I clicked like but that isn't true. We now live in an inverted totalitarianism system with the oligarchy and the largest corporations in charge and our government's carrying water for them. Big tech actually knows what's in your mind better than you do and they exploit it for more than selling you stuff you don't need that you buy with money you don't have. They are connected at the hip with the security state; you might call them Big Brother. The largest construction projects in the US are Data center's; 10s of billions worth; what do you think that's all about? You don't have to be a nut to question W T F is going on and what's the end game.
That's pretty much it. Although I don't know about Them being joined at the hip; it seems to me that they're more like a headless octopus with triple-jointed tentacles. But they're definitely joined. No one should confuse the result with omniscience; the data point connections are probably generating more noise, more misinformation, and more opportunities for overly ambitious and extravagant misinterpretation than if the overseers were simply operating in an admitted vacuum of ignorance. A condition which is at least humbling.
Medicare is getting a substantial premium increase. Literally ~half the increase is for an Alzheimer's drug that A doesn't work and B where there was actually direct collusion between the FDA and the Big pharma corporation. Of course there's been regulatory capture since forever but this was a New low in criminality. I don't exaggerate, actual criminal behavior. Check it out.
I checked it out. Interesting. Seems the FDA has been under fire from
Alzheimer patients and their families and Alzheimer advocates to approve SOME therapeutical drug that treats the disease and get it on the market. Seems dubious, insofar the drug (Adhulem, produced by Biogen Pharma) has been widely panned by neurologists, and only slows the onset of Alzheimer symptoms. Biogen has reduced the cost of the drug by half. No evidence of criminality.
A few snippets pulled from the links (worth a read) below that give a rather concise overview:
"...U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra on Monday ordered Medicare to reassess a big premium increase facing millions of enrollees this year, attributed in large part to a pricey new Alzheimer's drug with questionable benefits....Becerra's directive came days after drugmaker Biogen slashed the price of its $56,000-a-year medication, Aduhelm, to $28,200 a year — a cut of about half."
"...There were previously no drugs cleared by the FDA that can slow the mental decline from Alzheimer’s, which is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. The agency has approved Alzheimer’s drugs aimed at helping symptoms, not actually slowing the disease itself...Federal regulators have faced intense pressure from friends and family members of Alzheimer’s patients asking to fast-track aducanumab, but the road to regulatory approval has been a controversial one since it showed promise in 2016."
"...Becerra's move came after prominent Democratic senators urged the Biden administration to take immediate steps to cut rising drug costs for seniors. Much bigger curbs on drug prices promised by Democrats are hung up in Congress along with the rest of President Joe Biden's massive social agenda legislation. That bill would cap at $2,000 a year the amount Medicare recipients have to pay out-of-pocket for medicines, require drugmakers to pay the government rebates if they hike prices faster than inflation, and authorize Medicare to negotiate prices for certain medications."
"...Aduhelm is the first Alzheimer’s medication in nearly 20 years. It doesn’t cure the life-sapping condition, but the Food and Drug Administration determined that its ability to reduce clumps of plaque in the brain is likely to slow dementia in its earlier stages. However, many experts say that benefit has not been clearly demonstrated."
"...Call In The Detectives: With the temperature being turned up on the agency, Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, who was not involved in the approval decision, has asked the Office of the Inspector General to conduct an investigation into her agency over the matter. Biogen says it welcomes a probe."
Try spending $15 bucks on Public Citizen to find out what really happens in the drug approval process. It's basically a corruption based system in so many ways. Science says no; management overrules, drug makes money for Wall Street which is why they're in business. The difference between this drug/scam is the direct collusion. It's very much like the Boeing 737 max; the FAA got in bed with the corporation to a greater degree than before. The drug has not proven efficacious. This is NOT unusual for New meds that get on the market. What is New is the level of corruption and direct participation of the regulator? in the process. In China, the regulator and the CEO would be in jail where they belong.
We've become numbly inured to the corruption that surrounds us in the U.S. The Chinese, on the other hand, are regularly reminded by their government that this sort of behavior quickly leads to a bunk bed in a Xinjiang gulag. So it's rare. On the other hand, you and I would be summarily dispatched to the gulag for little more than these two posts.
