that your “Fake News” insinuation is a farce, a joke. It leads people to become patently ill-informed. How? Because all it takes is someone to utter that phrase, and the assumption becomes “true”. A person who desires to be informed delves into the matter by perusing several sources and by astutely investigating one’s own recency or confirmation biases. In this manner, the person is more likely to arrive at a more objective finding of the available facts. Instead, anything that does not automatically fit into one’s crafted narrative as “fact” or “truth” becomes “Fake News”.

It is virtually impossible to argue with those people who cling on this “Fake News” or “media lies” meme. Any fact one provides an argument, they immediately attack the SOURCE, rather than the SUBSTANCE. Unfortunately, this leads more people to become ignorant by facilitating echo chambers and confirmation bias. We are all guilty of it, just more people employ it on a regular basis compared to other people. Even Mr. Sailer and Mr. Unz? Of course. On one hand, they tacitly encourage readers to peddle this “Fake News” mantra. On the other hand, they latch on to MSM stories that seemingly support their conclusions.

OT: Biden or his speechwriter has been reading ‘The Fourth Turning’. Remember when it was dismissed as ‘Bannon’s bible’ and dismissed as having been ‘debunked by historians’ and implied to be outright fascist by the MSM?

https://twitter.com/MaajidNawaz/status/1506072187215753218

“We are at an inflection point in the world. It occurs every 3 or 4 generations… there’s gonna be a New World Order”

Cliodynamics is just a macro version of noticing the children of the rich are often bad with money but it the implications of the historical patterns disturb the modern American social scientists because one of the things it implies is that the decline of societies is heavily correlated with their tolerance of foreigners and immigrants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory

Would you have supported Chinese-/South Korean-style, aggressive (and privacy-intrusive/Big Brother) contact tracing and quarantining of the infected (especially early in the pandemic) in lieu of mass school/business closures and other broadly-enacted restrictions?

Do you think that a majority of Americans would have supported the same?

My answer: Of course not. I’m sure you agree.

In 2020, on May 8, Steve wrote this entry (excerpted) about COVID data collection:

https://www.unz.com/isteve/is-it-safer-to-visit-a-coffee-shop-or-a-gym

Is It Safer to Visit a Coffee Shop or a Gym?

My feeling is, however, that researchers should be allowed to get their hands on track-and-trace files because they ought to be highly useful at informing the public about which places are more and which are less risky. Don’t just rely on the first case, look at one thousand (or more) cases. Publish the results.

If Pfizer announces a successful vaxxine before the 2020 election and, thus, President Trump wins reelection, the fakestream media then goes on to accurately chronicle the vaxxine’s dangers and deaths, CNN and MSNBC broadcast a running total of TrumpVax deaths and injuries reported to VAERS alongside an ever-accelerating COVID bodycount, and Americans would know the TrumpVax is a disaster, leading to a second impeachment of Trump and public calls by his own party to resign, plus continuous years-long imposition of facediapering and lockdowns until we create an effective vaccine.

God bless Pfizer for electing Diaper Joe – his election forced the fakestream media to pretend the clotshot is Safe And Effective and granted at least a temporary respite from CoronaHoax abuses.

On the other hand, they latch on to MSM stories that seemingly support their conclusions.

Far from being illustrative of their hypocrisy, it is a perfectly sensible approach. The legal system has always (properly) regarded a declaration against interest as having greater credibility.

In a February 2017 article from Quartz two journalists commented on the theory saying: “it is too vague to be proven wrong, and has not been taken seriously by most professional historians. But it is superficially compelling, and plots out to some degree how America’s history has unfolded since its founding”.

In an April 2017 article from Politico, David Greenberg, a professor of history and media studies at Rutgers University, described Strauss–Howe generational theory as “crackpot theories”.

A May 2017 article from Quartz described Strauss–Howe generational theory as “pseudoscience”.

That’s great — now they can pay higher property taxes just like whites!

Or they just would have needed to airlift in a few thousand more ballots in the middle of th night in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, etc. to make up the difference.

That screen capture is interesting. It appears the ASL interpreter is pointing at Biden while making a gesture considered very rude in Italy. You never know–according to a TIME magazine article, Biden’s first ASL interpreter had “ties to far right” (AKA Republican Party). https://time.com/5933592/white-house-sign-language-interpreter/

all to elect an elderly, obviously declined and mentally unfit candidate–who was at best a so-so midwit even when he was young and health

Agree 80%. However, to quibble, Biden was never a mid-wit. A mid-wit craves participation trophy-level intellectual cachet- the mid-wit does not need to be the smartest xir in the room, merely nestled deep inside the warm, protective amniotic embrace of the nearest mid-wit herd ball. Biden, even in his prime, was a Tom Buchanan-like sub-intellectual meathead bully with deep insecurities that caused him to lash out and become nasty whenever he felt on the verge of being exposed.

In the Dumbya Bush days, when the anti-war/Flying Spaghetti Monster meme’ing/miraculous power of stem cells-touting proto-Bernie Bro was the cultural hero du jour, I was on-site at Google and noticed a humorous “common intellectual fallacies” poster taped to one of the cubes. Of course, the ground-level, bargain basement, sine qua non requirement of spotting intellectual fallacies is recognizing that an intellectual fallacy is not always an intellectual fallacy. For example, the statement “No true Pope would deny the existence of the Trinity” is NOT a logical fallacy simply because it sounds an awfully lot like “No true Scotsman…” . Similarity, all the charges of “what-about-ism” (remember when the Internet actually had standards and you’d be ashamed to resort to such Harry Potter-@ss kindergarten-isms when the proper term is ”tu quoquo”) thrown about by Blue Checks in regard to the Ukraine crisis. Pointing out the US has shown equal disregard for international law and sovereignty as Russia is doing now is not a “what about-ist” logical fallacy when the question is not the absolute moral value of the act but the pragmatic one of whether it is so egregiously outside geopolitical norms as to constitute a systemically destabilizing act of aggression.

Overall, I find myself happily surprised by Joe Biden’s foreign policy, though I reman agnostic as to how much of it is the result of the near-80 year old man we call Joe Biden. Maybe there’s a collective Jackie-in-Dallas coterie in the West Wing, desperately trying to collect the remaining good pieces of the President’s brain we should thank instead. Joe Biden could be a hologram on-tour with Iron Maiden for all I care. The point is his major foreign policy decision have all been good or at least about right. Withdrawal from Afghanistan forever war- good. Not fighting Russia over Ukraine but unambiguously stating that NATO members will be defended- about right (Poland, unlike Ukraine, what with its Katyn Forest massacre, its Solidarity Movement, its giving the world John Paul II has a moral claim on the West I just do not feel with the latter).

Is it possible the Pfizer CEO is from the future and just saved us all form nuclear holocaust (knock on wood)? I’ll always love Trump, but as more reliable (non-MSM, non-Deep State, non-Lincoln Project pedo-RINO) information has reached me about his real character, I’m starting to shudder at what his response would have led to. Trump has great instincts but poor organization and discipline. He wanted to drain the Swamp but in the end it drained him. It got to figures who could have created a sane policy of detente with Russia like Michael Flynn and Trump did nothing. Worse, in order to counter smears of collusion he doubled-down and ended up giving Ukraine weapons systems that even Obama thought too provocative. President Trump in his second term, weakened after nearly a year of anti-fa urban riots and charges of military authoritarianism after 3 “peaceful protestors” were killed in the Liberate the Capitol event of alternate-January 6th, dogged by MSNBC “Putin puppet” smears, may have gone for a much more reckless I’ll-show-them sort of national security posture and ended up blowing up the world.

All you have done here is rely on your crutch of “you cannot trust the media”, rather than specifically address the points made in the source.

Of course I specifically addressed the point made in your phony USA Today “fact check.” Steve’s article draws the highly persuasive inference of political motive from the “curious decision in what [Bourla] calls ‘the most important trial in the world’ to shut down laboratory processing of samples from late October 2020 until the day after the election.”

But you think you have debunked this with a dumb USA Today argument claiming that no political motive could exist because “Pfizer lacked access to its trial data until after Election Day.” But that’s the whole f***ing point of Steve’s article: Pfizer deliberately delayed their processing of samples so that they would not have “access” to the results before the election. (Note: USA Today is also playing a semantic game with the word “access” — if Pfizer could have processed the data then they did, in fact, had “access” (as a noun) to the data — but they they just voluntarily chose not to “access” the data (as a verb).)

So USA Today’s fake “fact check” does nothing to dispel the obvious fact of Pfizer’s political motive in deciding not to “access” its own data. These lame arguments masquerading as “fact checks” are designed to manipulate the low-IQ, low-information masses who lack the critical thinking and reading comprehension skills to unpack the obvious evasions and logical fallacies. It certainly worked on you.

Donald Trump is the Jacqueline Gareau of politics. If you don’t recognize the name, it’s because she has been supplanted in the public’s mind by the Cuban-born embezzbian Rosie Ruiz:

You’re simply doubling down on this “Fake News” ideology.

There is an HbD inspired explanation for you assuming everyone other than yourself is being duped, that you hold the key to truth. We as a species have this impulsive cognition-–the seat of emotion, of sense of self, of phobias, and of herding behavior. The limbic system of the brain has its neurons fire faster and with greater amplitude than in the cerebral cortex, so it literally drowns out rational mindedness. There are a myriad of examples that this snap-decision system is controlling what we think.

Belief comes first, with our biases are held in the brain immediately above the brainstem, and they are the central control room for everything coming into the brain. Nothing will pass these filters, so it is virtually essentially impossible to “change someone’s mind” via persuasion. A person’s filters have to fall first. Otherwise, they will simply go into shoot the messenger mode when, for example, WaPO and NYT are used as sources. So there was this emotional hypostasis on your part that TRIGGERED in your brain an endorphin rush of self-righteousness.

