VagueMag

Look, NPR isn't state affiliated because it also gets lots of money from various foundations and corporations which are themselves built using massive amounts of state funding. If you add those extra steps it's totally different!

Sarcasm aside, NPR has been a reliable mouthpiece for what we might call "establishment state" narratives on subjects like Ukraine, "the pandemic," bank bailouts, and on and on, even up to the blatant US-sponsored coup attempt in Bolivia. Bringing on some token conservative commentator from the Hoover Institute or NYT Opinion pages to occasionally add some conservative take on social issues or even-more-right-wing-than-the-usual-neoliberals economic take doesn't really change that picture.

We didn't just copy the rockets from them though, their leadership was absorbed into the highest levels of the U.S./NATO military/intelligence/scientific communities. I feel like the NASA stuff gets all the attention while almost none is paid to the mind control (definitely alluded to in GR) and biological/chemical/nuclear warfare research. (In paranoid conspiracy circles I've even heard some ~interesting~ questions posed about Thiel's family background!)

"So Gravity's Rainbow, in the sense that it's about how humans act in global systems of control, is really about the birth of the Internet."

...

"Pynchon's intent was to expose the incorporation of the Nazi project into US militarism. Requires a specific kind of critical engagement."

https://twitter.com/cuttlefish_btc/status/701271529565384704...

My favorite theory for the Adderall shortage is that it's all being diverted to soldiers on the front lines in Ukraine.

Coming soon: "There is no evidence to support baseless claims that the chemical spill is linked to increased cancer rates in the area" (after they obstinately refuse to look for any link at all).

I don't know, they told healthy 20 year olds to take multiple shots of largely untested injections to avoid those same symptoms, so

> The countless money spent caring for people with Covid who might have required less care if they were vaccinated is one. Health care costs are amortized over the population through insurance

This is a recipe for the worst, most intrusive kind of tyranny in the name of "biosecurity," but that's probably a feature and not a bug to the sort of person who is still advocating for COVID vaccine mandates at this late date.

There are vast demographics of healthy young people at infinitesimal risk from COVID and much higher risk from the shots, for whom taking them actually raised their risk of being hospitalized. But the difference between you and me is, if I found out people required more medical care because of their unwise and ill-considered health choices, the last thing on earth that would occur to me would be to punish them with job losses, higher insurance premiums, and the like.

I wonder what guides the editorial decisions to variously refer to Jan 6 as an "insurrection" vs a "riot" from article to article.

NYFDS didn't organize the Silicon Valley Bank run on Slack, or make them go too far out on a limb with duration risk in the first place.

They also didn't cause Signature to suffer a run so severe they couldn't even say for sure what the size was of their deficit at the Fed: https://www.fdic.gov/news/speeches/2023/spmar2723.pdf

If there was any substance whatsoever to these sorts of numbers then highly vaxxed jurisdictions would show significantly better case rates, and they absolutely do not.

Well, most of the other sources would hate that I think there's something to get out of Marx too! Jim Grant is about as hardcore libertarian as you can get. The longer I watch and trade markets the more I see the value of ideological flexibility and being able to synthesize many different and even contradictory perspectives.

Your comment above was in reference to infection risk, and now you've jived to discussing hospitalization and death.

My outlook is pretty different from some of the sources you cite, but I like:

- Eurodollar University / Jeff Snider

- Robert Prechter, mostly for the understanding of money/credit and the fact that asset price movements are an endogenous process which drives headlines, not the other way around. Be careful of the permabear outlook and excessive Elliott Wave woo though.

- Financial histories (essential reading IMO): Galbraith's history of the 1929 crash, Jim Grant's stuff, Manias, Panics, and Crashes, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, etc

- Naked Capitalism blog

- Karl Marx and Henryk Grossman (the TRPF explains a lot of financial/investing phenomena like stock market cap as % of GDP rising over time)

- Podcasts: Market Huddle, Top Traders Unplugged

- Minyanville used to be a great source, any of the writers who used to be there are worth checking out.

