Steerzing in a New Direction...

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John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1501

Post by John D »

So... okay... the little soprano. Wow. I have a little crush. I could take all my money and travel to Georgia. I could fund her singing career and in our spare time we could raise poppies. We could sing folk songs together in the evenings as we cooked our simple dinner. We would plan her next concert and then cuddle in front of the fire. I should get a good week out of this fantasy as I drift off to sleep.

They have such strong faces and chins. They are probably tougher than I am.... no... they are certainly tougher than I am... but I would try to keep up.

:fpig:


John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1502

Post by John D »

Ok... fuck it. I am in love.

I am going to go online and get a ticket today and cash out my 401k. Georgia here I come. :D


ThreeFlangedJavis
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1503

Post by ThreeFlangedJavis »

Psychologist Mattias Desmet thinks we are in the grip of something called mass formation where a big chunk of the population become fixated on one threat to the exclusion of all others. It's why you cannot get people to recognise the damage done by the Corona hysteria.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1504

Post by fafnir »

Steersman wrote:
fafnir wrote: 0.1% for under 65s? The stat I had was 0.05% for people under 70. It's also deaths "with covid" not deaths "from covid". I really don't know about the claim that only 10% of the "with covid" deaths are also "from covid", but it's certainly less than 100%. 0.05% fatality rate is more of an approximate upper bound of the situation a year ago. I hope we are better at treating it now. If we don't have enough ventilators, then there isn't much excuse. In any case, the odds of somebody who isn't obese, chronically sick, or old dying is tiny.
As you suggested later, how we calculate these numbers is a bit of a shot in the dark. Very easy to misinterpret the data and reach conclusions that aren't justified.

For example, I see the Worldometer says 44 million cases in the US with 0.72 million dead so that's a fatality rate of about 1.6%. But if we assume the whole population (330 million) have actually been exposed - which I don't think is at all justified - then that's a fatality rate of about 0.2%. Which of course varies by age and health condition:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Yes, but that 44million is just positive tests. A lot of those aren't clinical cases since the person wasn't actually sick. I think that's partly what the inventor of the PCR test was complaining about with it not being a diagnostic tool. If one is wanting the total number of people who would have tested positive but weren't tested, it's obviously going to be far higher. How many people were being tested during the first spike? Presumably only a fraction of the people who would have tested positive if they'd been tested. There is also probably quite a bit of duplication in there as they are measuring positive tests, not the number of people who have had covid. How meaningful is knowing the number of positive tests, and why are we using it as if it was either the number of cases or the number of infections? Then you get on to the deaths. Again, those aren't deaths "from" covid, those are deaths "with" covid. I don't know what dividing one number that isn't the thing we want to measure into another number that isn't the thing we want to measure is supposed to be telling us.
Steersman wrote: But seems to me that that 0.05% rate is masking some aspects that we should be aware of. While I don't have a really good handle on the associated probability calculations - Bayes theorem in particular - it seems useful to partition the population into those who, on being exposed to the virus, require hospitalization and those who don't. Interesting graph from Wikipedia that shows the current level of hospitalizations in the US over a period of a year ending this last March - a peak of about 130,000 in January 2021:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistic ... alizations
Are those "with covid" or "from covid"?
Steersman wrote: Which is maybe not a big deal as there are apparently some million hospital beds in the US. Although different states could have, generally do have, different levels of hospitalization typically dependent on vaccination levels:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/185 ... ince-2001/
There are supposedly some complications with hospital beds. If you don't allocate a nurse to the bed, the bed dissapears. Number of beds isn't the same the capacity in the system to quickly create beds if needed, which I think is more like the figure we want.
Steersman wrote: However, there's no indication there of the total number of beds that have been occupied to date by Covid patients. Although I remember seeing a statistic that there's a 1 in 5 chance of dying if one is hospitalized for Covid. On the basis of .72 million dead, that works out to about 3.6 million hospital beds taken up by Covid patients. So one might argue that there's 1 chance in 100 of winding up hospitalized for Covid, although that is assuming that all 330 million Americans have been exposed which seems unlikely to the case. But the kicker there is that there seems to be only 1 chance in 20 to 1 chance in 100 of surviving that hospitalization if one hasn't been vaccinated:

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus- ... 54f5d5e187

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-58545548
Are those people being hospitalized "from covid" or "with covid"? If true, it sounds like unvaccinated people aren't really a risk to the vaccinated. Why is everybody going crazy authoritarian then? I'd have to think harder about the data, but looking at the BBC data..... they are taking the period January to June. For a good part of that time, the number of people who were double vaccinated in the UK was tiny. There is definitely going to be an effect of taking a small subset of the population and remarking on them having a small subset of the total number of deaths. I don't think many people are arguing that the vaccine does absolutely nothing though. It does seem to be less and less effective though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58162318
Steersman wrote: Sure, the chances of being hospitalized aren't all that high, though 1 in 100 seems to be poor odds to be risking one's life for. But those are improved substantially by being vaccinated.
Hospitalised "from covid" or "with covid"? I think the data your are refering to comes from before the virus adapted to the vaccine. None the less, sure the vaccine doesn't do absolutely nothing. I'm not overweight, old or chronically sick, so my odds of being hospitalised are not 1%.
Steersman wrote:
fafnir wrote: One funny observation..... you mention 150,000 as the number of deaths in the under 65 age range if everybody became infected under based on this infection fatality rate. 158,926 people in that age range have died "with covid" already:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/119 ... by-age-us/
Another swing and a miss by me? ... ;) But a bit surprised at that, although, if I'd thought about it, I probably shouldn't have been. Maybe all those in that cohort with "pre-existing conditions" have already died so that rate is unlikely to be repeated. But again that seems dependent on a questionable assumption or two, notably that all in that group have either been vaccinated or exposed.
Some of the people with pre-existing issues have certainly died. That then starts to lead into the claim that in a lot of countries that were hit badly by covid, there had previously been some mild flu seasons, so an unusually high number of such people were kicking around. I haven't looked into that though.
Steersman wrote:
fafnir wrote: Maybe that means that almost everybody must have had it and the pandemic is over? Maybe it means there is something wrong in the way deaths are being recorded? I don't know.
Maybe. I don't know either. Complex phenomenon, but ignoring the science and the biology - as so many insist on doing - isn't helping matters any. Though the nature of flu viruses is that they seem to be continually evolving - hence the necessity for yearly flu shots. We may well have "herd immunity" for the current strains of Covid, but already half-a-dozen strains identified; seems likely that there will be others that we'll have to deal with.
Perhaps the thing with flu is that by the time you hit 70 you have been exposed to a lot of flu viruses, so there isn't anybody out there over the age of 10 whose immune system is entirely untraine to it. What would the death rate for flu be if through heroic efforts we got the median first exposure up to, say 40 years? You'd have loads of elderly people who had never had a sniff of the flu falling over like native americans from smallpox.

Maybe just letting all the healthy people catch it would be a better idea than repeatedly giving it not very effective vaccines that keep training the virus to adapt to the vaccines? Certainly cheaper than shutting down the global economy.

Service Dog
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1505

Post by Service Dog »

Credit Report:

Fairly large Bank of America branch in Lower Manhattan was wide open, with zero staff visible, just now.

Robbery in progress? nope

Only 2 came to work today. And 1 took lunch break, as per law. The other was hiding in a side office. Flustered, confused, unable to perform all normal transactions by herself.

What's BoA's credit rating?

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1506

Post by John D »

Credit story: When I bought my current house (six years ago) I decided to get a home loan. With the assets from my current home I put about 30% of the value in the down payment. Then I shopped for a loan. I worked with about four lenders to get a loan rate and check the fees. I picked the least expensive and proceeded to secure the loan.