“These lame arguments masquerading as “fact checks” are designed to manipulate the low-IQ, low-information masses who lack the critical thinking and reading comprehension skills to unpack the obvious evasions and logical fallacies.”

Ah, yes, the No True Scotsman Fallacy in action. So only intelligent people in your world view see right through the lies and obfuscations of the MSM; otherwise, they are automatically categorized as “low-IQ, low-information masses”. Are you inferring the majority of white people fall in this category? If yes, would not this characterization be considered “anti-white rhetoric”? Why?

Right from Ron Unz himself…

As a counter, here is the advice of Ron Unz…

I apply the same historical methods I did in my academic journal articles back in the 1980’s. You analyze the likely reliability of the raw information presented, look for confirming or refuting evidence, and then draw your own plausible conclusions…On a more serious note, many of my articles very heavily cite various MSM sources, so why would I do that if I believed they were always lying?”

Let us call it a false multi-chomity then. I honestly treat the numbers like the shit they are–but they don’t matter. How are Swedes with their government’s performance? Our opinion on the matter is irrelevant condesension.

Yes, it’s a shame their economy didn’t thrive more because the rest of Europe went under the US/NIAID boot, but there’s the minor benefit of avoiding the psychological, moral and physical degradation of lockdowns. Of not letting the nation’s politics become a proxy war around these issues, like us. Of not having one’s society distorted in a grand experiment.

Keeping one’s dignity, at an individual or societal level, should not be dismissed out of hand.

What the hell is wrong with you guys?

I don’t know who Jacqueline Gareau is but I remember Rosie Ruiz’s five minutes of fame very well.

I think you’re confused though.

Rosie Ruiz’s taking the T to “victory” is like basement Joe Biden’s “mailed in ballots” path to victory in 2020.

When did Donald Trump cut corners?

Trump’s very proud of his energy level and displayed it prominently during his presidential campaigns and during his presidency (you would have needed to have watched OAN news to actually see him in action during his presidency since “the media” effectively had a “blackout” of most of his actual activities).

You have to love that the CDC said it was 79% efficacious after 8 mos, despite many studies showing the opposite, all the while Bourla goes on CNBC and says the original shots don’t work against omnicron thus everyone needs a booster (or two)!

Great thing about the corona20-21 hoax is that there’s so much bullshit being pumped out by the CDC and “experts” is that anyone can find a quote to back up anything they want to! And if you haven’t found what you’re looking for yet, just wait a few weeks and the CDC will release a brand new claim!

I was also naive. I thought that people would react with seriousness. What did they do? Spruce up the back patio so they could entertain + socially distance (also put a babushka across the face — that’s fun!) More trendy folks bought a larger house for a better home office, or hired contractors to improve their homes. Others spent days online trying to find the last dumbbell set in the region or employed other strategies to outfox the supply chain. They stayed too busy to question authority. If they started to get bored or lonely, the message was to “zoom” – not think. If they really got bored or lonely they could go to a BLM event!

I’m rather tired of the Covid “controversies”, so I’ll just sum my position:

* Covid deniers are not worth discussing with.

* it is true that vaccines work, 2-3 shots. I took 2 after my 2 Covid incidents, and they removed my long-hauling fatigue.

* it seems that Scandinavians, due to their higher civilization levels & behavior, got over it better than others. Swedes were the worst, but one must take into account that perhaps 40-50% of their deaths were non-European immigrants, mostly Arabs and Somalis, so….. Generally, over 75% twice vaxxed is a good thing.

* some geographical areas’ regimes are not to be trusted. Reading comments on the Serbian forum and asking them specific questions, it is very likely that Covid death toll is close to 3 times bigger than reported. I don’t know about Romania, Bulgaria,…. Also, I don’t know about Slovakia or Austria, but I think their figures can be trusted.

* what is interesting is if you follow European countries with 5- 10 million inhabitants, you see that in the past 2-3 months, on average, countries with 70+% vaccination rate had 2-7 Covid deaths daily, while those with 40-50% vaccination rate- 30 to 50. Then it seems that this wave has subsided, and in the Balkans & the surrounding countries, there are less than 10 deaths daily. Now, there are 20-30 deaths daily in Denmark, so it may be that the latest mutations are doing their job, while this “classic” vaccine is a weaker deterrent.

We’ll see, but evidently, if Covid goes on mutating not very predictably, there will be need for further, more advanced vaccines.

Nice false dichotomy you have there.

You have poor reading comprehension, so work on that first.

Nowhere did I suggest or imply these were the only alternatives. The South Korean model was one relatively successful model, and I wanted to know whether other commenters, especially AnotherDad, would support such a policy or thought Americans in general would have.

What the hell is wrong with you guys?

Some of us take a dim view of ad hominem and straw man, and see negative value in whiney opinion comments backed by zero evidence or data.

While I agree with all of our “–” points, AD, I think your assumption that all this is for the one election is erroneous. Otherwise, yeah, why do all this stuff for the senile old half-century-long Feral Gov’t employee and that idiot woman?

No, this is the new M.O. of the left, AnotherDad. It’s not about the one election. All this stuff? That’s what Communists and other Totalitarians do every time, for STARTERS. People (I don’t include you, because I know you are pretty wise), such as Pat Buchanan, that are true Conservatives, but think it’s freaking 1985 out the window, need to understand this:

’20s America is not anything resembling a Republic or even a Democracy anymore. The Feral Gov’t is no better than those Latin American ones guys like Bono wrote songs about. For crying out loud, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of political prisoners being held without trial in Washington, FS right now, for more than a year!. We don’t even know how many.

This is for Twinkie too, since he asked all of us, but I more than agree, O.P. I say “more than” because, and don’t anyone get his panties in a wad here, but I wouldn’t agree with any of those Orwellian policies even if the Covid-one-niner HAD been the damn Black Plague 2.0. Thing is, when it gets real bad, people know WTH to do!

The CDC was great as a statistics gathering agency. Even without them, if I knew 18 people in our neighborhood had already died from this, everyone I know knew a handful of people who’d died, and there were commandeered FEDEX-EX vans going around the neighborhood with the P/A going “Bring outcher dead”, then we’d have been hunkered down, locked in our house with the unleaded-burning Coleman stove, water filter, our rice, pasta, beans, gourmet SPAM and cases of cherry pie filling*. We’d know what to do!

The Kung Flu has been used as an EXCUSE, that’s all, for Totalitarian policies around the world. Yes, per Generic American above, iSteve fell for some of this, but got better.

The Chinese? Hahaaa! Ron Unz, where are you? I thought China had DEFEATED the living shit out of this virus. Nahhhh, “It’s baaaack….”. I gotta say, I’m thoroughly amused by the situation in China. Old Winnie doesn’t like to lose face.

.

* Don’t go prepping when you’re hungry, they always say.

Dumbo, you won’t get many AGREES, because of your gratuitous dig as Steve at the end of your post, otherwise I almost completely agree.

(If you had said “Steve is an idiot about Cooties 19” then I would completely agree.)

A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant. Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

Like everyone else, I’m not going to spend the time going through this CDC report to figure out how they cherry-picked and manipulated the data and definitions to get this result. But the CDC has zero credibility at this point so I give this top line summary of efficacy zero weight. Indeed, they flat out admit they are hiding the relevant efficacy data. https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/22/cdc-tells-new-york-times-it-hid-covid-data-for-political-reasons/

The data from countries that aren’t hiding the ball show that, if anything, the vax has negative efficacy after a few months and against new variants. Even pro-vaxxers don’t actually believe their own B.S., and are voting with their arms to steer clear of the jab.

While governments will not openly admit the Covid jabs have failed, their citizens understand the reality. Fewer than 80,000 Americans a day are now getting BOOSTERS – out of more than 100,000,000 people who are eligible. By definition, the booster audience should not be “vaccine-hesitant,” since it consists of people who already took Covid jabs. https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/the-covid-vaccine-era-is-ending-already?s=r

They’ve got their own version of “better to ask forgiveness than permission”. I’m still working on the wording, but agreed, Warner.

I am a fan of the vaccine because it allowed me to take off the dehumanizing face diaper at work. For that I am most grateful.

BTW: He was a vet? The folks who talked all the pet owners into feline luekemia shots and heartworm medicine. Maximizing profits, you say? Yah.

The CDC was great as a statistics gathering agency.

You sweet summer child. Good try with the cynicism, but winter is coming.

Do people know what to do? Given the unchecked spread of charlie-one-niner, it seems what they would do is get sick and die. Society absolutely flipped out and accomplished nothing, to within the margin of error. It was a practice run in advance of a real plague, and the result is: y’all are hosed. You’re so far behind it’s not even worth the effort to fix it.

Luckily in Reality the four horsemen go together. Even the black death only had something like 7% mortality among the healthy upper classes. No war, no famine. No famine, no (real) plague. No plague, no death.

The real lesson of charlie-one-niner is this: take your vitamin D, you dense mfers. This may well be your last warning.

Now write an article of the millions of people who have been maimed and killed by the vaccines.

I’m holding my breath . . . !

My wife and I bought a house in December 2020. The appraisal was done at our expense (a satisfactory appraisal was a condition of the mortgage). I met the appraiser, and I suspect that’s normal, but I don’t really know.

As I would have predicted in January 2020 if anyone had asked, the vaccine is more dangerous than the virus. Conquest #3 is an iron law.

Bonus: we knew all along the vaccinated don’t believe in the vaccine. If they did, they wouldn’t be fussed if anyone else was vaccinated. They would believe in the protection. They clearly never did.

But that’s all in the past now. The point is to overcome Gell-Mann amnesia and remember Conquest #3 in the future. Next time the goverment says something is a problem (Ukraine) remember it’s not a problem. Remember their proposed fix (sanctions) will cause the very harm they’re allegedly trying to prevent.

Ran out of agrees, Juicy. I think there is much to what you say.

