VagueMag

Ukrainian outlet in the USA in 1941, hmmmmm....

Hearst newspaper hyperventilations about the famines aside, there was no Soviet attempt to "genocide Eastern Europe."

> I am struggling to see how the risk calculus tilts strongly against vaccination for college campuses. What are you saying?

Adolescents and young adults are at highest risk for complications from the vaccine, and at the same time at almost the lowest risk of a severe case, a reduction in the odds of which is the only benefit conferred by the vaccines.

> They should be a safe place for people even that are unable to get vaccinated due to medical issues.

Mandates have nothing to do with this, because the vaccines do not prevent transmission or confer any herd immunity benefit whatsoever.

> The risk of myocarditis is higher with a COVID infection than the vaccine.

I don't believe this is true, given that a massive population study in Israel in 2020 pre vaccines found no heightened risk of myocarditis (although it does seem clear COVID infection can raise risks of cardiac/vascular issues more generally). However, even granting that it was the case, the comparison is rather pointless because the risks are not mutually exclusive, but rather additive.

Once you break it down by age group, you find that the vast majority of people at significant risk from COVID voluntarily took vaccines shortly after they became available, so mandates could have had little effect in that cohort. Meanwhile, the mandates have lasted the longest on college campuses, where the risk calculus tilts most strongly against vaccination for COVID. So even if we're going to engage in a kind of naive "how many deaths from COVID were prevented" analysis as the sole criterion for evaluating the success or failure of mandates, the question is still potentially quite tricky. And that's without getting into the second order effects of throwing many people out of work without unemployment benefits, or cutting down the numbers of healthcare workers, both of which led to some number of preventable deaths which again would be difficult to calculate.

> It was allegedly a large part of the impetus that led them to create their own ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA program.

This is a commonly repeated refrain, but it just exists to provide a comforting explanation for the fact that the U.S. security state decided to embark on a program of mind control experimentation on many unwitting and unwilling human guinea pigs. The truth is that as WWII wound down, we eagerly imported Nazi scientists who were already engaged in this kind of research, and ARTICHOKE/MKULTRA/etc were just the continuation of it for all the same purposes but under a different name.

Indeed, the whole point of this tech is to remove pesky human morality from the equation. Much more efficient than the Nazis' Einsatzgruppen method.

Most new technologies are developed in secret as military tech first, then laundered into consumer applications. It's a decent bet they've been sitting on far more advanced AI models and algorithms for some time.

Obviously no one would care if Dimon had discussed Epstein's accounts and he was booted from the bank the next day, or even the next month. The whole issue is what was discussed when, and what Dimon's instructions were.

Person A tells Persons B and C that they're under a grave threat if they step outside and must stay indoors. B and C then observe A strolling around outside without a care in the world. B says, "A is a hypocrite, and they must have been lying to me! I'm not going to follow their edicts" and resumes living life outside as normal. C says, "A is a hypocrite! They're behaving just like that degenerate B and refusing to take this deadly threat seriously!"

Who is the "swivel eyed loon" in this scenario again?

I suppose electing the CEO of the largest bank and a bailout recipient par excellence to the office of POTUS would finally dispense with the pretense that there is any significant distinction between Washington and Wall Street.

The idea that continuing with life as normal -- especially various forms of essential social contact and economic activity -- amounts to "murdering workers" when a somewhat bad respiratory virus is going around was one of the most risible bits of nonsense pushed into widespread adoption during the COVID response. Just because Doctorow may not mind extended social isolation with only his computer to keep him company, does not mean that everyone else was somehow uninformed if they weren't agitating for the same restrictions to be applied to themselves. Life is more than the pathologically assiduous avoidance of death.

The wealthy and powerful have read their Marx, and understand that for them to maintain their station requires that the vast majority of humanity be pressed into ever-worsening material conditions. What better way to get everyone to accept a lower standard of living, worse education for their children, and amped up surveillance and restrictions on their movements, than to sell it as a pandemic response that's all "for their own good"? The part where they forced huge swaths of small/medium sized firms out of business and consolidated their market share for huge corporations was just a bonus.