I filled out a shit ton of papers. Old taxes, old pay stubs, etc. etc. I had to explain a mistake on one of the credit reports....etc. I told the loan officer that I had a million dollars of assets in my 401k. Surely.... I was not a credit risk. Nope. They said they didn't care. I actually had to sign a tax form that I had filed online... to prove that I paid my taxes. Total bullshit.

I finally called the woman and said. "Look... I am not filling out any more forms for you. If you want my business then accept my application. If you don't want my business I will go somewhere else. I will NOT fill out any more forms."

I was approved the next day.

Fucking Cunt.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1507

Post by fafnir »

Service Dog wrote: What's BoA's credit rating?
AA - Very high credit quality
https://www.fitchratings.com/entity/ban ... a-80089060

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1508

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Facebook is down. Can't even get their own internal servers back up.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1509

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

fafnir wrote:
Steersman wrote:
fafnir wrote: 0.1% for under 65s? The stat I had was 0.05% for people under 70. It's also deaths "with covid" not deaths "from covid". I really don't know about the claim that only 10% of the "with covid" deaths are also "from covid", but it's certainly less than 100%. 0.05% fatality rate is more of an approximate upper bound of the situation a year ago. I hope we are better at treating it now. If we don't have enough ventilators, then there isn't much excuse. In any case, the odds of somebody who isn't obese, chronically sick, or old dying is tiny.
As you suggested later, how we calculate these numbers is a bit of a shot in the dark. Very easy to misinterpret the data and reach conclusions that aren't justified.

For example, I see the Worldometer says 44 million cases in the US with 0.72 million dead so that's a fatality rate of about 1.6%. But if we assume the whole population (330 million) have actually been exposed - which I don't think is at all justified - then that's a fatality rate of about 0.2%. Which of course varies by age and health condition:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Yes, but that 44million is just positive tests. A lot of those aren't clinical cases since the person wasn't actually sick.
Steerz should know the difference between CFR and IFR. He's just trying to get a rise out of you, out of anybody.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1510

Post by John D »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Facebook is down. Can't even get their own internal servers back up.
The world is suddenly twice as good as it was a few minutes ago. Ahhhhhhh....

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1511

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Steerz should know the difference between CFR and IFR. He's just trying to get a rise out of you, out of anybody.
Thanks. I find it helpful writing it out to get it all straight in my own mind. I'll bail if the whole thing hinges on the definition of "woman". ;-)

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1512

Post by Brive1987 »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: I believe there were scorch marks on trees indicating failed efforts at fires
Apparently, she tried to set three standing, dead trees on fire, instead of using duff and brush to build a small, smoky fire.

Why these people don't bring whistles along -- three, paced blows is the universal distress signal. SAR would have heard them.

Oh and she had skipped the map classes as unnecessary.
Kinda like how Amelia Earhart couldn't be bothered to learn how to operate the radio.
Magnets how do they work?

“Investigators also found a compass, trail map and emergency whistle, according to the report.”

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1513

Post by fafnir »

Brive1987 wrote: Magnets how do they work?

“Investigators also found a compass, trail map and emergency whistle, according to the report.”
If my wife's survival depended on her knowing which way up to hold a map, she'd be dead.

John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1514

Post by John D »

fafnir wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: Magnets how do they work?

“Investigators also found a compass, trail map and emergency whistle, according to the report.”
If my wife's survival depended on her knowing which way up to hold a map, she'd be dead.
Haha. My wife is the worst at reading a map... but she thinks she is really good at it. She is good at remembering landmarks, so sometimes she knows where she is better than me... but... she can NEVER point to north. No matter where we are...even at home... she has no idea where north is. Haha.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1515

Post by fafnir »

John D wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: Magnets how do they work?

“Investigators also found a compass, trail map and emergency whistle, according to the report.”
If my wife's survival depended on her knowing which way up to hold a map, she'd be dead.
Haha. My wife is the worst at reading a map... but she thinks she is really good at it. She is good at remembering landmarks, so sometimes she knows where she is better than me... but... she can NEVER point to north. No matter where we are...even at home... she has no idea where north is. Haha.
My wife knows she can't do it..... Before satnav it was a nightmare. She once had to be map reader on a road trip for my mother who always gives incomplete instructions that assume you have access to what she was thinking about before she began to speak. She had no idea where she was, or what way up the map was and my mother would bark things at her like "we're on the Norwich Road (only it wouldn't be called that on the map) we need to turn off about 5 minutes before we see a white pub". She practically had a stroke.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1516

Post by Brive1987 »

I'm calling bullshit on any excuses. Note the scale at the bottom: 200m.

This woman had just done over 1000 miles of hiking and had 'prepared'. :lol:

She had just descended a very significant feature into a valley and up again.
She had just crossed literally the old human-made landmark since her prev nights shelter - 'Railroad Road'.
She had also just crossed a significant stream - the first of the day and the only flowing north south.

It was literally impossible for her to move more than 500m in any line (other than a very constrained NNW) without hitting a track or road.
All she had to do was go back down the hill she had just climbed.

I call bullshit on her whistle skills, her map (which was probably a torn page from an atlas), her basic situational awareness and any claim she identified rudimentary waypoints on her journey.

She was meant to die.


Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1517

Post by Brive1987 »

Even if she couldn't remember whether she had turned left or right off the track, any westward line going downhill would have hit the Orbeton Stream or Redington Pond.

It's not like she was aiming for a track junction or specific re-entrant in order to win the game.

fafnir
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1518

Post by fafnir »

Are we know she didn't stop taking her anti-anxiety meds earlier? Quite a few of these inexplicable disappearance stories come down to people not in their right mind.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1519

Post by fafnir »

Brive1987 wrote: Even if she couldn't remember whether she had turned left or right off the track, any westward line going downhill would have hit the Orbeton Stream or Redington Pond.

It's not like she was aiming for a track junction or specific re-entrant in order to win the game.
Maybe she was hiding due to paranoia induced by withdrawal from her meds?

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1520

Post by Brive1987 »

Just read an article with this doozy. Note the hearing aid and compass entry.


Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1521

Post by Brive1987 »

fafnir wrote: Are we know she didn't stop taking her anti-anxiety meds earlier? Quite a few of these inexplicable disappearance stories come down to people not in their right mind.
Her diary appears quite calm throughout and the SMS unsuccessfully sent on the day mentions a 'br' break. The SMS the next day is only marginally escalated. Her behaviour in going to higher ground, lighting fires, staying put etc feels measured if stupid - especially after a few days.

So I don't see evidence of chaos. Just total disorientation.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1522

Post by Steersman »

fafnir wrote:
Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Steerz should know the difference between CFR and IFR. He's just trying to get a rise out of you, out of anybody.
Thanks. I find it helpful writing it out to get it all straight in my own mind. I'll bail if the whole thing hinges on the definition of "woman". ;-)
:) Can't see any connections offhand but give me a minute or two to think about how "CFR and IFR" might turn on that definition ... ;)

But curious phenomenon in many ways. Lotta feminists in particular who throw stones, with some justification, at the transgendered with their "self-identification" - Helen Joyce most recently:
Why it's wrong – and profoundly damaging – to make us all agree that someone is whatever gender they say they are: HELEN JOYCE argues the gender self-identification lobby is harming children, women – and trans people themselves.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... eople.html

Yet Joyce and those same feminists will insist that there are no necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify as either a "woman" or as a "female", that memberships in those categories are entirely and only a matter of "self-identification". Been blocked for my troubles for pointing that out too - surprise, surprise ;) :

Tweets_HelenJoyce_JamesWatt_Worst_Female1A.jpg
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Bit hard to see how Joyce can argue that I'm talking her & JC Jones "out of context" when they both more or less point out that "produces ova" is that "necessary and sufficient condition": no ova, not a female. Likewise with sperm.

