VagueMag

Any chance I could ask for books you found especially useful in Ruby buy-in?

The Thai prospective study of these shots in adolescents found biomarkers of cardiac disturbances in 3% of subjects who took them. That's not just a lot, it's a HELL of a lot. If the number is within even 1/100th of that for ~40 year olds it would still be 1 in 3,333, which is far higher than what used to be considered an acceptable adverse event rate.

What's even more absurd is that that kind of study was never even conducted as part of the broad clinical trials in the first place.

> The reality is with 5.56B people vaccinated, if it had any effects, it would be clearly and plainly visible in population-level data.

And indeed it is, as I've already pointed out. Excess deaths are remaining stubbornly high in highly vaccinated countries.

It's amazing to me that the CDC is leaving completely embarrassing numbers up like the ones you cite, but I suppose they have no shortage of suckers ready to believe and repeat them.

The data point is meant to be illustrative of broader habits and behaviors which put the lie to the absurd notion that there is robust pharmacovigilance being conducted on the COVID vaccines. So if we apply your line of reasoning across the board, why would any adverse event ever be recorded, followed up, or investigated? After all, bad things happen all the time, and we're giving out billions of doses. What do you think the typical bias of the typical doctor has been since the vaccine rollout started?

Where did you get your figures for the likelihood of a cardiac event from the COVID vaccines? Were they stratified by age? Were they derived from trials conducted by the manufacturers, who we now know to have excluded cardiac events from the trial results for no apparent reason other than "couldn't possibly have been our Safe & Effective shots"?

Why have excess deaths remained persistently high in countries which saw a high degree of vaccine uptake, when they should be expected to decline after a new contagious virus runs its course and the vast majority of a population gains exposure? If the answer is "Long COVID," then a.) why were the vaccines so ineffective in protecting against long-term sequelae, and b.) how is it possible to disambiguate the causes of deaths without, again, properly placebo-controlled RCTs?

> When you give billions of people the vaccine you'll get basically everything happening after someone gets a vaccine including a death by train derailment.

This is such a tendentious, dishonest argument. As though "hey maybe these shots which are known to cause a lot of people heart problems caused this sudden cardiac arrest in a 42 year old who had just taken them, I would bet no one even looked into it at all because everyone knew to trust the Safe & Effective Vaccine" is somehow comparable to spuriously linking them to a train derailment.

It's also odd because this earlier article from the WSJ was never flagged: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35762731

The SEC went hard after Steve Hoffenberg, Epstein's partner in crime at Towers, but somehow Epstein managed not to land in any legal trouble over it whatsoever. A truly charmed life.

> But the risk of getting caught would be very high.

Besides that the reputational risk of hanging out with convicted sex offenders is high enough that one should want not to do that.

I'd say the whole Epstein saga (not to mention this very thread) shows neither of these risks were very significant at all.

Chomsky's work really isn't all that great though. His work on linguistics has essentially been revealed as nonsense and his political analysis is firmly in the realm of the "compatible left": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35764773

Or it suggests the victims have been silenced with a mix of out-of-court settlements and threats. Some victims have testified that Ghislaine Maxwell would explicitly and openly threaten their lives in the event they spoke with any authorities. Maria Farmer reported Epstein to the FBI in the 1990s and the investigation was spiked.

The only publicly known and documented source of Epstein's wealth is gifts of stock and real estate from Les Wexner. Any claims to the effect he was some sort of legitimate "financier" (which is still the widespread perception) are completely unsupported by evidence, which would be abundantly available in the form of trading and other financial records.

Have you ever actually listened to any of the victim testimonies? For example, the ones which make it clear that it was essentially impossible to visit Epstein's island in the Caribbean (as Reid Hoffman did) without it being completely obvious what was going on there? Even the locals who never visited referred to it as "Pedophile Island."

What was the point of the dinner Reid Hoffman organized with already-very-wealthy tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg? They already had access to far more money than Epstein could possibly have provided.

Your notions of why Chomsky was meeting with Epstein (or more than that, why Epstein was meeting with Chomsky) are touchingly naive, especially given everything we know about how Epstein influenced other MIT faculty via funding. It certainly casts Chomsky's constant inveighing against any form of conspiratorial analysis from the left in a new light, just as Chomsky's meeting with Ehud Barak calls his criticisms of BDS into question.

The crooked, drug-running cop who was Epstein's cellmate (and charged with murdering four people in a drug conspiracy) was quietly spared the death penalty in December last year, with no reason given: https://www.lohud.com/story/news/2022/12/14/nicholas-tartagl...