Interesting linking disinformation and pornography. I imagine the cohort which most strenuously objects to misinformation is reliably indifferent to pornography, and almost certainly not responsible for its ubiquitousness. Conversely, it's a safe wager that the most ardent patrons of pornography are indifferent to disinformation and probably too distracted to care.
To take a vaccine and to become pregnant are both choices (don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise) and to (potentially) die from a vaccine and to (affirmatively) kill an unborn baby are also choices. But the outcomes from those choices are quite different.
I know it is - I look at what happened once Canada adopted the anti-porn laws Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon got passed in Minnesota, only to have them struck down by US courts as "unconstitutionally overbroad".
Canada's Supreme Court said "True, but We Must PROTECT Women From the Evil Effects of Pornography!" Much of what they ended up censoring was either done by women for women, and a lot of the rest was only "porn" if you think ESQUIRE is beyond the pale, and PLAYBOY was obscene....
And you can't be bothered to parent? You'd censor everybody because you refuse to take responsibility for your own children, but expect society to do your job for you?
I don't have kids - though my former Partner and I volunteered with a number of Profoundly Gifted ones, as former Gifted Children ourselves who dealt with the educational system not knowing what to do with us. So I have little to no sympathy for parents who blindly trust institutions with their children.
Incidentally, sex still leads to children. I'm sure more than a few of us were conceived in some relatively amorous conditions (November birthdays, anyone? Your conception date could very well be Valentine's Day).
“Fueling drug addiction”? So you’re saying that all porn stars are “drug addicts” (because why else would they fuck for money unless they were junkies, right?). Do you have any evidence that the rate of drug addiction is significantly higher in the porn industry than it is in, say, the restaurant business? Or any other business? I worked in restaurants for two decades and I can assure you that the majority of the people in that industry are either high, hungover or both.
I’m curious what you’re doing right now to stem the evil tide of drug addiction, since that’s what you really care about. “It isn’t porn; it’s the drugs that bother me.” That’s what you’re implying, correct?
I agree, weather porn has replaced "if it bleeds, it leads". That is especially true where I live in New England where people clear all the grocery store shelves of bread and milk at the hint of a serious snowstorm.
At least everyone knows that porn represents fantasy, not necessarily real-world experience. And the few who don't realize that, I pity their partners.
What? There’s nothing “fake” about the chick I just watched on xvideos getting the shit fucked out of her. That was real. Take your puritanical bullshit somewhere else.
Actually, it might not be very real. Porn is theatrical, and like any theater, it is composed of illusions, or as one pornographer said, 'What happens in the studio has almost nothing to do with what you wind up seeing in the movie.' In other words, it's not different from other artistic media. If you doubt this, check with some of the people who do the work.
Thank you, someone who understands my innocent comment. I cannot believe the responses I have received. Of course porn is fantasy, the makers of porn want to explore the fantasies of their consumers. I have no ill will towards porn or the consumers, however, I am aware of the effect that online porn has had on the sexual attitudes and expectations of young people and, like Barbie for young girls, it sets the bar pretty high. In any case, I certainly stepped in it.
Obviously, a lot of the performers are probably exaggerating their enjoyment; they’re actors, after all. But I’ve known a few porn stars who really did like the work. They just like being sleazy (and getting paid for it), which I’m all for. I’m always FOR women feeling more comfortable doing the things they like to do, free of judgement. And, in a case of life possibly imitating art, every chick I’ve fucked in the last twenty-five years or so (probably around 400 women) has definitely been dirtier and more awesome than before, like, 1995. That could maybe have something to do with me and being comfortable with my own personal kinks, it could have to do with a generation-and-a-half growing up with easy access to porn. I don’t know. I try not to think about it or analyze it too much. But it’s definitely fun.
Re: what I said about the the chick I just watched on xvideos getting fucked being “real,” specifically: what I meant was, there was definitely a big dick in her mouth and pussy. That was real. It happened. It’s not “disinformation” or whatever that dipshit said.
I think it’s funny that anybody could watch porn and think,”There’s no way that’s what sex is really like…” Maybe not for y’all, but I fuck like a pornstar haha!