No, even by the time of Delta it was clear the efficacy against infection was marginal at best. The CDC acknowledged this in its Provincetown study in late July 2021 and recommended the reimposition of mask mandates as a result.

All these numbers are completely riddled with various kinds of biases and confounders, not the least of which is that someone who gets an mRNA shot is much more likely to socially isolate themselves in an effort to avoid infection.

Yep did the gargle as well both times I had COVID. Tried nasal irrigation with the diluted form but it was just too much to handle so I used NeilMed instead. n=1 caveats, but both cases (the first one Delta) were mild.

Agreed. I don't take it very often, maybe once every few weeks or so, slightly more often if I start feeling symptoms.

The whole "there is no evidence, therefore the link doesn't exist" thing is an obvious grift. Simply never look for side effects (and attribute them to hysteria or anything else besides the shots when they do arise), and it's as though they never existed.

Rather than depositing bits of viral material directly, the mRNA vaccines instruct your own cells to manufacture a viral antigen (the spike protein), one which is now well understood by itself to play a key role in COVID pathology, despite all the initial insistence that it was harmless. This is absolutely a novel style of delivery. Even Dr. Paul Offit, who sat on the committees which voted to give the mRNA shots their emergency use authorizations, has acknowledged that they may in some cases be stimulating an immune response against the body's own healthy cells and tissues.

Or authorities flatly insisting the vaccines were "safe" in contexts where they had no evidence to support the claim whatsoever.

It just reduces the amount of virus which can reproduce in your nasal cavities, giving your innate immune response a better chance at fighting it off before it gains a foothold. I've mostly seen it recommended as something to do after significant exposure events like being among large crowds indoors.

Since the initial outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 I have kept bottles of Betadine nasal spray around. They say "clinically proven to reduce cold symptoms on the packaging," always seemed reasonable to think it might work as well against this coronavirus as all the others.

Companies like "ShareMyHealth" have an excellent grift going, selling tools to implement pointless COVID injection mandates to soothe the irrational anxieties of software engineers who believe it will somehow make a difference in whether they catch a bad cold at the conference. Someone who still needs this to "feel safe" attending a conference in 2023 will probably need it for the rest of their life.

Was disappointing to hear Monktoberfest praised for using this blatantly discriminatory snake oil on an episode of Oxide and Friends.

The SEC's major focus on wash trading in this complaint might have some interesting implications for the broader crypto ecosystem.

I've been trying to get caught up while job searching after being laid off, and have found YouTube to be a pretty good source, the Java language advocates are all very keen to show off all the shiny new stuff. Also definitely recommend the JEPs as one of the other sibling comments did. All of the "Data Oriented Programming in Java" stuff is I think especially relevant, Brian Goetz had a good article on InfoQ about it.

Have not dug into it in all that much depth either, but Jalali was one of the first and loudest proponents of theories of SARS-CoV-2 being primarily an issue of vascular (as opposed to respiratory) pathologies, and fluvoxamine as a form of treatment which, while not a cure, did wind up being shown to be somewhat effective.

From the little bit I saw it seemed like maybe he was recommending aggressive use of antihistamines. I believe some of it may have been incorporated into the FLCCC IRECOVER protocol.

The other thing that he seemed to believe might work is anticoagulants, but he was concerned that the doses that would need to be taken are potentially hazardous in and of themselves.

Just wondering if you're familiar with Dr. Farid Jalali and his theory Long COVID is a form of or related to Mast Cell Activation Syndrome?

The CDC is not a credible source on any topics relating to SARS-CoV-2 but in particular masks. They've been churning out junk science on the subject ever since the initial outbreak.

"Consistent mask wearing in high-risk areas such as households" just lol, yeah let me wear a mask over my face 24/7 forever so I can maybe catch SARS-CoV-2 six months later than I otherwise would have.

I'm not talking about going down 50% for a year or two and then rebounding when the Fed re-juices the markets with liquidity, I'm talking about grinding down over a couple of decades to something like -75% and staying there, and this would have huge implications beyond just where buyers & sellers can transact.

Anything said about the effectiveness and safety of the vaccines would be couched in all this exact same uncertainty if there was any epistemic honesty involved here.