This is a good thing to point out. I imagine there are some new names in here, but the Noam Chomsky connections at least were surfaced by left-leaning parapolitical Twitter accounts early last year. IIRC Chomsky even confirmed it via email. The stuff about him having dinner with Woody Allen seems new though.

https://twitter.com/gumby4christ/status/1491847630275629057?...

The "well-connected financier" storyline generally falls apart on closer inspection. Of what is actually known and documented about how Epstein obtained his money, it was mostly through stock and real estate gifted to him by Les Wexner.

Thank you. There is such an overwhelming number of these details it becomes very difficult to remember all of them.

To put a little meat on the bone here in terms of what you're asking, this is the same prison that held El Chapo through his trial. If it was a sloppily run facility it seems unlikely it would have been chosen for that purpose. I don't have the exact numbers at hand but I believe successful suicide attempts at the MCC were also very rare, as in, Epstein's was the first in 20 years or something like that.

> Lamentable - the careers of the officers involved will be stained.

You would think so, but: https://apnews.com/article/jeffrey-epstein-prisons-new-jerse...

> .. Why hasn't someone been arrested yet??

There's the mundane answer: Because the wealthy and powerful are above the law and exempt from the normal mechanisms of accountability. And the more introspective, deeper one: Because enough of the rest of society believes that it has no choice or has something to gain by remaining complicit with a system run by Epstein & Friends, enough that that system can even reveal parts of its own nature to us and continue to chug along unabated.

I don't respect Chomsky and think he has built a career out of building a "compatible left" which completely fails to meaningfully oppose and often even carries water for corporate and institutional power, of which their widespread support for various forms of COVID fascism like vaccine mandates was a particularly glaring example.

It's completely silly to use "how was a typical prisoner handled" as the baseline for what should have been expected with Jeffrey Epstein. There was extremely intense news interest, mainstream outlets were speculating that his testimony might bring down a huge swath of the U.S. ruling elite, and every conspiracy theorist in the world was predicting (correctly, as it turned out!) that he would never make it to trial.

There's something satisfying about seeing Chomsky on this list after he spent 2021 saying that people who didn't take the COVID shots should be removed from society and left to fend for themselves in obtaining food.

Alex Jones really just sells a whole lot of brain pills! Whether Icke or Jones are real examples of the phenomenon, I believe it has actually been documented e.g. with the "Mirage Men" revelations that this "flooding the zone with bullshit" tactic has been used from time to time.

One day around 2015 or 2016, I remember seeing a ton of "FLAT EARTH!" graffiti that appeared out of nowhere all over Emeryville. That's another one that's always struck me as weird and maybe astroturfed.

I was hospitalized for two severe manic episodes in my late teens and was told I would have to take lithium for the rest of my life or I would inevitably end up back in the hospital. I did take it (and Zyprexa) for about nine months during my freshman year of college, got the fattest I've ever been, and spent almost the entirety of my free downtime zoned out in my dorm room.

That summer after my first year of college, I spent my days moving stuff around in a furniture store and golfing 9 holes after work was done, and weaned myself off of it. I haven't relapsed into the hospital in two decades since, despite more than a few high risk periods I've gone through over that time, and a lapse during fatherhood in my ability to keep up with exercise as much as would be ideal. I don't know whether my brain was sufficiently re-wired by those 9 months of pills or what, but it's a bit strange to me that essentially every psychiatrist would have insisted something like this was impossible.

Will this also prohibit the installation of propane or other one-off gas cooking options at summer homes in the Hamptons? Are all those personal chefs going to have to make do with induction ranges?

> We raise interest rates in an inflationary environment because we want people to accumulate wealth in the form of financial assets instead of spending on real things.

Yes and no. The Fed has a not-so-subtle goal of taming inflation in part by capping asset prices with its interest rate hikes.

Used to bank with First Republic when I lived in CA and always had very good experiences. Unfortunately, in banking, a high degree of customer satisfaction can be a side effect of practices which ultimately land the bank in trouble.

The biggest problematic asset on their books is actually the interest-only mortgages, which were only extended to fairly high-income borrowers.

Yes, it's still a very unlikely scenario but the TGA running low and debt ceiling brinkmanship at the same time banks are going under does make me think there's some nonzero chance of some insured depositors in some banks having to wait awhile for their funds. But yes, low probability at the moment.

The FDIC generally likes to do this on Fridays so they can reopen the bridge bank and everyone can access their funds on Monday. If you're under the insurance limit you're almost certainly fine.

4 days is a long time in bank deposit land now!