I wasn't thinking how the actors felt about the work but rather that their behavior and mentality when they were working would be different -- more oriented toward its subsequent representation on the screen than toward getting pleasure out of it (or any other personal benefit).
So what you’re really saying is,”It’s not possible that the woman getting fucked in this porn clip is enjoying this sex as much as she seems to be; she’s just pretending.” Which, bullshit.
Do not confuse things. Porn is porn, do not like it do not "use" it whatever it means Censoring people questioning the official narratives is suppressing political dissent and freedom.
Sorry that as a human being I have opinions and the freedom to express them. I could continue by babbling incoherently about nothing, but you already covered that.
Great article. As brutal as your description of the Covid clown show was, you understated it. Masks do not work. At all. Children are being harmed. This is a dire issue. We have to end the forced masking of children 7 hours a day while adults go to the bar down the street and drink for hours without a mask. Children are at virtually no risk. And vaccines and masks do NoT stop Omicron spread. The level of lying on masks is stunning. We need to demand this end right now!
This bothers me, too. You would think, since people in some east Asian cities have been masking for decades during flu season, that there would be a wealth of information available as to the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the practice. You would think that public health officials in the West would be able to draw on this data to support their mask mandates. Or to call the whole thing off as useless, or -- middle ground -- to say masking is perhaps marginally effective so have at it if you wish. But no, we must obey the diktats of the Fauci -- for he IS science -- even after he flip-flopped and lied about it early on.
They do call on studies that they have done themselves, which are so badly designed they are laughable. They are NEVER controlled, and are always small.
Controlled studies are easy to do, and there have been dozens during the last hundred years. Every one showed that masks did not stop spread. Even the N95 masks do no good.
@Linda—Agreed. And isn’t the takeaway that the n95 mask filter up to .3 to .5 microns while the viruses is .1 microns?
Additionally, there is no way that some air is not going to leak through the edges of the mask. (I saw somebody quoted 18% leakage). I imagine you can put some duct tape around the edges but then you would be breathing probably more triple the amount of carbon dioxide than normal, which in turn will eventually make you gumpy. Or maybe this is the ultimate goal:-)
It is not only bad for your heart to keep breathing in your own CO2, but it makes you stupider. That's not a joke--the more CO2 you breathe in, the more intelligence you lose.
You are not “breathing in your own CO2” as the mask allows for air to be freely exchanged, as witnessed by the fact that the mask does not cut off your oxygen. The mask, if well sealed, filters out the virus that may be in the air. It does not filter out air, or prevent the expulsion of CO2. The more bad science you are immersed in, the more intelligence you lose.
Here is an analysis of the data that shows both why the studies are hard to do and how the study itself showed masks don’t do anything. https://www.argmin.net/2021/12/01/unblinding/
Indeed, it is relatively straightforward, but not easy, to determine whether masks can directly affect the wearer, very difficult, if it is possible at all, to show second degree or indirect effects. Besides, results of all the studies are so close as to be statistically insignificant. The rate of infection is so low that samples sizes would have to be larger than realistically possible to perform a truly controlled study.
As far as I know, the Danish study was the closest to a decent study on primary control. Now I hear people betting on N95 as primary control, but I haven’t seen any trial studies. My own opinion is that the rational behind “my mask protects you” was lost when people realized the primary transmission was aerosols. Every time I look for studies on masks now, all I find is modeling or filter efficiency studies.
There are lots of controlled studies, and even meta-analyses of studies. The CDC's own guidance for masks with the flu virus is that they don't do any good. The flu virus virions are larger than COVID virions. Both are airborne. Ergo, mask wearing is ludicrous. It was always ludicrous. They knew that in 1918, when they did a study comparing two cities, one of which masked and the other didn't. Flu spread at exactly the same rate. There have been dozens of studies since on masking, and they all show the same thing.
Indeed, all these studies show there is no statistical difference in infection rates between a masked population and an unmasked population. The whole thing is government sponsored silliness.
Oh well, when I go to work with COVID patients I still opt for an N95 and the rest of the PPE. So far I have been lucky not to get COVID given the apparent uselessness of said masks. I am reluctant to wander the ward without one. Would you go maskless in the COVID ward and am I just superstitious?