I ask why you guys place so little value on the quality and dignity of life. Maybe I’m being presumptuous in your case, sorry. And yes, I missed that last sentence in your first post. doh

But people speak reverentially of “data” here (you should capitalize it, like Black)–as if it’s just a body count and if we all have to live like rats in a cage to improve those numbers, so be it. There’s a comfort and escape in “the numbers”. I don’t make data-driven arguments? Well someone has to refrain. Life is boring enough.

We are in a time where accurate data doesn’t matter, and you guys haven’t caught on, apparently. But really, the hard questions are not questions that hinge on data. They are frankly philosophical as well as practical and all shed from one big question: how shall we live?

Data is only as good as the system in which it circulates, and ours is broken.

Slightly OT – free money if Covid set you back on a mortgage –

“The Illinois Homeowner Assistance Fund is a federally funded program that provides housing assistance to those impacted by the financial hardship of the COVID-19 pandemic. The assistance fund will offer grants of up to $30,000 of assistance to approved applicants to eliminate or reduce delinquent mortgage and property tax payments.

Applications will be considered based on several criteria, such as the degree of need and household income.”

https://www.illinoishousinghelp.org/ilhaf

Good luck on meeting those “several criteria”! “Degree of need” – is this simple math or is it a sliding scale based on Steve’s pokemon points?

This. Mrs. Prude was stoked into the early evening hours of the election with Trump having momentum. I paid no attention and went to bed. The next morning she was strangely silent. They had stopped the counting. WFT.

Where does this “they had stopped the counting” bullshit come from?

OT:

Now: 1,000,145

These lame arguments masquerading as “fact checks” are designed to manipulate the low-IQ, low-information masses who lack the critical thinking and reading comprehension skills to unpack the obvious evasions and logical fallacies.

They’re not really being tricked, though.

Remember, the most important factor determining how popular a song is: how popular the song is perceived to be. If listeners are bamboozled into thinking everyone else likes the song, they will self-report liking the song. This is what incessant radio airtime is for, as an example.

The point of fact checks is so the peasants know what the king is telling them they’re supposed to believe. They don’t care if the song is any good, they just want to sing the same one as everyone else. They don’t care what’s true, they only care about what they’re supposed to say.

After all, for the “low-information” masses, even conforming is a difficult and complicated operation. They’re sometimes called sheep, but they can only look up to the sheep that manage to follow properly and in detail. Obedience challenges them, because e.g. they’re not literate or even fluent in their native tongue. They aspire to be able to understand what they were told to do, and compete with each other to understand and conform better.

—

P.S. Peasant “rebellions” are always Sophist ops. That really is something of a trick: you trick the local peasantry into thinking you’re the legitimate king instead of some other king, through one means or another. The peasants don’t rebel, they continue to do what they’re supposed to do, they’re just been flummoxed into thinking violence is what they’re supposed to do.

As a counter, here is the advice of Ron Unz…

From that same Ron Unz comment:

But offhand it does look like the Biden laptop bombshell is probably genuine, and the notion of Twitter (and Facebook?) banning America’s oldest newspaper for breaking the story seems utterly unprecedented.

From the Corvinus response:

I get it, though, for if you chose to investigate in an honest manner, you would realize this “story” has been essentially manufactured, and that would not bode well for your credibility here. But as a result of your tacit endorsement, your readers will continue to believe the Biden laptop is a “bombshell”.

BOOM goes the dynamite:

https://nypost.com/2022/03/17/hunter-bidens-infamous-laptop-confirmed-in-new-york-times-report/

Hunter Biden's infamous laptop confirmed in New York Times report https://t.co/R7095FaRtX pic.twitter.com/EG1d8xS7WV

— New York Post (@nypost) March 17, 2022

A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant. Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

It’s pretty funny that there are people who still believe government and pharmaceutical company statements about vaccine effectiveness.

Corvinus sees an article that mentions how Pfizer mysteriously refused to collect its data on schedule in order to avoid reporting the study results before the election.

All you have done here is rely on your crutch of “you cannot trust the media”, rather than specifically address the points made in the source.

Try actually reading what he said.

Of course there’s “no evidence” Pfizer deliberately withheld the results to influence the election. They just made sure the data wasn’t collected on schedule so “the results” didn’t exist until after the election. Hence, they’d have nothing to withhold.

Points (to the extent any actual “points” were made) addressed and destroyed.

I honestly treat the numbers like the shit they are–but they don’t matter. How are Swedes with their government’s performance?

A fair point.

If Swedes are satisfied with their own government’s performance on COVID, then who are you or I to gainsay them?

I agree.

But do you extend the same courtesy to public opinion in the Antipodes and East Asia? Both regions were filled with countries who generally took very restrictive approaches to COVID that were supported by their respective publics.

Here, for example, is the polling in New Zealand. I’ve never seen such consistently high support for a government policy on any issue in the U.S. for over a two-year period. The only time it even dipped below fifty percent was back in the beginning of the pandemic before the restrictive measures were put in place. Since April of 2020, public support for what can be fairly described as one of the most restrictive COVID policies among all Western nations has averaged over 80% support in the polls.

Please note that New Zealand today still has anti-vaccine riots and that the Labour Party government is polling quite low, but there is no evidence that most Kiwis think the government policy was mistaken. The government has even lifted most vaccine mandates, despite the fact they were quite popular with a majority of people. That’s because 95% of Kiwis are vaccinated.

The smaller democratic East Asian countries (Taiwan, Singapore, South Korea) are similar. Strong restrictions; low death rates; high public approval.

Yet many American conservatives have denigrated these successful policy efforts as tyrannical. Were you among them?

He had all three. The push for more severe (and still unproven) measures was influenced by the campaign to be rid of Trump at all costs, and wrecking the economic recovery he had been touting every day before covid was an acceptable cost (to be leveled on us).

It doesn’t seem right to portray Trump as passively hoping for things that didn’t transpire, as if on their own, when the reality is he delivered, but it didn’t matter. This should outrage us all.

I guess Trump’s personality works against him. Good people seeing him as a bad person are willing to see principle trampled, in his case. Who’s the Baddy, always (I like to inflect as if I’m saying “who’s your daddy?” and do an ass-slapping motion with my hand).

The problem with the lingering discussion about COVID is that almost everyone is lying about some thing.

What is a “COVID death” versus not? There are so many co-factors that clear analysis is not easy.

Then you have the invulnerable boaster club (“I don’t get sick”, etc.) and the fact that clearly many people have died after getting the Fauci Flu. No one admits they were wrong. The COVID dead boasters don’t return to life to tell us they were wrong.

Also, little satisfaction about what strategies do and don’t work well.

COVID is weakening over time, so variants are less harmful. Of the LockDown nations, even NZ and AUS have given up on that. China seems to love lock-downs but there isn’t much to support that even there.

Why are the Chinese so “cautious” about this? Do they know more than we do? Or is this just their authoritarian impulse to boss around the citizens?

Of course, all of this is clearly iSteve’s fault. He plans to apologize to the rest of you morons soon enough…

Honestly I don’t get your comment, Alrenous. You think a really deadly virus will be released? Are you being facetious about Vitamin D?

The 4 Horsepersons of the Apocalypse WILL be coming, but just another bug out of the Orient is not gonna be one of them. Think Global Financial Stupidity instead.

…there are dozens, maybe hundreds of political prisoners being held without trial in Washington, FS right now, for more than a year!. We don’t even know how many.

And why don’t we know how many? I spent some time a few days ago trying to find out how many J6 protestors are still being held without bail. I couldn’t find a figure anywhere. Shouldn’t this information be readily accessible? Also, I gather the FBI is still busily trying to track down and arrest people of whom they have photographs at the J6 event. For god’s sake, murder levels are soaring and this is what they’re wasting resources on!

Yeah, I have no idea but I think New Zealand and Australia share something that makes for a trusting population. For one thing they’ve had good government for a long time.

I don’t have a clue about the best policy, so no, I don’t denigrate Singapore for doing what Singapore thinks right. They seem to be pretty smart about that. But I think similar policy in the US would be a disaster, not merely because of our cultural differences but frankly because we rode into covid already sick to the core psychologically.

And I realize what I’m arguing for is viewing the problem in the same way my enemies do: as a manipulated political and social campaign around covid, and not simply a public health crisis prompted by covid.

Has anyone else noticed that crooked smile of Hunter’s, where only one end goes up? Sort of a smirk, rather roguish. Is that a tell for unscrupulousness? His father also often smiles that way, when he’s not using his full-on forced grimace.

I think a very restrictive border approach, combined with a ruthless tracking regime for any local cases that popped up, might have worked back in early 2020. But by March, 2020, and certainly by April of that year, that possible alternative policy was probably toast.

Moral judgments and values are only as good as the data they are based on.

To assume otherwise is to give the advantage in the debate to the grifters and the hustlers, for they can talk about morals all the livelong day. You think Al Sharpton doesn’t talk about values? You think AOC is a heavily-reliant-on-data socialist?

We can complain in good faith about the quality of data on any particular issue. That’s acceptable. I do it myself on occasion when I have genuine problems with the numbers, when they seem either incomplete or misleading to me. However, to do that, I need to make a good case on the particulars. I don’t just slam all arguments based on data. For to dismiss data altogether is to invite chaos.

Even as a little kid he had a mischievous smirk. It must be a genetic trait.

Beau is on the left; Hunter and Daddy Joe are on the right:

East Asian counties were hard hit by SARS 20 years ago so they took this epidemic seriously from the start, unlike westerners who reacted too late to the danger.

Nice post Twinkie. And nice article Mr Sailer.

There is no doubt to anyone that is scientifically competent and is inclined to do some research, that COVID was about an order of magnitude or more worse than influenza in unvaccinated people. It also had the very nasty problem that if left to transmit unchecked, it would swiftly overwhelm hospitals with people in ICU on ventilators, or on oxygen. They have limited number of beds, ventilators and ICU spots, and other people with serious or life threatening illnesses need these facilities too. So the choice was like a typical election in a liberal democracy – a lesser evil, not no evil at all.