Far too many of us - most in fact - insist on making transitory memberships in biological categories into "immutable" identities. Feminists and transwomen: pots and kettles, almost equally "black".

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1523

Post by Steersman »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
fafnir wrote:
Steersman wrote:
fafnir wrote: 0.1% for under 65s? The stat I had was 0.05% for people under 70. It's also deaths "with covid" not deaths "from covid". I really don't know about the claim that only 10% of the "with covid" deaths are also "from covid", but it's certainly less than 100%. 0.05% fatality rate is more of an approximate upper bound of the situation a year ago. I hope we are better at treating it now. If we don't have enough ventilators, then there isn't much excuse. In any case, the odds of somebody who isn't obese, chronically sick, or old dying is tiny.
As you suggested later, how we calculate these numbers is a bit of a shot in the dark. Very easy to misinterpret the data and reach conclusions that aren't justified.

For example, I see the Worldometer says 44 million cases in the US with 0.72 million dead so that's a fatality rate of about 1.6%. But if we assume the whole population (330 million) have actually been exposed - which I don't think is at all justified - then that's a fatality rate of about 0.2%. Which of course varies by age and health condition:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Yes, but that 44million is just positive tests. A lot of those aren't clinical cases since the person wasn't actually sick.
Steerz should know the difference between CFR and IFR. He's just trying to get a rise out of you, out of anybody.
Dang! Busted again! ;)

But not really - hadn't ever really thought much about what the difference might be. My intent in comparing with "infected" populations of either 44 million or 330 million was to put up a couple of fence posts to mark the south 40 - a minimum and a maximum "IFR". Or "CFR" - whichever makes you happiest.

Though as a point of reference and for posterity:
The IFR differs from the CFR in that it aims to estimate the fatality rate in both sick and healthy infected: the detected disease (cases) and those with an undetected disease (asymptomatic and not tested group).[9] (Individuals who are infected, but show no symptoms, are said to have "unapparent", "silent" or "subclinical" infections and may inadvertently infect others.) By definition, the IFR cannot exceed the CFR, because the former adds asymptomatic cases to its denominator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Case_fatality_rate

But the "sick and healthy infected" phrase looks a bit iffy - what's the dividing line between "sick infected" and "healthy infected"? And how does one quantify the latter if many are "asymptomatic"? Partly why, as a worst case, I took the 330 million. Which looks rather improbable - which makes that lower number of 0.2% something of a wanhope.

As for that "foul canard" of "getting a rise out of you", that looks rather like "playing the race card". Don't think you're doing yourself any favours by such baseless accusations - rather like your earlier "cherry-picking" and "sophistry":
Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
But don't think you help that by making unevidenced claims, particularly those that are contradicted by other evidence:
Among every 100,000 patients who get the vaccine, 1 to 5 will likely develop myocarditis who would not otherwise have developed it, researchers reported based on data from Clalit Health Services, a large Israeli HMO.

That rate is much higher - 11 per 100,000 - among people infected with the coronavirus, they said.
Cherry-picking -- more sophistry from you.
Is it or is it not the case - assuming the accuracy of the above - that one is anywhere from 2 to 11 times more likely to "develop myocarditis" from getting infected by covid than from getting the jab?

Don't think you're helping your case by not answering and dealing with my points. You're a better man than that - Gunga Din.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1524

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Steersman wrote: Don't think you're helping your case by not answering and dealing with my points. You're a better man than that - Gunga Din.
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John D
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1525

Post by John D »

Rand Paul does it again...


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1526

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

John D wrote: Rand Paul does it again...

Xavy motherfuckin' Becerra, former CA AG, banner of guns, frequent guest topper of B-27s for our target practice. Spent his entire time as AG on frivolous lawsuits against the Trump admin. Cocksucker. Cunt. Sociopath.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1527

Post by Brive1987 »

Brive1987 wrote:
fafnir wrote: Are we know she didn't stop taking her anti-anxiety meds earlier? Quite a few of these inexplicable disappearance stories come down to people not in their right mind.
Her diary appears quite calm throughout and the SMS unsuccessfully sent on the day mentions a 'br' break. The SMS the next day is only marginally escalated. Her behaviour in going to higher ground, lighting fires, staying put etc feels measured if stupid - especially after a few days.

So I don't see evidence of chaos. Just total disorientation.
Here's what passes as fan-fiction journalism - out from behind its pay-wall.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160825171 ... story.html

What a load of crap. However it does illuminate a couple of things.

April 23: started the walk with a friend and her husband support team.

Every day they had been met by her husband in his car who had preselected accommodation and food (motel or camp ground) "along with the best ice cream stand, which is to say, the one that had either blueberries and cream or rocky road — Gerry’s favorite flavors".

On the trail, whenever they had to take a dump, one would stand sentry on the trail while the other wandered off.

b]May/June[/b] was essentially a series of supported day hikes.

End of June her partner goes home.

For two weeks she had to use huts/shelters when hubby couldn't be reached in a day. It seems though that she only picked up her tent from hubby in mid July. Say July 15.

July 21 she was at Poplar Ridge Hut heading per SOP to Spaulding Mountain Hut. Single bound. Then back to the car.
July 22 she was lost.
Aug 10-18 or thereabouts she was dead.

It could very well be that July 22 was the first time she had used her tent (outside a camp ground) on the entire trek.

Having never been unsupported by infrastructure before, she simply turtled up and waited for the cavalry. Alas, until August 08, SAR had been searching closer to the Spaulding Mountain Hut due to an inaccurate sighting.

She died 700 metres from the Railway Road and exactly 500m from the track.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1528

Post by Service Dog »

Steersman wrote: one Robert Malone who we've talked about before
For what it's worth... my current opinion of Malone... is based on a hunch about his psychology.

It seems to me that he suffered several raw deals in his career. And this is 'his moment' to be recognized, respected, and call-out those who did him wrong. Except he's only partly-satisfied. An enthusiastic minority adore him. But the majority don't care-- or automatically despise him-- at the urging of powerful institutions in the govt, universities, media, tech.

Rather than present his strongest case-- then sit-back & hope for the best-- it seems to me he's frantically seeking the fatal flaw in his opponents' armor... anywhere he can find it. Outside his expertise.

Look at this, below. Everything he's asserting & insinuating may be true... but he has no specific personal knowledge about it... no more than any outsider. He's just another guy-on-the-internet re-sharing 'conspiracy theories'. EVEN IF he's right-- he's not positioning himself as a credentialed expert. He's arguing like just-some-guy on the outside looking-in, making guesses... which strikes me as an act of desperation...

https://media.patriots.win/post/Moot46I8.png

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1529

Post by Brive1987 »

According to this detailed article:
Lee (her partner) told the wardens that Gerry was “scared of the dark,” “scared of being alone” and hated to sleep in her tent in the woods.
And ...
Lee noticed troubling changes in her friend’s behavior the year before they began their big hike. According to Warden Dugas’ notes on his first conversation with Lee, which took place July 26, Gerry was “slower, less steady … and more careful” than she’d been during hikes they took in the summer of 2012, and she “had become forgetful.” As they hiked the A.T. in the spring of 2013, “Ms. Lee said that she had to go backwards on the trail and find Geraldine on an ever increasing basis.”