I hope you are just an orderly because this comment shows a lack of critical thinking unbefitting of a health professional. You do know that the vast majority of health professionals have caught Covid, presumably many from their patients despite their use of N95s. Maybe you do have a magic mask.
Well, I would presume you would want to follow the science, and as a health professional you would know that virions are much smaller than the weave of surgical or N95 masks, and since COVID is airborne, any mask that does not block virions or allows breathing would not contain them. Ergo...the fact that no controlled study has ever shown a benefit. But you'd know that, right, since you've read the studies? You do know that "I've always worn a mask and I haven't gotten COVID, so masks must prevent COVID" is not a legitimate study, right?
True, although I think you should be able to see a difference in the rate of transmission between groups if the sizes were large enough. Quite a few people in any group would never be around people outside their household without a mask on. It’s obvious at this point that everybody is getting exposed.
Maybe this is an issue of the definition of "mask." Here is a recent study from the Max Plank Instutute in Germany that shows FFP2 masks are highly effective.
This is a dangerous false claim. Masks (good ones) work are very effective at reducing your chance of getting infected. Children don't understand the consequences of their or their parents' actions, unlike well informed adults.
You are completely wrong. N95 masks have been mandated and complied with in Germany and Austria for a year, but their cases are surging. There is ZERO correlation between masking and low case numbers.
Even N95 masks have to be worn and used correctly to have proper effect. And replaced often. If that's not done - and a lot of people simply will not do it properly - then effectiveness is poor.
Here, let me translate for you, since I understand a little Arrogant Butthole myself. "If only THOSE people could and would do it right, then this whole virus thing would vanish. The poor, the ignorant, the unwashed, if only the goddamn PROLES would just do as they are told by their betters," you patronizingly explained in Upper Buttholese, "why then this whole pesky virus would vanish. Indeed." Then you sniffed and said, "Oh, pissboy, bring my bucket!"
Sorry I came across that way to you. However, I was only pointing out a fact. N95 masks have to be used properly to work, and most people won't take the time to learn how.
What is the point of discussing if most average people know how to wear N95s correctly in a society where only maybe 10-20% of airplane passengers are even bothering with KN95/N95s?
A nurse told me this on Sunday, February 28, 2020.....seems to still be true on Friday, January 28, 2022. I remember the date because it's the last time we were all together! Masks are a joke and an entire generation of children will have suffered for no valid reason.
You may be right, but just as a casual observation, I have been wearing a mask in public for the better part of the last two years. In that time I have not contracted a virus of any kind. That could just be coincidence, but I don't remember ever going even six months without getting something before this and I'm 64. My wife and my daughters and their families all have had the same experience. Maybe we've just been really lucky...
More casual observation: I have, like you, mostly worn masks in public since early 2020. I have not had reason to suspect I caught COVID, but I've caught colds and flus and other bugs in that time.
I did go maskless this past summer on a visit to friends in places with higher COVID rates than my home area, among mostly mask-free people, and caught zip.
Earlier, friends of mine caught COVID despite being masked among the masked.
It's pretty clear mileages vary, and masks are no panacea.
Have you been tested to determine whether you're immune to COVID? Because one of the biggest problems with this whole mess is that the propaganda has deliberately led people to envision the virus as worse than smallpox and the Black Plague combined. In fact, while it's not pleasant, it's usually no worse than any other bad cold or nasty flu. I know, because I've now had both major versions.
The fact that for many a bout of COVID can be totally asymptomatic has been carefully underplayed to reinforce the demand for masking and social distancing and running to get your increasingly useless vaccine boosters while saving up to buy more test kits when the government stops providing freebies. People like you and me (I just turned 74) are warned in tones of doom we're at risk of death if we don't obey.
Nevertheless, if you want to be a target for rabid hysterical condemnation, just tell people you've had it and it's not that bad. With the media pounding on "death tolls" every day for two years, the public conception is that anyone who got COVID was doomed. Now, as it becomes clearly that just ain't so, we're switching to the horror of "long COVID".