Irrespective of the source, notwithstanding the possibility that Ron Unz suggests that the US government ultimately decided to unleash this on the world… once out, the genie was out of the bottle and we had to deal with it.

The mechanics of virus transmission are apolitical. The virus does not see whether transmission reduction is implemented by Democrat or Republican, White Nationalist or Zionist, Communist or Green.

Pre-Omicron and pre-vaccine, countries were faced with several choices. They could effectively reduce transmission and international travel to the point where states or countries were effectively virus free, which could be maintained for relatively long periods of time with life back to normal sans international travel. This involved lots of testing, and where detected, contact tracing, measures like masks, social distancing, improved hygiene, and lockdowns in some instances where the virus was found until it could be eliminated, which it was, frequently.

In Australia and New Zealand, this was a pretty good compromise. And this policy was only supposed to be a temporary measure until effective vaccines could be developed and distributed until everyone who had the opportunity could be vaccinated. This has come to pass and so the virus suppression/elimination tactics have also largely fallen by the wayside. Very few people are dying, those who are, are overwhelmingly unvaccinated. With those stats, while the deaths are few, it’s still obvious this is far worse than “the flu”.

Notably, there has been a much needed hiatus from immigration. For anyone anti-immigration (and I thought that was most everyone on the site aside from the A-tier hasbara Jack D and the F-tier, possibly Ethiopian Jew hasbara Corvinus) and who wanted a minimally inconvenienced life with far less chance of death or permanently reduced health (cardiovascular or mental capacity), this was the way to go.

The other main choice was never to do nothing and pretend that the virus was “just the flu”. Because the government had to deal with the influx of hospital cases and ICU beds. And people would do their own transmission reduction. So you got the worst of all worlds, continued immigration, deaths and worsened health in far more people, and economy crushing transmission reduction measures that extended a long time.

It is frustrating to see that what I thought were anti-immigrationists, conservatives, WNs, alt-right, the grab-bag of people Republican or further to the right, instead choose “Don’t tread on me!” as prime objective, like they were now Ayn Randian libertarians or crazy anarcho-capitalists. Literally Freeper-level discourse. And in the end, all they got was frustration. They got trod on with worse economic results, they got more immigration, and they suffered more death and ill-health. Jack D was probably laughing like you were some Azov battalion engaged in battle with the white soldiers of a mostly Christian nation with nukes – except, he had to live in a society with these shitty decisions as well.

To be fair, your collective thought processes were likely hijacked by astroturfed antivax rightwing sentiment, but I thought you all were mostly better than that. Some were, most weren’t, and they were very vocal.

And it seems like the ANZ approach has worked better than the Chinese/Taiwanese/Hong Kong approach, with a shitty domestically produced vaccine, insufficient vaccination, and a COVID-zero policy that is much harder to implement in the age of Omicron. That was of course, the third option.

Anyway, the point of this article was to provide further evidence that the election was tampered with by unethical haters of Trump/White people. They hated us so much they installed Biden, whom no doubt they are getting some buyer’s remorse over and likely regret, as the reality was that although one might vote Trump, all the goys from the Cabinet were purged and we had de facto rule by Javanka.

But this is a general symptom of rule by Zionists. Like a dog that has finally caught the car it was chasing after, they do not know how to handle the power now they finally have it. Their crushing of hate facts and true ideas they don’t like mean they have less understanding of reality. Their USA has an ascendent nuclear-armed peer China that they cannot control (which they allowed into being), from whom they have admitted many immigrants, and now senses weakness. Having completely unecessarily turned the Allies into a multiracial hodgepodge with the unhinged paranoia that we might have turned on them at any time, or that White goys are the most significant threat, we are less capable now, a capability that would be useful in economy and war.

And right when they would find Russia a useful ally against China, they do not seem to comprehend that Russia is a peer to the US in nuclear weapons, better to accept and ally with than confront.

I hope this will have been a good learning experience for elite Jews everywhere, an object lesson in what not to do. After this all comes crashing down, I hope they realize that the white goys weren’t so bad after all, and that the IQ and networking advantage were enough to see you succeed, that it did not benefit you to attempt to destroy the host you rely on.

If that were even remotely true, the NYT and the rest of the so-called “prestige media” — not to mention all of the social-media giants — wouldn’t have gone to such great lengths to suppress it. The NYT itself took 17 months to come clean. Turns out the laptop wasn’t “Russian Disinformation” after all! And the pornographic aspects that appear to have titillated you were a trivial part of the story.

For interested parties, here’s Holman Jenkins in today’s WSJ. He pulls his punches, probably to avoid war with the Grey Lady, but still offers several good points:

Tyranny can be successful strategy in confronting a great many issues. Do the ends always justify the means?

If Singapore wants to oppress its citizenry with brutal covid policy and they enjoy it, who am i to say otherwise? I’m sure they could eliminate the transmission of STD’s if they put to death anyone who engaged in sexual intercourse. Don’t bring it here.

“A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant.”

Steve quotes a CDC report. Might as well be ad copy for Pfizer or Moderna. I go to Ed Dowd, financial and statistics guy, to cover the business end of mRNA. For the science part I subscribe to the Substack account of vaccinologist Robert Malone, who’s name is on several mRNA patents. As a member of the team that invented this technology his voice is important as we go forward with what will be widespread use of mRNA — originally developed as a cancer drug — by the medical systems. Malone ain’t happy with the way mRNA is being used. And he is distressed by the current number of deaths and injuries attributable to the vaccine, especially amongst the 20s to 40s age brackets.

“Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.”

Ad copy. Funny and sad.

Biden apparently got 16 million more votes than Hillary did in ’16. Ballots, yeah; votes, nope. There was no amount of Covid jab test results and Hunter’s laptop that could overcome that mischief.

Biden campaigned from his basement and improved Hillary’s vote total by 25%? Pull the other one, its got bells on.

I agree. I was living in Taiwan during that outbreak.

But neither Australia and New Zealand were hit hard by that earlier pandemic and yet both countries took excellent steps to secure their countries from COVID-19.

Who are these people dying and unvaxxed? What demographic?

Warmongering for the purpose of legitimizing laundered campaign cash, tech favors and other dark money campaign benefits including sabotaging elections not to mention assorted Ukrainian gangster favors constitutes clean behavior? You’re a piece of work Corvie!

Moral judgments and values are only as good as the data they are based on.

Data is only as good as the input. In the early 2000’s the DC Chief of Police directed his officers to record assaults as “injured person.” This resulted in lowered aggravated assault stats. A retired NYT reporter was beaten to death by two men who had committed an earlier violent theft but it went unreported, and therefore no investigation.

How are you able to trust the Covid data knowing what you should know about the entire mess?

While I agree with pretty much all of your comment here,

actually one of Steve’s worst and least important ‘scoops’ ever. pretty much everybody is aware that tons of corporations are against Republicans in general and Trump specifically, and had been operating that way for years…

… actually (sorry), that doesn’t change the fact that it was a very nice job. I remember iSteve being all over this right at the time, if not just after the election. No, Steve Sailer wasn’t going to change anything against the whole Establishment, so I just mean “important” in that I don’t recall reading about this, in that detail, anywhere else on-line. How about you?

It’s like the Biden laptop story. It’s important. Will Hunter or Joe Biden get in trouble or anything change in the way the Lyin’ Press operates? No, not until the total reset of the country or whatever …

It’s still good to get the people on our side aware of just what kind of country we live in, such as I wrote in my reply to AnotherDad.

Notably, there has been a much needed hiatus from immigration.

That was almost SOLELY due to Donald Trump’s efforts. His below-the-radar work on immigration is something that I do praise him for. However …

That’s long over with, #344. Do you not read VDare? Immigration levels, at least the illegal from down south are at all-time highs. Because Trump had no strategy to get policy put into law, Joe Biden reversed about all of his efforts within the first few months, and now we have nearly 2,000,000 people coming in per year, just from that direction!

Tyranny can be successful strategy in confronting a great many issues. Do the ends always justify the means?

No, but a good end is often a sign that you chose the right means. Shouting “tyranny” every time someone proposes something that actually works is not a way to maintain a successful society.

If Singapore wants to oppress its citizenry with brutal covid policy and they enjoy it, who am i to say otherwise?

But Australia and New Zealand took similar routes as Singapore to success against COVID, and both those nations are freedom-loving Western countries with kindred traditions to the United States. Indeed, by many measurements, Australia and New Zealand are freer than the U.S., as they are ranked higher on many indices of freedom for both civil rights and economic liberty.

So if your rhetoric is taking you to a place where you have to identity Australia and New Zealand as tyrannical governments, then there is probably something wrong with your rhetoric.

Data is only as good as the input.

I said as much in my post.

But the best way to combat sloppy or fraudulent data is to get better data, not to give up on data.

You just described Trump. Thanks for admitting to it.

New viruses appear regularly. Eventually they mutate into something serious. A real society has to have a real plan for the moment a real virus hits the world.

horsepersons kek, nice one

Gotta have a war to get the four horsemen to ride.
Well, DC is working hard on that one, at least. Piously supporting God’s right to visit wrath upon Americans, I guess.

—

In particular, it’s a great idea to plan to seal the border. (And also have a backup plan for stuff that used to cross the border. What if strategic reserves were good actually…) Then, cautiously open the border piecemeal. E.g. start with one volunteer town. “You get to be open. The rest of us are staying shut: you go outside the seal now.”

If it’s okay, then shrug and open up. If not, then experiment with treatments – in that one town, not on the entire country at once.

* it is true that vaccines work, 2-3 shots. I took 2 after my 2 Covid incidents, and they removed my long-hauling fatigue.