"Capital's profitability now depends on 'lockdowns', acute social enclosure, and 'medical' tyranny": https://grossmanite.wixsite.com/my-site/post/capital-s-profi...

> Plenty of everyday people "swanned around having a lovely time" too; or at least, didn't think the restrictions should apply to them.

The difference is that none of those people were themselves hyping the threat of the virus, or insisting everyone else should stay at home.

People in power created the lockdown policies, and told their subjects they were necessary because of a uniquely threatening contagion which everyone needed to avoid until vaccines could be distributed. They then carried on with their own lives as normal, indicating no fear of the virus on their own part whatsoever. Doesn't that suggest the rationale for the lockdowns was a pretense from the start?

> “Climate lockdowns” are a product of a conspiracist’s fevered imagi­nation...

"We need to act boldly now if we are to avoid economy-wide lockdowns to halt climate change": https://www.marketwatch.com/story/we-need-to-act-boldly-now-...

"Report: World Needs Equivalent of a Pandemic Lockdown Every Two Years to Meet Paris Carbon Emissions Goals": https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2021/03/03/re...

> Overall, the relatively higher intra-host diversity among vaccinated individuals and the detection of immune-escape mutations, despite being rare, suggest a potential vaccine-induced immune pressure in vaccinated individuals.

> There's always a richer class who people can be mad about.

I mean, not for one class in particular, right? One which happens to be making a whole lot of noise about this issue while not volunteering to make any sacrifices on its own part to fix it?

I make pretty heavy use of Java's AutoCloseable interface for this purpose. The lambda approach is an interesting one that could be applied in most languages though.

Can you link me to a study which does a reasonable job of attempting to come up with a "Covid deaths prevented by vaccines number" while taking into account the effects of increased seroprevalence, decreased virulence of the virus itself, and the "no more dry tinder" effect?

No that isn't what I said, and yes it would be just as ridiculous as attributing the same value to preventing a 90 year old nursing home patient from dying of an endemic respiratory virus as we do to preventing deaths in plane crashes.

Are the people who were saved by COVID vaccines never going to die from any other cause? I believe the $9M figure is actually just a reference to what the FAA considers a reasonable threshold for imposing a new expense on aircraft manufacturers and airlines in order to make flying safer?

The movie AMSTERDAM which came out recently touches on the Business Plot, and themes of sub rosa fascists and Nazis in the American ruling class more generally. Fairly worth a watch if you're interested in history viewed through this sort of parapolitical lens.

You don't find it interesting that Gates was intimately involved in pushing vaccines which were used by the CIA to gather DNA? And then went on to be a figurehead for the largest mass vaccination drive in human history? And had close dealings with a man Alex Acosta was told to give a sweetheart deal because he "belonged to intelligence"? An application of the barest minimum of pattern recognition raises some interesting questions.

Have you even seen how much money Les Wexner alone gifted to Epstein, on top of the [checks notes] largest townhouse in Manhattan?

> “Our documents show that Mr. Gates met with Norwegian officials to discuss the security situation in Afghanistan as part of Mr. Gates’ work on polio eradication,” said the Gates spokeswoman. “Mr. Gates has never been focused on or campaigned for the Nobel Peace Prize, or any other prize.” Jagland didn’t respond to requests for comment. He has previously said the prize wasn’t a topic for discussion during the Strasbourg meeting.

That's interesting, this seems to have been not long after the CIA was caught using the polio vaccines to gather DNA in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

How would we know if Epstein had been successful?

> trying to set up a philanthropic fund that he hoped would include the billionaire as an anchor donor

haha yes, I'm sure this was the sum total of the influence Epstein was exerting.

Far more money has probably been stolen with the "heads I win, tails you lose" approach -- just put on massive leverage and stick someone else with the bill if it blows up -- than has been stolen by all the Ponzi schemes in history.

Wow, are there HFT firms doing this? How reliable is it?

Vanilla options are hundreds of years old, but Myron Scholes (of the ubiquitous Black-Scholes pricing model) went on to be principal at LTCM.