Elsewhere in the notes there are remarks like “off the trail four times in Dartmouth,” “no confidence” and, “If she took side trail she’d forget where she was.” Lee told the wardens she hiked ahead of Gerry, who was slower than her younger friend, but soon got in the habit of stopping and waiting for Gerry wherever side trails met the A.T., because otherwise her friend was likely to take the side trail and get lost and flustered.

The Warden Service emphasized Gerry’s lack of a sense of direction in a sworn statement they provided to Verizon to obtain her phone records with a warrant. “[Lee] had stated that GERALDINE routinely would become disoriented throughout their hike and they would have frequent arguments about which direction to hike in along the trail,” investigator Joshua Bubier said in his July 26 statement. “[Lee] felt that GERALDINE would have easily taken a wrong trail or gotten off the Appalachian Trail into the woods or down what might appear to be a trail and have gotten lost or injured.”
So. Her friend and husband shoulder quite the load of blame. Even if they had sold their home to up root to do this amazing(?) adventure.

And yes, going off food/meds wouldn't have helped.

https://thebollard.com/2016/07/04/m-i-a ... no-escape/

Steersman
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1530

Post by Steersman »

fafnir wrote:
Steersman wrote: <snip>

For example, I see the Worldometer says 44 million cases in the US with 0.72 million dead so that's a fatality rate of about 1.6%. But if we assume the whole population (330 million) have actually been exposed - which I don't think is at all justified - then that's a fatality rate of about 0.2%. Which of course varies by age and health condition:

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
Yes, but that 44million is just positive tests. A lot of those aren't clinical cases since the person wasn't actually sick. ....
Sure. But as I just mentioned in a response to Matt, those 44 million & 330 million numbers were just to create some "outer markers" of minimum and maximum IFRs. Or CFRs if you prefer ... ;)
fafnir wrote:
<snip>
Again, those aren't deaths "from" covid, those are deaths "with" covid. I don't know what dividing one number that isn't the thing we want to measure into another number that isn't the thing we want to measure is supposed to be telling us.

<snip>

Are those "with covid" or "from covid"?

<snip>

Are those people being hospitalized "from covid" or "with covid"? If true, it sounds like unvaccinated people aren't really a risk to the vaccinated. ....
You seem to like that phrase: "from covid or with covid". Reminds me of the Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz movie, Knight and Day: With me, and without me ... ;)

No doubt some deaths are marked due to covid when it wasn't a factor at all: car accident? Covid, QED. But "from" or "with" seems a bit of a red herring. If it's the Covid that administers the "coup de grace" then it seems a bit academic that the victim had already been shot up or had been standing on the edge of a cliff ready for Covid to push them over.

But certainly the unvaccinated are less of a risk to the vaccinated than they are to the other unvaccinated.
fafnir wrote: Why is everybody going crazy authoritarian then? I'd have to think harder about the data, but looking at the BBC data..... they are taking the period January to June. For a good part of that time, the number of people who were double vaccinated in the UK was tiny. There is definitely going to be an effect of taking a small subset of the population and remarking on them having a small subset of the total number of deaths. I don't think many people are arguing that the vaccine does absolutely nothing though. It does seem to be less and less effective though.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58162318
Good question - mob psychology? Why do people like watching disaster movies? Read somewhere is that it gives us all a sense of community, a shared experience.

As for "less and less effective", it seems clear that there are many variants that are the result of evolution, or are being created - no doubt in secret Microsoft labs ... ;)
fafnir wrote: Maybe just letting all the healthy people catch it would be a better idea than repeatedly giving it not very effective vaccines that keep training the virus to adapt to the vaccines? Certainly cheaper than shutting down the global economy.
Not sure that that is a particularly wise policy. Was reading a bit of the 1919 Spanish flu epidemic that said that it attacked the young more than the old:
Most influenza outbreaks disproportionately kill the young and old, with a higher survival rate in-between, but this pandemic had unusually high mortality for young adults.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu

Though you may have something of a point about "not very effective vaccines". You've probably taken antibiotics before and noticed that the instructions say that one has to follow the complete regimen simply to ensure that all the bugs are killed and there aren't any left to evolve into something worse. And many argue that the massive doses of antibiotics given to farm animals just makes the resulting bugs less susceptible to the antibiotics.

But don't think it's a particularly sound policy to not make an effort. No doubt it's better to have more effective vaccines and antibiotics but often something is better than nothing. Counseling the latter seems little different from banks saying there's no point in putting bars on the windows because the crooks will just find another way to break in.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1531

Post by fafnir »

Steersman wrote: You seem to like that phrase: "from covid or with covid". Reminds me of the Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz movie, Knight and Day: With me, and without me ... ;)

No doubt some deaths are marked due to covid when it wasn't a factor at all: car accident? Covid, QED. But "from" or "with" seems a bit of a red herring. If it's the Covid that administers the "coup de grace" then it seems a bit academic that the victim had already been shot up or had been standing on the edge of a cliff ready for Covid to push them over.
When the UK dropped the threshold for counting a "with covid" death in the covid deaths stats from 60 days after a positive test to 28, the death count dropped by 10%. Are most people who die "with covid" getting pushed over the cliff by covid? Even to the extent that they are, a better measure is the number of Quality Adjusted Life Years lost, not deaths.
Steersman wrote: Though you may have something of a point about "not very effective vaccines". You've probably taken antibiotics before and noticed that the instructions say that one has to follow the complete regimen simply to ensure that all the bugs are killed and there aren't any left to evolve into something worse. And many argue that the massive doses of antibiotics given to farm animals just makes the resulting bugs less susceptible to the antibiotics.

But don't think it's a particularly sound policy to not make an effort. No doubt it's better to have more effective vaccines and antibiotics but often something is better than nothing. Counseling the latter seems little different from banks saying there's no point in putting bars on the windows because the crooks will just find another way to break in.
How useful would antibiotics be if we gave an insufficient dose to reliably kill whatever bugs we were wanting to kill to everybody, sick or healthy, just to be sure? The rate that they became useless would go up enormously. Would that be an example of "doing something is better than doing nothing". Is that not what we are doing with the covid vaccines? Are we sure the gain of function study has finished?

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1532

Post by Brive1987 »

I feel the COVID debate mirrors the imprecision of the Holocaust counter arguments. With the Holocaust it’s never clear whether the argument is one ‘merely’ questioning the scale, or questioning the techniques or questioning the very reality of the exercise. Sometimes the alt-POV shifts depending on the area of operations. Typically the counter factual is never properly defined. Rather it’s an argument by exception loosely glued together with a darkly hinted at antisemitism.

So to with COVID. Are we claiming a global cabal? Is it govt led, Gates led or big pharma led? or is it a grand alliance? Are the goals to experiment? To depopulate? To subdue and remove “freedoms”? Maybe its sterilisation. Perhaps its a holistic programme across all outcome areas. Has it developed via free form organic structuralism or is it the execution of a pre-planned Davos agenda? Regardless, is the ‘goal’ consistent or does it vary by country?

Are lockdown and vaccines insidiously developed strategies designed for a one two punch? How much lead time was Amazon given to ramp up logistics to leverage lockdowns? Who briefed them? When? How?

Or is the virus outbreak just a shitty situation with reactive blunt force counter measures by ill prepared and incompetent bureaucracies who really didn’t want to enact the spoons? But who want to somehow make the problem go away so they could get back to the business of lazy money making? Have the solutions mirrored existing cultural and political prejudices? Bam bam bam. Has this disruption also opened windows leveraged by greedy and/or ambitious opportunists?

There’s been a lot of crazy talk and gnashing of teeth. In many ways this connected world is our worst case nightmare. Never mind the tentacled aliens lurking in the Moderna vax.