Well, a single case of anecdotal evidence is enough to convince me! But on the other hand, I took zero vaccine doses and zero boosters and ended up feeling a little out of sorts for a couple hours one afternoon. Took a couple of ibuprofen and that was the end of that. I suppose that my anecdotal evidence should be ignored though, since it seems to discredit yours.

Really? What if the data is racist, sexist, homophobic, deplorable, divisive, misinformation, etc. LOL. You’re a funny guy.

Biden campaigned from his basement and improved Hillary’s vote total by 25%?

Well, she is a whole lot worse. Better a fool than a knave.

And how much was HRC’s vote inflated?

Where does this “they had stopped the counting” bullshit come from?

Philadelphia.

But it’s inaccurate. Half the counters were “asked” to leave the room, and then the counting went into overdrive.

So if your rhetoric is taking you to a place where you have to identity Australia and New Zealand as tyrannical governments,…

They most certainly are, as of late. If you think locking people in their homes, keeping them out of businesses without “their papers”, and forcing them to wear completely worthless face diapers is not tyranny, than you deserve the chains of a slave. You wouldn’t notice the difference.

You’re pathetic.

I agree with your comment and thanks for the full text of the WSJ piece. Talk about pulling his punches, Jenkins writes: “So we come to the New York Times. The paper, which aspires to be nation’s and even the world’s ‘newspaper of record,’ has chosen this moment to rectify its own record on the Hunter Biden laptop.”

Does a passing mention in the 24th paragraph of a story qualify as rectifying its intentional cover-up? It’s utterly inadequate. We need a complete admission of guilt, a confession of why they did it, heads to roll, and a commitment to doing better. That we’ve gotten so far is what they called a “modified, limited hangout” in the Watergate days.

Dumbo,

It’s actually even worse than what you’re saying. Take a closer look at what Steve Sailer actually wrote:

While the revolutionary mRNA vaccine from Pfizer-BioNTech has not turned out to be as much of a panacea as hoped, for people at risk (e.g., older and/or fatter, like most of us) it remains effective at reducing the odds of dying or being ventilated due to Covid. A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant. Add a booster shot and efficacy is back up to an impressive 94 percent.

This is a very misleading piece of reportage on Steve’s part. The CDC study that Steve links to is only measuring vaccine efficacy against mechanical ventilation and death, not against infection. And Steve Sailer knows this, because he mentions the fact in the first sentence of this three-sentence paragraph. But then, in a piece of devious slight of hand, he just sort of casually elides into the next sentence that states “A new CDC report finds that two doses eight months ago were 79 percent efficacious against the recent Omicron variant,” making it sound as if he is talking about efficacy against infection. By writing it this way, Steve tricks incautious readers into thinking that the CDC has established vaccine efficacy against infection, while also providing plausible deniability that this is not what he said, and that he was talking about ventilation and death efficacy all along.

Now, it is well-known and established by multiple studies in multiple countries, that mRNA vaccines are negatively efficacious against omicron—i.e., being vaccinated makes it more likely that you will contract the disease than being unvaccinated does. The CDC study, in effect, is saying that the same vaccines that make you more likely to be infected also make you less likely to need ventilation or to die.

This is a very curious claim that requires, at minimum, some sort of causal explanation for those who want to ask the obvious question of how in the heck this is even possible.

The study claims to have matched patients according to age, race, sex, and health conditions, thus controlling for demographic factors that might confound the analysis, and then to have run a regression that isolated for vaccine effects. This is supposed to make you think that the vaccine alone accounts for differences in outcomes between groups. However, this is a red herring.

And why is it a red herring? Because these demographic factors are unlikely to have any significant effect on the outcome of what the study was actually measuring. And what was the study actually measuring? The number of people who were put on ventilators or who died.

Now, the state of “being put on a ventilator” is not in and of itself a medical condition; it is a decision made by a doctor who can make it for any reason or no reason. And ventilation is itself a very invasive procedure which itself causes a large number of iatrogenic deaths. The CDC study itself admits this. If you look under the chapter titled “Discusion,”you will find this telling admission:

Third, control-patients hospitalized without COVID-19 might not have been fully representative of case-patients likely to receive IMV or die while in the hospital. In a sensitivity analysis restricting control-patients to those who received IMV or died from causes not related to COVID-19, results were similar.

In other words, of all the patients in the hospital, the percentage of patients who were ventilated or died was the same regardless of whether or not they even had Covid-19. Thus, a positive Covid diagnosis is irrelevant. Those with or without Covid will die at equal rates, once admitted to hospital.

What does that tell you about the dangerousness of Covid? What does that tell you about vaccine efficacy?

When did Donald Trump cut corners?

Whoever said he did? Jacqueline Gareau played by the rules, and lost. Until justice was served. That’s what she has in common with Trump.

“It’s important. Will Hunter or Joe Biden get in trouble or anything change in the way the Lyin’ Press operates?”

Will anything change in the way the Rs behave if they ever take over — meaning will they risk putting Lindsey or any of the other assorted R grifters with folios at the bank of Jeffrey Epstein and Friends at risk by going after Joe? I won’t hold my breath.

“No, but a good end is often a sign that you chose the right means. Shouting “tyranny” every time someone proposes something that actually works is not a way to maintain a successful society.”

I’m sorry, lockdowns and forced mask mandates/vaccines aren’t tyranny? Either way, I don’t even accept your premise that any government action was required in order to “fight” covid. I support the premise that the so called covid-19 virus was an unremarkable respiratory virus that had and continues to reflect a 99.97 survivability rate with 90% co-morbidity. The was no good end to the covid hysteria. It was all a con to justify the biggest transfer of wealth and power in the history of the world.

“But Australia and New Zealand took similar routes as Singapore to success against COVID, and both those nations are freedom-loving Western countries with kindred traditions to the United States. Indeed, by many measurements, Australia and New Zealand are freer than the U.S., as they are ranked higher on many indices of freedom for both civil rights and economic liberty.”

Australia does not allow its citizens to posses firearms to any significant degree and went full retard with the lockdowns, and NZ was fairly similar IIRC, so I’m not really sure what your measures of civil rights and freedom are. This is all frankly immaterial regardless.

Based on the link below, Singapore had only 827 “covid deaths” in all of 2020-21. Sounds great! Until you see that they also had 12,264 influenza and pneumonia deaths in the same exact time span. It stands to reason that the measures taken to “fight” covid should have had similar results against other respiratory viruses, especially considering we were told covid was deadlier than the flu. So how did a less deadly pathogen manage to kill ~15x as many people??? And why has their covid death count relatively exploded with 400 more deaths just in the last 3 months after only 800 deaths in 24 months? This is after most of them have been vaccinated.

https://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/country-health-profile/singapore

“So if your rhetoric is taking you to a place where you have to identity Australia and New Zealand as tyrannical governments, then there is probably something wrong with your rhetoric. ”

Strawman. You brought up Australia et al. (whataboutism) I speak for individual liberty and freedom of association as I always do, and that includes to right to make my own medical choices free of government thuggery. You’re the one descending into broken eggs and omelettes territory.

They most certainly are, as of late.

They’re not. You’re just someone who is unable to imagine a competent response to a public health crisis.

That doesn’t make you a lover of freedom, unless freedom for you smells a lot like death; it just makes you a dipshit. Wasting a million lives unnecessarily is not freedom; it’s a waste of freedom. It shows how undeserving of freedom you are.

Home Depot made a fortune with all the home remodeling that went on. Either by professionals or home owners. And it stayed open. Because construction is as essential as food.

All these headlines; housing prices up!!!! Rents up!!!!! Because of immigrants. Asian multimillionaires, middle class Indians, public housing Hispanics I Person or people to a one bedroom apartment. 2 parents and 2 kids or 20 people to a 3 bedroom house and garage.

More people equals less available housing equals more expensive housing.

Pincher probably has not seen the videos, or the excellent documentary which came out and featured several outraged police officers who resigned in disgust. Informed people know that the antipodes and especially Victoria have suffered a violent disaster without any medical benefit.

Lindsay with Epstein? Not really his line.

“ U.S. – 3056 deaths per million”

Lol! After all this time, still taking the numbers as given. What a stupid rube.

“ a Tom Buchanan-like sub-intellectual meathead bully ”

Buchanan read Stoddard and therefore knew more about race than the entire faculties of all Ivy League colleges combined.

(Insert perfunctory note about the Electoral College here)

“It’s a waste of freedom.” What does that even mean? Freedom is something well beyond your puny imagination, obviously. Pathetic, as I wrote already.

In Michigan a female elector was hectored and her children were threatened, on video, until she agreed to vote for Biden. So going forward keep in mind that apparently that’s now kosher.

Anecdotes are the data of the uneducated. Any idiot can find someone who is unhappy with any policy.

Australia’s death rate from COVID is less than ten percent that of the United States and New Zealand’s is less than two percent that of the U.S. To call that a “violent disaster without any medical benefit” is just so stunningly ignorant that I hardly know how to respond.

What does that even mean?

It means that all freedom exists within limits, and any idiot who doesn’t recognize that is not doing freedom any favors.

“But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”

“Liberty must be limited in order to be possessed.”

– Edmund Burke

Or as many Americans have noted in one form or another, from Jefferson to the present day, “The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide document.” If George Washington saw no problem with punitive vaccine mandates, why should you?

The numbers are low, if anything, Rube.

The word anecdote is completely inappropriate in an accusation of tyranny because one elderly woman held down and beaten by police officers is enough. Tyranny isn’t a medical issue. The documentary wasn’t holding one wierd case up against good data, it was documenting tyranny. As far as the rates, it’s still laughable. They can have perfect rates by taking their sovereignty seriously. It seems unlikely that their data would ever fail to be better than ours, but then why isn’t ours worse? We effectively had no adherence to this all-important lockdown, with the result that nothing happened. There are even clearer examples. Sweden did not impose a lockdown and then break its own rules at every opportunity, Sweden never locked down in the first place. Why are they alive? Why was our border never closed? Why did everyone who could do so travel to dirty third world countries and then come back? What part of this is supposed to resemble a plague?
Your side has had every opportunity and the benefit of all earthly authority to prove whatever it was that you meant to prove.