The whole thing is a tin-foiled sheathed wet dream.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1533

Post by Brive1987 »

I’m surprised the usual Pit trick of hiving off a dominating discussion into a sub thread hasn’t been wheeled out. But then Captain Fluffy Bunny hasn’t graced us with his presence for quite some time.

So there is that.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1534

Post by Brive1987 »

Meanwhile I would argue that there is (was) a clear precovid agenda by social, educational, political and ideological movements to dismantle western nation states to further an obsession with intersecting ‘isms and capitalistic global concentrations of wealth.

These two dynamics were synergistic, but seperate and only loosely coordinated in an overarching fashion. They reflected and were driven by the new physically and digitally connected planet. They were initially challenged by Islam but now face running headlong into aggressive Chinese expansion.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1535

Post by fafnir »

Brive,

There is a theory that the left has to some degree got a perspective that they can unify around, it's just a question of degree. The right is everybody who disagrees with that perspective, and hence is disunited in their actual beliefs. You have something similar going on with people who support the official narrative being necessarily fairly united, and people who disagree with it being far less united.

There are some basic facts that we can discuss, and maybe come to the conclusion that something is wrong with the official narrative. Any conclusion beyond that as to why is necessarily going to be speculative and depend greatly on our divergent understandings of the world. In the 1500s, there was a practical reality of indulgences being sold that could be sensibly discussed, but the cause of it being that the Pope needed money to pay for the new St Peter's wasn't something any but a handful of people would have known with certainty and evidence.
Brive1987 wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:58 am
There’s been a lot of crazy talk and gnashing of teeth. In many ways this connected world is our worst case nightmare. Never mind the tentacled aliens lurking in the Moderna vax.
100%. I work in IT and had an interest in reliability, availability, minimizing the impact of system failure etc.... The not particularly novel conclusion I came to was that the more interconnected, tightly coupled and interdependent systems are the bigger the scope for massive fuck ups and the less I wanted to touch them. That was at around the time of financial issues in 2008 and the two things became connected in my head ever since. It doesn't matter though, because the economies of scale that you get by not caring about this issue is nearly irresistible. On that principle alone, I don't like the idea of vaccinating entire populations in this way, at this pace.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1536

Post by fafnir »

Brive1987 wrote: Meanwhile I would argue that there is (was) a clear precovid agenda by social, educational, political and ideological movements to dismantle western nation states to further an obsession with intersecting ‘isms and capitalistic global concentrations of wealth.

These two dynamics were synergistic, but seperate and only loosely coordinated in an overarching fashion. They reflected and were driven by the new physically and digitally connected planet. They were initially challenged by Islam but now face running headlong into aggressive Chinese expansion.
My version of this is that you had two shocks on the left. The first shock was the realisation that the worker driven revolution Marx had predicted wasn't coming. Broadly that had been realised by the 20s. Then you have Khrushchev denouncing Stalin in the last 50s.

The first shock caused the development of the Gramsci idea of needing to take over the culture and the institutions that create culture. The second shock is when the left decouple from Soviet controlled Communist parties and their associated international organizational structure, and take up Gramsci and Continental philosophy which then leads to the 68.

Practically what all that did was to create a template for how you capture and wield power. On the one hand those weapons have been used by Marxists to carry out Gramsci's project with considerable success. On the other hand, you have a bunch of people who are interested in power and look at the weapons that have been created and want to wield them themselves, and look at the political landscape and realise that the safest path is to play nice with the ideologues.

I do think though that it is a mistake to see everything as emergent effects. If we take the example of the Russian revolution, there absolutely were people planning, coordinating, providing funds for years before hand towards that outcome....

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1537

Post by fafnir »

I was at a memorial recently with a bunch of old 60s leftists, now well into their 70s. I think the combination of Brexit and Trump was a shock to them as profound as the ones I mentioned in my previous post. I found a quote from somebody who heard the Khrushchev speech ‘Everything crumbled, never to be made whole again.’

Looking at Covid, I think you have a lot of things going on. You absolutely do have the Gramsci/Marxist/tear down America thing, you also have people whose lives have been spent thinking that they have been building something solid and good in the rules based international liberal order. You have people who are cynically interested in wealth and power. You have the political realism of China. You have NGOs and billionaires who have been making Malthusian population reduction arguments for more than a century. You presumably also have a bunch of people who are trying to make the best decisions they can while constrained by all these other forces.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1538

Post by John D »

:clap:
Brive1987 wrote: Or is the virus outbreak just a shitty situation with reactive blunt force counter measures by ill prepared and incompetent bureaucracies who really didn’t want to enact the spoons? But who want to somehow make the problem go away so they could get back to the business of lazy money making? Have the solutions mirrored existing cultural and political prejudices? Bam bam bam. Has this disruption also opened windows leveraged by greedy and/or ambitious opportunists?
This!

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1539

Post by Brive1987 »

fafnir wrote: Brive,

There is a theory that the left has to some degree got a perspective that they can unify around, it's just a question of degree. The right is everybody who disagrees with that perspective, and hence is disunited in their actual beliefs. You have something similar going on with people who support the official narrative being necessarily fairly united, and people who disagree with it being far less united.

There are some basic facts that we can discuss, and maybe come to the conclusion that something is wrong with the official narrative. Any conclusion beyond that as to why is necessarily going to be speculative and depend greatly on our divergent understandings of the world. In the 1500s, there was a practical reality of indulgences being sold that could be sensibly discussed, but the cause of it being that the Pope needed money to pay for the new St Peter's wasn't something any but a handful of people would have known with certainty and evidence.
Brive1987 wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 1:58 am
There’s been a lot of crazy talk and gnashing of teeth. In many ways this connected world is our worst case nightmare. Never mind the tentacled aliens lurking in the Moderna vax.
100%. I work in IT and had an interest in reliability, availability, minimizing the impact of system failure etc.... The not particularly novel conclusion I came to was that the more interconnected, tightly coupled and interdependent systems are the bigger the scope for massive fuck ups and the less I wanted to touch them. That was at around the time of financial issues in 2008 and the two things became connected in my head ever since. It doesn't matter though, because the economies of scale that you get by not caring about this issue is nearly irresistible. On that principle alone, I don't like the idea of vaccinating entire populations in this way, at this pace.
The problem of course is that the argument isn’t over detail. Detail is the smoke thrown down to cover broad brush stroke causal narratives. From the ‘right’. The ? Left ? is simply pointing out a new virus that shouldn’t be left to smoke thru societies per Italy et al. The counter POV isn’t simply push back, it’s alleging a conspiracy worldview of uncertain parameters. This isn’t helpful. I’d agree that unintended consequences attendant unprecedented global action is a worry. Be it vaccine, lockdown or ‘QE’. But the world has long ceased been capable of measured, nuanced action. I guess we’ll just pull bigger and bigger levers until something is irreparably broken.

Of course framing COVID as an invented hidden ‘means to an end’ (per indulgences) is a bit of a reach.

Brive1987
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1540

Post by Brive1987 »

fafnir wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: Meanwhile I would argue that there is (was) a clear precovid agenda by social, educational, political and ideological movements to dismantle western nation states to further an obsession with intersecting ‘isms and capitalistic global concentrations of wealth.

These two dynamics were synergistic, but seperate and only loosely coordinated in an overarching fashion. They reflected and were driven by the new physically and digitally connected planet. They were initially challenged by Islam but now face running headlong into aggressive Chinese expansion.
My version of this is that you had two shocks on the left. The first shock was the realisation that the worker driven revolution Marx had predicted wasn't coming. Broadly that had been realised by the 20s. Then you have Khrushchev denouncing Stalin in the last 50s.