Pfizer admitted the efficacy of the vaccine fell below 50% after just 6 months…this was back in July 2021 when they begged the FDA to approve the boosters for all Americans due to the falling efficacy of their experimental vaccine. Even before Omicron the efficacy of these vaccines was below 50%. After Omicron the Pfizer CEO admitted the vaccines were near worthless against Omicron.

Steve once looked at the data out of Israel to convince us the vaccines were working, yet now just 14 months later he ignores the Israeli data after they mandated a fourth dose due to the failed efficacy of the boosters to stop COVID. The vaccines were a big failure. They failed to reduce deaths and failed to stop the spread. They failed because the efficacy fades rapidly below 50% after just 6 months. The efficacy of the boosters drops below 50% after just 3 months. This is the reason Israel began promoting the fourth dose just 10 months after they rolled out the first does and 3 months after the first boosters failed to prevent the spread of COVID.

5 months ago Pfizer and Moderna stated they were testing a new vaccine against the new variants. We are still waiting for the efficacy results, but leaked reports indicate the new mRNA vaccines have efficacy below 50% , just like the vaccine trials for children under 5 demonstrated. These vaccines could not get approved today because the efficacy is below 50%. This is why Pfizer and Moderna cannot get the vaccines approved for children under, the data demonstrate the efficacy of these out-dated vaccines has fallen below 50%. We will not have an Omicron vaccine as promised a few months ago because they failed in the trials. Will They will keep pushing the obsolete vaccines for the rest of the year ? Will college kids be forced to get a fourth dose to attend school in the fall ?

The word anecdote is completely inappropriate in an accusation of tyranny because one elderly woman held down and beaten by police officers is enough.

I think you mean “appropriate” and, no, it is not. A handful of incidents of police abuse, as described in the media, does not make a country tyrannical any more than a handful of anti-black racist incidents makes the U.S. a racist nation. Scale, proportion and public opinion all matter.

As far as the rates, it’s still laughable.

Yes, it’s a lot of giggles to consider that the difference between what Australia did and what we did meant 900,000 additional dead Americans, and that the difference between what New Zealand did and what we did meant an additional 980,000 dead Americans.

It is a relief, though, to know that all those Americans died for your notion of freedom, Chucklehead, just because you consider nearly a million dead Americans an acceptable tradeoff for us never being as tyrannical as New Zealand or Australia.

Thank you. That was exceptionally articulate.

Really? What if the data is racist, sexist, homophobic, deplorable, divisive, misinformation, etc. LOL. You’re a funny guy.

I meant it was the best way to combat falsehoods and get at the truth; I didn’t mean it was the best way to win friends.

I’m sorry, lockdowns and forced mask mandates/vaccines aren’t tyranny?

In the context of a public health crisis, no, they are not.

Nor is the military censoring media battlefield reports during a war considered tyranny, either.

Either way, I don’t even accept your premise that any government action was required in order to “fight” covid.

If we wanted to fight COVID competently, then government action was certainly required. Hell, even Sweden took many measures at certain times to slow the spread of the virus. But like us, the Swedes were incompetent in their approach and suffered a lot more deaths than were necessary.

I support the premise that the so called covid-19 virus was an unremarkable respiratory virus that had and continues to reflect a 99.97 survivability rate with 90% co-morbidity.

Too bad your premise is based on bullshit.

Australia does not allow its citizens to posses firearms to any significant degree…

Very few countries do. And many countries which do have some right by citizens to purchase and own firearms – or at least the capacity to buy and own them – are not places we associate with freedom. Serbia, Yemen, and the UAE, for example.

And the fact that not even U.S. conservatives push other countries very hard to allow gun ownership suggests that we believe it is a special right of Americans, something peculiar to our way of life and view of rights, and not something “tyrannical” when other countries bar it.

I like and strongly support gun rights in America, but I don’t consider Japan, England and Australia tyrannies just because those countries are far more restrictive about gun ownership.

Based on the link below, Singapore had only 827 “covid deaths” in all of 2020-21. Sounds great! Until you see that they also had 12,264 influenza and pneumonia deaths in the same exact time span.

You didn’t read your own link very carefully. What it compares is COVID deaths from 2020 to the present day to the “historical average of selected Singapore causes.”

“Historical average.” Get it now? (My guess is you probably don’t.)

You brought up Australia et al. (whataboutism) I speak for individual liberty and freedom of association as I always do, and that includes to right to make my own medical choices free of government thuggery. You’re the one descending into broken eggs and omelettes territory.

Nope. You’re the one who just broke a million eggs and yet you still couldn’t make an omelet. In the end, you could defend neither freedom nor competent government in the U.S., and so you got neither.

Or as many Americans have noted in one form or another, from Jefferson to the present day, “The U.S. Constitution is not a suicide document.” If George Washington saw no problem with punitive vaccine mandates, why should you?

Washington ordered his army to receive the smallpox vaccine, but his army was made up of volunteers so this doesn’t tell us whether he would have supported everyone being required to get vaccinated.

This was also before the adoption of the Constitution, so it doesn’t tell us what Washington thought about vaccine mandates under the Constitution. The Constitution said anything not specifically listed in that document was not a function of the federal government and was to be left to the states or the people. A 1905 Supreme Court decision said vaccine mandates could only be applied at the state level and a recent Supreme Court decision said the federal government could not require that all businesses in the country force their employees to get vaccinated.

We also need to recognize that smallpox and Covid are not equivalent. Smallpox killed 30% of those who got it and many young people died from it. 99.6% of those under 60 survive Covid and the average age of death is 77. Those are not average 77 year olds either. They are the segment of the elderly population in the worst health, with multiple comorbidities. I would not call you an “idiot”, as you are doing here with others, for not recognizing that but I would point out that people often start engaging in name calling when they don’t have the facts on their side.

You base your arguments on the premise Cooties was a crisis. It was not. I scoffed at this BS hysteria all along and everyone I know and work with has gotten through just fine, including many who got the sniffles.

Not a crisis. Just the flu, bro. Now go back to hiding in your closet and wearing a diaper like Mommy told you.

Harpo, you speak!

Here is the COMPLETE quote by Mr. Unz.

Well, I’ll admit I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to the election campaign. But offhand it does look like the Biden laptop bombshell is probably genuine, and the notion of Twitter (and Facebook?) banning America’s oldest newspaper for breaking the story seems utterly unprecedented.

My response was in relation to the CONTENTS, not the existence, of Hunter’s laptop. That is the context that you conveniently neglected. Besides, I thought we aren’t supposed to trust the MSM, yet here you are citing it as a reference. That same story by the NYT stated “But prosecutors face a number of hurdles to bringing criminal charges, the people familiar with the investigation said, including proving that Mr. Biden intentionally violated the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, which requires disclosure to the Justice Department of lobbying or public relations assistance on behalf of foreign clients.”

We do know, however, that several of Trump’s cronies were prosecuted for illegal activities, and we do know about the various war rooms that led to the January 6 insurrection. If you or our intrepid host were patently concerned about the rule of law and law and order, reporting on those events would be a good first step.

Stick to honking your own and remaining silent.

Nonsense. Put your mask on, citizen. Stay safe, or like whatever, bro.

Only a highly motivated and tendentious mindset

One of the better descriptions of Corvinus’ persona here I have seen. Thanks.

I’m not sure how often the appraiser knows the race of the SELLER (more often than not I would guess, as in keypusher’s experience), but the research involved only looked at the neighborhood composition which is known (and I would hope the appraiser would be aware of it since it does matter for valuation).

The point abut black buyers relies (I think) on the idea that blacks are more likely to buy in black neighborhoods so a tendency to overpay could have an impact on the selling price.

In any case there does seem to be an issue with a (usually) small gap in the sales/appraisal ratio in minority neighborhoods. The question is should anything be done. Given the small magnitude I suspect any “cure” would probably be worse than the “disease.”

As a hypothetical, consider the idea of incentivizing appraisers for their ability to be closer to the sales price. Superficially plausible, but would put appraisers at the mercy of a potentially irrational market in a manner I think is unacceptable.

P.S. I thought their points about comparables were interesting. Seems like those would provide a partial explanation and are consistent with black neighborhoods being more variable (note locality implication as well as overall variation risk) combined with appraiser conservatism (the primary point of appraisals is establishing a valuation for lending decisions).

Comp distance
The average distance between a subject property and its comps is substantially smaller when the property is in a Black or Latino tract than in a White tract.

Comp reconciliation
Properties in Black and Latino tracts tend to be reconciled toward the lower end of the comp range compared to those in White tracts, although the dollarized impact is small.

Comp variance
There is more variation in the sales price of comps used in appraisals for properties in Black tracts than White tracts, but there is less variation for Latino tracts.

Chimps are the best known for flinging poop. This article mentions a monkey example, but I don’t know of any ape examples. Note the point about captivity as well.
https://www.livescience.com/66042-why-chimps-throw-poop.html

Throwing feces is not a regular occurrence for primates, at least not most of them. Primates in the wild don’t normally throw feces, Karen Strier, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Live Science. It’s typically observed in captive populations of chimpanzees, although other primates, such as wild howler monkeys in western Belize, are also known to throw poop.

A saw an employee from JoAnn Fabrics on TV complaining she had to go to work! What’s more essential than stocking the shelves with yarn and picture frames?

My apologies. I thought you were equating Gareau (who I do not know) with Rosie Ruiz (who is a metaphor for cutting corners).

One example was the burst pipe incident in Georgia. That was when I wrote the election off. Here is my comment from just after it happened.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/whats-happening/#comment-4262488

And here is an article discussing the incident a week or so later.
https://www.news.com.au/world/north-america/us-politics/slow-leak-text-messages-cast-doubt-on-georgia-officials-burst-pipe-excuse-for-pause-in-counting/news-story/19176f5113512210517c82debe684392

Note the Australian source. I actually missed hearing anything about that at the time even though I was clearly interested (first link).

P.S. Maybe be a little slower on the BS calls if you don’t really know.

I miss AE.

Ok, so I called you on your use of anecdotal evidence and your response it to post more anecdotal evidence? There are many thousands of garbage studies on the internet, couldn’t you have at least found one?

Washington ordered his army to receive the smallpox vaccine, but his army was made up of volunteers so this doesn’t tell us whether he would have supported everyone being required to get vaccinated.

I was not referring to Washington’s orders to inoculate his volunteer army. I was referring to his comments made as a private citizen:

Washington’s most important contribution to American medicine was in the area of smallpox prevention, and he clearly recognized that there was a beneficial governmental stake in ensuring better health practices. He was an early advocate for smallpox inoculation even prior to his involvement as commander of the army during the Revolutionary War. Unsurprisingly, Washington had railed against early restriction of smallpox inoculation by the Virginia assembly, declaring, “I would rather move for a Law to compel the Masters of Families to inoculate every child born within a certain limited time under Severe Penalties.”56 Washington was apparently prepared to take coercive measures for the sake of public health and would have probably resisted the later popular backlash against mandatory state smallpox vaccination legislation that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

– Revolutionary Medicine: The Founding Fathers and Mothers in Sickness and Health – Jeanne Abrams

Strange how the man who presided over the Constitutional Convention, and who led the Revolutionary Army against the British to protect American settlers’ rights as Englishmen, was still prepared to levy “severe penalties” against civilians who failed to get themselves and their families inoculated.

It’s almost as if your notion of freedom from vaccines was completely alien to him.

This was also before the adoption of the Constitution, so it doesn’t tell us what Washington thought about vaccine mandates under the Constitution. The Constitution said anything not specifically listed in that document was not a function of the federal government and was to be left to the states or the people. A 1905 Supreme Court decision said vaccine mandates could only be applied at the state level and a recent Supreme Court decision said the federal government could not require that all businesses in the country force their employees to get vaccinated.

Fine. But this just transfers the argument to another level. Nearly all fifty states have at one time or another taken some coercive measures for public health, whether they were soft lockdowns or temporary mask mandates or vaccine mandates for certain professions. Every state in the union also mandates at least a dozen vaccines for children.

And probably the most effective measures taken by Australia and New Zealand were strict border control and quarantine measures. Those can and should have been taken by the U.S. federal government early in the crisis.

We also need to recognize that smallpox and Covid are not equivalent. Smallpox killed 30% of those who got it and many young people died from it. 99.6% of those under 60 survive Covid and the average age of death is 77. Those are not average 77 year olds either. They are the segment of the elderly population in the worst health, with multiple comorbidities. I would not call you an “idiot”, as you are doing here with others, for not recognizing that but I would point out that people often start engaging in name calling when they don’t have the facts on their side.

But Washington was not privy to the statistics of smallpox infection when he advocated “severe penalties” for those who did not get inoculated. He was not a scientist. What’s more, from the casual observer’s point of view, smallpox outbreaks in America tended to be local rather than national or international. They first hit port cities and that’s when lockdowns were made. The science of vaccination was hardly in its infancy when Washington made his remarks.

So it’s not as if Washington had some solid scientific evidence to back up his remarks. He wasn’t working from statistics. He was merely working off his commonsense and experience. He could see smallpox was devastating wherever it hit, and his own inoculation program at Mount Vernon had been successful.

But not everyone agreed with his views. Hence, Washington’s disagreement with the Virginia House of Burgess restricting the use of inoculation.

Washington’s views are worth looking at because he was the avatar of the conservative view of the Constitution and the most important Founding Father. Yet he saw nothing wrong with mandates for public health. To him, they were just commonsense measures. Liberty didn’t enter into it.

The crisis is over now. Nearly everyone wants to get on with their lives.

But it’s telling that you guys advocated policies that helped kill a million Americans and would’ve killed a million more if you had your druthers, and yet you’re still not apologetic about it.

You base your arguments on the premise Cooties was a crisis. It was not. I scoffed at this BS hysteria all along and everyone I know and work with has gotten through just fine, including many who got the sniffles.

What you are saying is that you were ignorant before and you’re still proudly ignorant now. A million unnecessary American deaths has not made you any wiser.

Your post is probably the best argument for coercive measures that I could produce. What it proves is that some people are NEVER smart, and they have to be told what to do lest they cause social chaos and destruction.

So the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop are not “Russian disinformation” as per the links you left in a 2020 comment? Seth Abramson et al. were wrong all this time, and Glenn Greenwald et al. were right all this time. Good to know.

Total number of media outlets which spread the CIA's pre-election lie that the Biden laptop was "Russian disinformation" and have now retracted their falsehoods in light of the NYT's statement 8 days ago that they authenticated the laptop's key emails:

Zero. pic.twitter.com/laBKlX2jRC

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 24, 2022

“Only a highly motivated and tendentious mindset …”

50 cents per comment is all the motivation Coronavenusvirus needs from George Soros.

The record is sketchy, to say the least, regarding the ultimate disposition of the handful of blacks arriving on the ship and what kind of labor they performed for how long and for whom. Clearer, is the assessment of Yale historian Edmund Morgan in American Slavery, American Freedom, that until 1713 black slaves were scarce in the colonies and that White indentured servants were the primary source of plantation labor. He claims Indians sold into slavery from the South Carolina colony alone outnumbered all black slaves in the colonies.

He goes on to explain that blacks only became an majority of the plantation labor population in the middle of the 18th century and by the end of that century total plantation labor for the preceding 100 years was approx. 40/60 split white/black. As late as the start of the 19th century, most everything west of the East TN boundary with NC and south was wilderness. It took most of the following 60 years before war to clear the wilderness and establish plantations. The Gone with the Wind South was an short lived phenomena — 50 or fewer years in the main.

The plantation economy was the only part of the ag economy using mostly negro labor. The larger general ag economy was overwhelmingly white yeoman farmers.

Even Henry Louis Gates has found it necessary to explain to black folk looking for Indian ancestors that the 17th century in North America was an exclusively white and Indian affair except for an smattering of blacks.

The Russian disinformation was not about whether the lap top existed, but that its contexts contained unequivocal evidence of illegal activity on the part of Hunter Biden with the Ukrainians. There is the assumption on your part that there is definitive proof of guilt. There COULD be. But in your world, that’s all you need to convict.

Let us assume that there is illegal activity in a similar vein as Trump and his cronies, which already has been demonstrated and is currently being investigated. Are you willing to support the rule of law and law and order in both instances, or are you going to pull a Glenn Greenwald? Honk your horn twice on the record.

There was contemporaneous testimony corroborating the nature of the evidence found on the laptop. Don’t cherry pick the evidence.

But it’s telling that you guys advocated policies that helped kill a million Americans and would’ve killed a million more if you had your druthers, and yet you’re still not apologetic about it.

How many “guys” are you talking about? Two or three? So that makes them responsible for what …a million each? Half a million at least. Well, you keep right on them, and keep us updated on how many millions they’ve killed.

Do tell.

Fine. But this just transfers the argument to another level. Nearly all fifty states have at one time or another taken some coercive measures for public health, whether they were soft lockdowns or temporary mask mandates or vaccine mandates for certain professions.

You had mentioned the Constitution but seemed ambiguous about whether you thought the Constitution doesn’t block universal nationwide mandates. We appear to agree the Constitution blocks national mandates.

The level is important. One of the hidden reasons for universal vaccine mandates here was to eliminate the control group of unvaccinated people so no long-term comparisons could be made. Covid vaccine proponents appeared to be afraid of what it might show if such comparisons could be done. The state that had the least aggressive measures involving lockdowns, mask wearing, and mandatory vaccinations was probably Florida. Adjusted for age distribution, Florida death rates were about at the national average. Florida’s economic growth rate was above average and their unemployment rate was below average while the states that pursued aggressive measures mostly did worse. There are also intangible psychological harms to living in something like a police state. Florida gained two hundred thousand residents from other states in 2021. People were voting with their feet that they thought the measures being taken in other states were excessive.

The response to a disease should be proportionate to the seriousness of a disease. Washington didn’t need to know the exact death rate statistics for smallpox. As you said, he could see it was devastating. Years of life lost is much lower for Covid since a much smaller percentage die from it and those who do are usually near the end of their lives. Covid is probably a hundred times less dangerous in this respect so common sense tells us, and would have probably told Washington too, that you would not want to take the same extreme measures for Covid.

Pay attention.

How about being specific? What was this “contemporaneous testimony corroborating the nature of the evidence found on the laptop”? Who had testified? When?

Joe Biden claimed that the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop was Russian disinformation.

The lead spreader of CIA's "Russian disinformation" lie was Joe Biden. He'll never be asked to account for it. In fact, what proved the media's corrupt intent from the start was neither Biden denied their authenticity, yet media still claimed it was fake:https://t.co/vIycZYh8h9

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 18, 2022

And, lots and lots of yoga pants.

Sorry, Alden. I don’t know the fashion world terms, but everyone I know calls all of the tight thin, stretchable fabric pants “yoga pants”. You don’t have to actually, like, do yoga.

My share can’t be much more than 1/4 million. Compared to the Totalitarians, say your Stalins, your Pol Pots, and your Castroes, I’m a piker. I’m surprised I even have non-moderated posting privileges. (Just a joke, Steve!)

Oh, so the yoga pants oligarchs were calling the shots!