The first shock caused the development of the Gramsci idea of needing to take over the culture and the institutions that create culture. The second shock is when the left decouple from Soviet controlled Communist parties and their associated international organizational structure, and take up Gramsci and Continental philosophy which then leads to the 68.

Practically what all that did was to create a template for how you capture and wield power. On the one hand those weapons have been used by Marxists to carry out Gramsci's project with considerable success. On the other hand, you have a bunch of people who are interested in power and look at the weapons that have been created and want to wield them themselves, and look at the political landscape and realise that the safest path is to play nice with the ideologues.

I do think though that it is a mistake to see everything as emergent effects. If we take the example of the Russian revolution, there absolutely were people planning, coordinating, providing funds for years before hand towards that outcome....
The establishment of a new cultural hegemony has been largely completed - but it’s a pro global, anti national and woke liberal culture rather than a traditional ‘left wing’ one. It’s defined by social ‘isms not economic interest. It’s also defined by its destruction of past norms rather than the presentation of new logically coherent alternatives.

This has aided, but is philosophically divorced from, the actual economic revolution which is the global concentration of wealth in what would have been seen as oddly non-productive industries. Traditional industry, with high tangible overhead, has been outsourced to the developing world and China. Liberal culture is embraced by new-industry as an effective branding channel.

It’s a brave new world.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1541

Post by fafnir »

"The problem of course is that the argument isn’t over detail. Detail is the smoke thrown down to cover broad brush stroke causal narratives."
Is that true though? I often argue about the details. I think problems come when the argument is an unstructured gish gallop of both.

"The ? Left ? is simply pointing out a new virus that shouldn’t be left to smoke thru societies per Italy et al."
Surely you mean something more like "claiming" rather than "pointing out". Even that is wrong, because the question is always about specific courses of action. Sometimes doing something is worse than doing nothing. It's just that that is sometimes politically and organizationally hard to do. Does the government spending its way out of a recession help, or are they competing with the private sector and making the recession worse? Doing something is often politically easier than doing nothing, even if it is counter productive.

"The counter POV isn’t simply push back, it’s alleging a conspiracy worldview of uncertain parameters. This isn’t helpful."
No, it's saying that the courses of action recommended by the previously mentioned group aren't a good idea. That may involve a claim of a conspiracy, but not necessarily.

Does disagreeing with mandating the vaccination of people who have already had covid require claiming a conspiracy? In as much as it does, does that make it wrong?

"I’d agree that unintended consequences attendant unprecedented global action is a worry. Be it vaccine, lockdown or ‘QE’. But the world has long ceased been capable of measured, nuanced action. I guess we’ll just pull bigger and bigger levers until something is irreparably broken."
Yes, that is another way of looking at how we have gotten to where we are. Equally, it pretty clearly creates pushback. That pushback then gets tarred as pushing conspiracy theories since it claims the official course of action is wrong.

"Of course framing COVID as an invented hidden ‘means to an end’ (per indulgences) is a bit of a reach."
Again, going back to the Russian Revolution, I think you do often have powerful people attempting to engineer political outcomes. That is presumably not the whole story though. Covid could be a naturally occuring virus and still some of the decisions that were taken could have been taken to achieve unrelated political goals.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1542

Post by fafnir »

Brive1987 wrote: The establishment of a new cultural hegemony has been largely completed - but it’s a pro global, anti national
Have these not been features of Marxism since the 19th Century?
Brive1987 wrote: and woke liberal culture rather than a traditional ‘left wing’ one.
That has been a feature of proto-woke left wing culture since the 60s.
Brive1987 wrote: It’s defined by social ‘isms not economic interest.
Yes, the Marxist left began moving away from the economic interest towards isms in the 1920s when they realised that the predicted revolution through the contradictions in capitalism predicted by Marx wasn't happening. That went mainstream in the 1960s.
Brive1987 wrote: It’s also defined by its destruction of past norms rather than the presentation of new logically coherent alternatives.
Yes, really that is because they moved the idea of flattening the class structure into the proletariate and everything being about power and exploitation away from class and into culture and institutions. That then got increasingly intelectualised by mainly French philosophers in what people are referring to as post-modernism.... that is to say the reaction to the failure of Marxism, which was a modernist philosophy.
Brive1987 wrote: This has aided, but is philosophically divorced from, the actual economic revolution which is the global concentration of wealth in what would have been seen as oddly non-productive industries.
Again, the neo-Marxists began moving away from seizing the means of production.... at least as a priority, in the 1920s when that path to liberating the world began to be seen as a failure. The revolution is the same, they just changed the plan on how to get there.
Brive1987 wrote: Traditional industry, with high tangible overhead, has been outsourced to the developing world and China.
Yes. One of the problems that Marxists identified in the 20s and then increasingly became the focus was that capitalism was beginning to produce things that the working class wanted. It was making them happy. One of the recommendations of Gramsci and all the folks who followed after him was that you need to change the culture, the conditions of life, the worldview of marginalized and downtrodden groups so that they weren't happy with liberal capitalism. Outsourcing to China and all the other problems are terrific for them.
Brive1987 wrote: Liberal culture is embraced by new-industry as an effective branding channel.

It’s a brave new world.
Yes, but they have a cultural cancer in them. They are like an ant with a parasitic fungus. To what extent is liberal culture in control?

For what little it's worth, there is a similar story that can be told about the takeover by the management class. The idea of a world government has been building with them since at least the congress of vienna after the napoleonic wars. If we are talking about globalization, I think that's equally important but maybe less exciting.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1543

Post by Service Dog »

Brive1987 wrote: The establishment of a new cultural hegemony has been largely completed - but it’s a pro global, anti national and woke liberal culture rather than a traditional ‘left wing’ one. It’s defined by social ‘isms not economic interest. It’s also defined by its destruction of past norms rather than the presentation of new logically coherent alternatives.
....
It’s a brave new world.
I think the term 'Progressive' fits the hegemony.
Brive1987 wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:05 am
The counter POV isn’t simply push back, it’s alleging a conspiracy worldview of uncertain parameters. This isn’t helpful.
You are correct that this 'Side' is unified by what-they-oppose, rather than by what they agree-on.
But you emphasize the glass-half-empty aspect of that.

The glass-half-full is that this Side is (overwhelmingly) willing to play by a set of rules which is well-suited to minimizing the harm of heterodoxy.

And the _world_ is a place of uncertain parameters, so a heterodoxy of opinions is the correct response.

Even in your 'holocaust denier' example-- one guy might be a secret-nazi who secretly thinks jews are alien reptiles/ and another guy might be a normie amateur-historian who is trying to understand the past in accurate detail. But our inability to read their minds & guess which-is-which in his heart-of-hearts is not relevant... as long as they both adhere to a set of Best Practices for inquiry & discourse.

I don't know much about the Red Ice people... but it sounds-like they're playing by Marketplace of Ideas rules. They present their case for tentacled aliens in the Moderna vax-- and you're free to take-or-leave it. They're not censoring anyone who disagrees.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1544

Post by Service Dog »


ThreeFlangedJavis
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1545

Post by ThreeFlangedJavis »

Brive1987 wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 4:05 am
The problem of course is that the argument isn’t over detail. Detail is the smoke thrown down to cover broad brush stroke causal narratives. From the ‘right’. The ? Left ? is simply pointing out a new virus that shouldn’t be left to smoke thru societies per Italy et al. The counter POV isn’t simply push back, it’s alleging a conspiracy worldview of uncertain parameters. This isn’t helpful. I’d agree that unintended consequences attendant unprecedented global action is a worry. Be it vaccine, lockdown or ‘QE’. But the world has long ceased been capable of measured, nuanced action. I guess we’ll just pull bigger and bigger levers until something is irreparably broken.

Of course framing COVID as an invented hidden ‘means to an end’ (per indulgences) is a bit of a reach.
Did you watch the youtube link I posted to Mattias Desmet talking about the mass formation phenomenon? I think it very neatly explains how we have ended up going down such an authoritarian and intolerant path. My guess is that there is some awareness of this phenomenon in some of our governments and they have taken advantage. These very narrowly focused fears flourish in circumstances where people see no purpose in their daily existence and suffer general anxiety. I think it stands to reason that a percentage of the population are going to manifest the same phenomenon centred around the threat of Covid conspiracies and Billy Gates nanobots and it doesn't help that the supposed conspirators they are afraid of seem to lie so openly. It doesn't occur to them that the "liars" are in the grip of a mass hysteria rather than hiding some nefarious plan. Why pay attention to the Alex Jones groupies? Any cultural or political phenomenon has it's fringe and isn't defined by them. There is a kernel of truth or a known phenomenon behind the common theories around vaccines, great resets etc. In some cases, more than a kernel of truth. Candace Owens was just on Tucker Carlson and she posed the obvious question, why does George Soros throw money at anti-policing movements which will have the inevitable effect of getting more people murdered? He must have an agenda and it doesn't feature concern for American city dwellers.

The mass formation phenomenon facilitates the growth of authoritarian systems and it worries me because there doesn't seem to be much awareness of how perceived threats to the collective can lead the "good" people down the road to committing atrocities. It is clear that what is conceivable to do to the disobedient now would have been unutterable a year ago and it isn't safe to assume that there are limits to the slide. We now know that Covid is less deadly than was thought when lockdowns were first proposed and agonised over yet policies have become ever more destructive and limiting of freedom. Covid is the only threat worthy of concern and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy of the collective. It's like a religion. Whip up enough fear and distaste for the unclean unvaxxed and you don't know what can happen.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1546

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

The Beaver announces her Covid-Zero crusade has failed. NZ will begin opening up, meaning very small groups may meet outdoors if they promise not to breath on each other.

A sad end to the tragic ordeal that saw 27 kiwis lose their lives to this devastating killer disease.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1547

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

Brive1987 wrote: Every day they had been met by her husband in his car who had preselected accommodation and food (motel or camp ground) "along with the best ice cream stand, which is to say, the one that had either blueberries and cream or rocky road — Gerry’s favorite flavors".
As has been observed with Biden, ice cream is recommended as a quick, non-Rx palliative to the crankiness and confusion in the demented, especially during 'sundowning'. This gal was 66?? but displayed frequent confusion and irritableness.

From the material you've found, it's obvious her husband and the friend were shepherding and carrying her. Without constant intervention, she was 'lost' figuratively and literally. Maybe on some level she was cognizant of this, and holing up in the woods to die was to stop being a burden.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1548

Post by fafnir »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote:
Brive1987 wrote: Every day they had been met by her husband in his car who had preselected accommodation and food (motel or camp ground) "along with the best ice cream stand, which is to say, the one that had either blueberries and cream or rocky road — Gerry’s favorite flavors".
As has been observed with Biden, ice cream is recommended as a quick, non-Rx palliative to the crankiness and confusion in the demented, especially during 'sundowning'. This gal was 66?? but displayed frequent confusion and irritableness.

From the material you've found, it's obvious her husband and the friend were shepherding and carrying her. Without constant intervention, she was 'lost' figuratively and literally. Maybe on some level she was cognizant of this, and holing up in the woods to die was to stop being a burden.
Anxiety is a symptom of some types of dementia.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1549

Post by fafnir »

Thinking about when my father had dementia, once he had got a course of action into his head.... it was very hard to shake him out of it. He forgot why he thought he needed to do it and would get anxious and frustrated if argued with. He also had a need for freedom. While he still could, he would enjoy going for semi-independent walks by himself. I'd be looking after the kids in the park, he would go for a walk around the park. Quite a bit of deterioration later and he started to slip out of the house and we had to organize search parties that he would try to evade.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1550

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

ThreeFlangedJavis wrote: Did you watch the youtube link I posted to Mattias Desmet talking about the mass formation phenomenon? I think it very neatly explains how we have ended up going down such an authoritarian and intolerant path.
I haven't had the time yet, but I read a little on it, and the preconditions certainly obtain.

I think a lot of elements are involved, however, and, like the virus itself, the response mutates over time.

> The vast majority of our leaders are grossly incompetent, so will do and order whatever is fashionable. That masks and lockdowns had no effect didn't faze them -- when cases inevitably spiked again, they reinstituted the failed measures. When the not-really-a-vax turned out to not really work so good, instead of rethinking the vax push, they pushed even harder.

> At first, in the US, the response to covid was almost purely driven by anti-trump sentiment. I recall having earlier seen a shitlib online refer to Trump as "Malignancy 45"; the lockdowns and halting of our economy seem akin to chemo to purge the body of the trump tumor;

> Some folks are by nature more fixated on cleanliness and purity, more driven by disgust. From my personal relations, these have been the ones most fanatical about masks, distancing, and now vax mandates;

> the Left now eschews personal responsibility for reliance on, and obedience to, the government;

> The Left has for some time been increasingly conformist and authoritarian;

> The Left elite has long believed itself morally and intellectually superior to hoi polloi/deplorables. The just cause of saving lives provided an excuse to impose authoritarian measures. Which is why masks had to be not about protecting yourself, but others. Why getting vaxxed the same. Why Biden rails about "protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated";

> The Left elite is predominantly secular but, with nothing to replace religion save inchoate 'humanism' and the above-mentioned hubris, was succeptible to falling hard into a quasi-religious fervor;

> A hoary ploy of incompetent, corrupt, or unpopular rulers is to set up a detested 'Other' on which to focus their subjects' ire. All the better if they are disease-ridden and/or are marked by alien customs and attire. The Huguenots, the Jews, the Tutsis. For today's tyrants, the Other has become the unvaccinated. Like in those earlier examples, unless we end this shit right now, this can lead in only one direction.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1551

Post by John D »

Day two... still in love.

Showed some Trio Mandili videos to my wife. She said.... "They must be rich.... their teeth are perfect... they look like the Kardashians."

my reply... "I don't know. Maybe they are rich, but they live in Georgia (the country). Maybe they are just talented and hearty. Look at the great structure in their faces. Strong full jaws and cheeks."

So... it reminds me of the video that I watched with the Weinsteins where they interviewed a Dr. Mew. And his theory is that Westerners don't fully develop their jaws because we eat such soft food. and... that eating hard food causes our jaws to develop larger and stronger.... and that this explains why so many Westerners have crowded teeth and need orthodontic work.

and then I watch these three absolutely beautiful women... and yeah. Dr. Mew is right. These ladies wear no makeup. They don't curl or color or modify their hair. No lipstick. No orthodontics. Absolutely beautiful. But... maybe this is why they are popular in a place such as Georgia.... maybe they are just the best of the best. Still.... I am in love.


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1552

Post by Service Dog »

ThreeFlangedJavis wrote: Mattias Desmet talking about the mass formation phenomenon
I glimpsed a news story about a woman in the Philippines who kept going to the hospital with difficulty breathing.

Over a long period, they kept testing her-- saying 'you don't have Covid'-- and sending her home.

Eventually she said 'That's not good enough. Something is wrong. Test me for something else.'

It was Tuberculosis. Philippines has the highest TB rate of any Asian country.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1553

Post by Service Dog »

Brive1987 wrote: America is a land of extremes. A land of BLM and this



I hesitate to embrace advice flowing from such a fountainhead.
We wave Australian flags now.

Your flag has become a symbol.