Absolutely. Any father would defend his son. But the fact remains as of now there is nothing that has been proven that Hunter is guilty of anything. Greenwald and you know that. There is simply a suggestion or implication that there was other than legal activity taking place. In the end, you both are very selective about the rule law and law and order.

There very well might be something there. But Greenwald and you are acting as if there is definitively something that was patently against the law. That’s why it’s called misinformation.

And your silence is telling here— Let us assume that there is illegal activity in a similar vein as Trump and his cronies, which already has been demonstrated and is currently being investigated. Are you willing to support the rule of law and law and order in both instances, or are you going to pull a Glenn Greenwald?

Honk your horn twice on the record.

You had mentioned the Constitution but seemed ambiguous about whether you thought the Constitution doesn’t block universal nationwide mandates. We appear to agree the Constitution blocks national mandates.

I don’t think it matters. Childhood vaccinations are routine in all fifty states, for example. Even conservative Wyoming mandates over twenty total shots for its school children to immunize them against twelve different diseases. While waivers for the vaccine-hesitant are possible for religious or medical reasons, they are generally difficult to get in every state. That’s not an accident. Most states deliberately make it hard to avoid vaccinating your children because they want herd immunity.

So federalism doesn’t provide people like you any relief from vaccine mandates. It’s just helped a few reluctant and deluded souls to avoid COVID-19 vaccine mandates for the time being.

Covid vaccine proponents appeared to be afraid of what it might show if such comparisons could be done.

Nope. The proof of COVID-19 vaccine efficacy has been studied in numerous countries and from numerous angles. The vaccines work at keeping many people out of hospitals and the morgues. Temporarily perhaps, but in the long run we are all dead.

Adjusted for age distribution, Florida death rates were about at the national average. Florida’s economic growth rate was above average and their unemployment rate was below average while the states that pursued aggressive measures mostly did worse.

Florida also has one of the lowest rates of obesity in the nation (#6 out of 50 states), and I bet Florida’s economic growth rates had been above the national average for some time before the pandemic. Red states like Florida and Texas didn’t need this pandemic to show their superior economic stewardship over states like New York and California. They’ve been doing that for quite a while now.

There are also intangible psychological harms to living in something like a police state. Florida gained two hundred thousand residents from other states in 2021. People were voting with their feet that they thought the measures being taken in other states were excessive.

Calling jurisdictions “police states” because they have vaccine mandates is rhetorical overkill. And, once again, Florida and Texas had been winning out in the population race for many years over states like New York and California, well before the pandemic began. So that has nothing to do with COVID-19. The red state response to the pandemic may have encouraged a trend that was already there, but it didn’t create the trend.

The response to a disease should be proportionate to the seriousness of a disease.

That’s certainly true. But COVID-19 had been the most terrible pandemic to affect the U.S. in a century.

And while Washington saw smallpox was devastating, not everyone at the time did. Keep in mind that the Virginia House of Burgess voted to restrict inoculations. They didn’t just vote against mandates; they mandated that not everyone willing could get inoculated. And that group of Virginia lawmakers was seeing smallpox do the same thing to local populations that Washington was seeing it do, and yet they came to the exact opposite conclusion.

So you can’t rely on the obviousness of the argument that smallpox was so devastating that of course Washington wanted to coerce his fellow Americans into getting inoculated.

Corvy, let me ask you something: have you ever lived in a semi-developed kleptocracy like Ukraine or Russia, or had a relationship with someone who has, or have a family background in such a place? I’m assuming you haven’t, like the vast majority of American politicians and bureaucrats. Any money given in such countries, you can safely assume a large amount of it is going to be embezzled. That’s just life. What tends to make the difference is when corruption reaches such a level it inhibits getting positive things done, like in India or Russia, and unlike, say, China or Vietnam.

What American politicians *don’t* have any illusions about is when money comes the other direction. And Ukraine has spent more money on US politicians than far wealthier, higher-profile countries have in the last decade. It’s convenient for them that Biden’s son also happens to be a crackhead. They aren’t known for covering their trails very well or being the most formidable, savvy negotiators.

(Also, on Russia? Yeah, sure. Trump was a 1980s NYC real estate developer at the moment when Soviet Jewish criminals were just hitting the city in Brighton Beach. I’m under no illusions about his and his family’s graft… BUT there’s a catch. If you and your NPR buddies promise to treat the Clinton Foundation the same fair, transparent, non-judgmental way on their uranium deals. Want to take that bet? It’d be like comparing a small-time city hall politician to a global mafia network in terms of scale, hint, hint.

😉 😉 😉

I didn’t think so.)

I’m sorry to say that the responsible parties number in the millions, and therefore their per capita share of COVID fatalities is less than one dead per “guy.”

I’ll keep you updated, though, if the numbers change.

But COVID-19 had been the most terrible pandemic to affect the U.S. in a century.

If I look at Orwell2024’s numbers, I hesitate with regard to the severity of Covid

I mean: No Covid in New Zealand and just about the same number of deaths as in Sweden?

Here is Orwell2024’s Sweden / New Zealand comparison in more detail

https://orwell2024.substack.com/p/new-zealand-sweden-the-covid-mortality?s=r

I don’t know what to make of Orwell 2024’s data. I’m not familiar with how either Sweden or New Zealand collect or determine their mortality stats, and I don’t want to take the time to trace down his statistics. He takes way too much time introducing the problem in an uninteresting way (“Sweden is in Europe, blah, blah, blah, etc.”) rather than focus on the more likely problems to his data collection.

But I don’t think we do need to know those countries’ mortality figures to answer the question of COVID-19’s severity. I don’t know where you hail from, but as an American I followed the mortality stats here with great interest. And those stats clearly showed a striking leap up in deaths beginning with March, 2020.

That’s evident by just looking at the basic mortality stats from the last several years. All figures are from the CDC:

2014 – 2,626,418 deaths

2015 – 2,712,630

2016 – 2,744,248

2017 – 2,813,503

2018 – 2,839,205

2019 – 2,854,838

2020 – 3,383,729 (COVID pandemic begins in March)

2021 – 3,385,364 (provisional figures)

________

Look at how little the total number of U.S. deaths changed from year to year prior to 2020. Around 86K was the largest annual increase. And in the five years from 2014 to 2019, the total annual number of deaths grew less than 230K, despite going up every year.

Then, suddenly, a more-than-500K-leap in the total number of deaths occurred in 2020. That number remained just as high in 2021, which contradicts those who claimed in 2020 that COVID was only killing off all the old and weak people who didn’t have much time to live anyway.

BTW, the CDC claims that only 350K Americans died of COVID in 2020, but I’ve looked closely at the figures and by my reckoning well over 400K died of the disease that year. The CDC almost certainly is undercounting the number of COVID dead, at least for 2020.

Some U.S. conservatives have tried to argue that other causes, related to the shutdown, are responsible for the increase. Homicide, suicide, drug overdoses, old people unable or afraid to go the hospital to treat other non-COVID maladies because of the pandemic, etc.

But that, too, doesn’t make sense. Homicides went up dramatically in 2020, but compared to the overall number of deaths, the increase was just a drop in the bucket. Around 5,000 additional homicides in 2020. That accounts for less than 1% of the more than 500K increase.

Contrary to expectations, suicides did not go up in 2020. They went down. They even dropped from the list of ten top causes of death in the U.S. that year.

Drug overdose deaths in 2020 went up dramatically, but nowhere near enough to be responsible for more than 5% of the 500K additional deaths (~ 25K).

Did non-COVID diseases cause the spike because people were unable to get treatment due to the COVID pandemic? Doesn’t look like it: More people died of heart disease and stroke in 2020 than in 2019, but fewer people died of cancer and chronic respiratory diseases.

Obviously, COVID caused this large increase in mortality in the U.S., and obviously it was quite serious.

Thanks for looking into Orwell2024’s numbers. I live in southern Germany (Badenia).
Btw. – Switzerland too did not see excess deaths due to Covid, as Swiss social medicine and virology professor Pietro Vernazza found out – even though the official numbers tell a somewhat different story. Turns out, those were not adjusted to the growing number of older people in Switzerland. Bad stats.

Many obese and malnutritioned people live in the US.  The CDC reported in autumn 202o, that those would be the majority of ICU Covid-patients. Don’t know if that causes the big difference. And – White Death (fentanyl) might be an even bigger factor than the official numbers suggest.

Steve Sailer mentioned that traffic deaths went up in 2020/21.

I count George Floyd as one of the Covid deaths in the official death stats, that for sure were none.
But I see the problem: Even if one takes into account that many Covid deaths were with and not from Covid, the excess death numbers would still be a problem.

Blogger Achmed E. Newman did look into the excess death numbers in the US and found that there are factors that make those numbers look bigger than they are. He wrote about that on his blog and in comments here. His blog is Peak Stupidity. It is not easy to search for topics on his blog though. His main point is, that the growing numbers of older people and of immigrants are not correctly represented in the official stats and make them look scarier thn they actually are.

Orwell2024 thought about this nutrition / obesity problem too, because the French numbers surprised him positively and he came up with nutrition as a possible cause for the big difference in the excess death numbers between France and GB.

Here is Professor Norman Fenton, a GB statistician,  on deaths caused by lockdowns – it’s the header of his twitter account and thus easily to be found there

Tweets by profnfenton

Dr. Scott Atlas (A Plague Upon Our House): The Reality Is The Lockdowns Killed People worldwide

•Lockdowns pushed 130M people into abject poverty.
•400,000 new deaths from Tuberculosis.
•Tens of millions more babies dying of malaria.
•325,000 Americans skipped chemo in Spring 2020.
•50% of heart attack/strokes did not call ambulance.
•65% to 75% of cancer screenings missed.
•85% of living organ transplants not done.
•300% increase in teenage self-harm.
•200% to 300% increase in teenage anxiety and depression.
•52% of college-aged kids gained unwanted 28 pounds in 2020.