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1554

Post by Lsuoma »


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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1555

Post by ThreeFlangedJavis »

Not sure if anyone has stated the obvious suspicion about vaccine requirements in the public sector yet. Occurs to me that there is an objective here that I am not sure is secondary or primary, which is to purge the non-conformists from the public sector. Think of the benefits if you want to consolidate power and use the institutions of civil service as a weapon, something the left has not been shy about doing in the past. The Dems have a track record of abusing prosecutorial powers to access financial records to intimidate Republican donors. Anyone suspect that this proposed IRS spying power is to enable easier harassment of political enemies? There is no supportable reason for a 600 dollar trigger. I don't think I'm being unreasonably suspicious despite my one note commentary. Almost everything the Biden admin does can be interpreted as a step toward federalising powers, clamping down on opposition, diluting the opposition electorate and increasing govt influence in the lives of the people.

Matt Cavanaugh
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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1556

Post by Matt Cavanaugh »

John D wrote: So... it reminds me of the video that I watched with the Weinsteins where they interviewed a Dr. Mew. And his theory is that Westerners don't fully develop their jaws because we eat such soft food. and... that eating hard food causes our jaws to develop larger and stronger.... and that this explains why so many Westerners have crowded teeth and need orthodontic work.
Use and disuse. Make perfect sense. Why hasn't anyone come up with that theory of evolution before?

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1557

Post by Steersman »

Service Dog wrote:
Steersman wrote: one Robert Malone who we've talked about before
For what it's worth... my current opinion of Malone... is based on a hunch about his psychology.

It seems to me that he suffered several raw deals in his career. And this is 'his moment' to be recognized, respected, and call-out those who did him wrong. Except he's only partly-satisfied. An enthusiastic minority adore him. But the majority don't care-- or automatically despise him-- at the urging of powerful institutions in the govt, universities, media, tech.

Rather than present his strongest case-- then sit-back & hope for the best-- it seems to me he's frantically seeking the fatal flaw in his opponents' armor... anywhere he can find it. Outside his expertise.
Seems plausible. Had an opportunity to re-read the Nature article in a bit more detail, and there seems some justification for the "raw deal": "I was robbed! I could have been a contender!" But he also seems rather reluctant to consider the other contributions to the development of the mRNA vaccines that predated his 1987 experiments and claims, not to mention the many other ones after them:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02483-w

Somewhat amusing if a bit unseemly the jockeying for recognition, funding, or Nobel prizes. To paraphrase Kennedy, success has a thousand fathers but failure is an orphan.

But, as you suggest, the fly in the ointment that Malone is peddling is that there's apparently no smoking gun much less a dead body to justify his claims:
And in the past few months, he has started publicly attacking the safety of the mRNA vaccines that his research helped to enable. Malone says, for instance, that proteins produced by vaccines can damage the body’s cells and that the risks of vaccination outweigh the benefits for children and young adults — claims that other scientists and health officials have repeatedly refuted.
Somewhat surprising that he apparently doesn't recognize that he's not helping his case; I guess bitterness tends to cloud the judgement faculties.
Service Dog wrote: Look at this, below. Everything he's asserting & insinuating may be true... but he has no specific personal knowledge about it... no more than any outsider. He's just another guy-on-the-internet re-sharing 'conspiracy theories'. EVEN IF he's right-- he's not positioning himself as a credentialed expert. He's arguing like just-some-guy on the outside looking-in, making guesses... which strikes me as an act of desperation...

https://media.patriots.win/post/Moot46I8.png
Indeed. All too easy to connect a bunch of dots. Bit harder to show that the supposed connections are justified:

Memes_Data_Conspiracy_1A.jpg
(78.51 KiB) Downloaded 57 times

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1558

Post by Steersman »

Matt Cavanaugh wrote: Facebook is down. Can't even get their own internal servers back up.
Apparently a recent 60 Minutes interview with a "Facebook Whistleblower":

https://cathyreisenwitz.substack.com/p/ ... stleblower

Some plans afoot to regulate Facebook and some of the other tech platforms like Twitter. As problematic as that may turn out to be.

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1559

Post by Steersman »

fafnir wrote:
Steersman wrote: You seem to like that phrase: "from covid or with covid". Reminds me of the Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz movie, Knight and Day: With me, and without me ... ;)

No doubt some deaths are marked due to covid when it wasn't a factor at all: car accident? Covid, QED. But "from" or "with" seems a bit of a red herring. If it's the Covid that administers the "coup de grace" then it seems a bit academic that the victim had already been shot up or had been standing on the edge of a cliff ready for Covid to push them over.
When the UK dropped the threshold for counting a "with covid" death in the covid deaths stats from 60 days after a positive test to 28, the death count dropped by 10%. Are most people who die "with covid" getting pushed over the cliff by covid? Even to the extent that they are, a better measure is the number of Quality Adjusted Life Years lost, not deaths.
Interesting, but "QALY" is rather subjective, "dead" a bit more easily quantified. ;)
fafnir wrote:
Steersman wrote: <snip.
And many argue that the massive doses of antibiotics given to farm animals just makes the resulting bugs less susceptible to the antibiotics.

But don't think it's a particularly sound policy to not make an effort. No doubt it's better to have more effective vaccines and antibiotics but often something is better than nothing. ....
How useful would antibiotics be if we gave an insufficient dose to reliably kill whatever bugs we were wanting to kill to everybody, sick or healthy, just to be sure? The rate that they became useless would go up enormously. Would that be an example of "doing something is better than doing nothing". Is that not what we are doing with the covid vaccines? Are we sure the gain of function study has finished?
While it's probably true that an "insufficient dose" is worse than useless, I'm not sure that it's entirely applicable to vaccines which seem more applicable to viruses - smallpox, TB, Covid, etc - than to bacteria which of course is what antibiotics target:
Antibiotics are not effective against viruses such as the common cold or influenza;[5] drugs which inhibit viruses are termed antiviral drugs or antivirals rather than antibiotics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibiotic

Clearly, some scope for Ivermectin ... ;)

But apparently an entirely different mechanism in the operation of vaccines and antibiotics. The former "teaches" the immune system what to be on guard against; the latter just kills the bacteria without doing much to prevent further infections by "forewarning" the immune system. Seems to have a great deal of relevance in social policy development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system

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Re: Steerzing in a New Direction...

#1560

Post by fafnir »

Steersman wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:13 pm
While it's probably true that an "insufficient dose" is worse than useless, I'm not sure that it's entirely applicable to vaccines which seem more applicable to viruses - smallpox, TB, Covid, etc - than to bacteria which of course is what antibiotics target:
Antibiotics are not effective against viruses such as the common cold or influenza;[5] drugs which inhibit viruses are termed antiviral drugs or antivirals rather than antibiotics.
I'm aware of the difference between viruses and bacteria. An insufficient programme of antibiotics allows bacteria to develop resistance. A leaky vaccine allows a virus to develop resistance. The more you use each, the worse the problem gets. If we threw around antibiotics like we throw around covid vaccines they would be useless already.
Steersman wrote:
Tue Oct 05, 2021 12:13 pm
But apparently an entirely different mechanism in the operation of vaccines and antibiotics. The former "teaches" the immune system what to be on guard against; the latter just kills the bacteria without doing much to prevent further infections by "forewarning" the immune system. Seems to have a great deal of relevance in social policy development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system
I know. However, if you throw around antibiotics in a way that doesn't reliably kill bacteria, and vaccines in a way that doesn't reliably kill viruses.... what you are doing is training the pathogen to develop resistance. The reason we need booster shots of the vaccine is because we have sprayed it around like it was the gas station scene in Zoolander:

Locked