And now Pfizer is lobbying to make an annual COVID vaccine mandatory. The Great COVID Con marches on. #FollowThe💰
I have had the same experience. Barely anything that qualifies as a cold in the last 2 years and never sick once. On the other hand, I also haven't been inside an office since March 2020, an airplane since 2019, or hanging out in crowded spaces inside or outside since then too. But I have continuously been with close friends and family - unmaksed.
While masks do help in stopping the spread of regular colds and such like, that we are physically interacting with far fewer people than before likely also plays a role.
That is very similar to my own experience; in fact, I got one of the last boxes of N95 masks on Amazon (that I could find, late Feb 2020) and used those. It could be the mask, luck, natural immunity, or even having an asymptomatic infection. Who knows?
COVID May yet turn out to be a nothing burger; less than a million deaths in a country of 330 millions over two years, mostly seniors OR it may mutate into the end of life as we know it scenario. The US killed millions in Vietnam and Korea alone and of course many more died in the few years of WW I & 2 and society survived and moved on. I believe that the likely scenario here will be the same but it's not beyond the range of possiblity that this could end society as we know it.
This number, around a million deaths, is no longer valid per the CDC's revision downward based on clarification of 'Died WITH Covid' vs 'Died FROM Covid'. The new 'Died FROM Covid' is closer to 400K.
Who knows what the truth is? Even with a worse case scenario it doesn't start to compare to cardio vascular or cancer or even the medical industrial system over time. Yes Virginia, the medical system is dangerous to your health; kill's hundreds of thousands annually. The number three killer according to the AMA.
Out of the ~900000 deaths attributed to COVID the CDC says 90% of these the underlying cause of the death was the virus. For the other 10%, COVID was the contributing cause.
As a surgeon, masks and gloves in a surgical setting are worn primarily for preventing the spread of blood borne pathogens, not aerosolized viruses unless the blood itself becomes aerosolized through the use of high speed hand pieces and such. We are talking much different particle sizes for blood bound viruses that make masking effective, and Covid particle size which really does make most masking that I see Americans doing a totally silly enterprise. But of course nobody seems to want to get medical information from doctors these days.
Worked in a TB hospital in Russia for about a year surrounded by MDRTB patients and wore a mask every day I was there, along with all the other doctors I worked with. Doctors have been wearing masks in TB hospitals for close to a century at this point, and no, it’s not because of “aerosolized blood particles”, because we’re not doing surgery while we’re on our rounds. Yes, some of our patients hemoptysize, but it’s a pretty unlikely event during an average clinical day and not the reason we wear masks, LOL.
You’re welcome to work in a TB hospital yourself without a mask, I’m certainly not going to try to convince you otherwise because you sound as though you have all the correct information already and don’t need any advice from me.
But as for me, I’ll continue with my superstitions if I go back and work there.
You may be a doctor, even a good one, but you have angry opinions and clearly did not read what I wrote without prejudging or understanding it. First sentence I wrote: “in a surgical setting,” not “in a Russian TB hospital.” You should also read the rest of what I wrote because it is nuanced far more than your sledgehammer response. I read a ton; have two doctorates; treat patients everyday; travel to treat people on multiple continents charitably every year; and readily admit that I have far more questions than answers on this and many other medical topics. Anyone who thinks they have all the answers scares me tremendously. Unlike you did me, I refuse to insult you with an off-handed derogatory comment.
A meta analysis study in 2015 published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine concluded “overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination. More rigorous contemporary research is needed to make a definitive comment on the effectiveness of surgical facemasks.” And that, in a peer-reviewed journal, sums up the spectrum of facemask research and knowledge to that date.
That's a key distinction he made there, doc. And a pertinent one, considering that doctors don't *normally* go around wearing masks outside of surgery "for hundreds of years", except when in the presence of an airborne pathogen. Like say, TB, and yes, Covid.
"We are talking much different particle sizes for blood bound viruses that make masking effective, and Covid particle size which really does make ***most masking that I see Americans doing*** a totally silly enterprise"
You're really trying to pick a fight when none is there to be had.
"...because you sound as though you have all the correct information already and don’t need any advice from me."
Yes, people generally don't want or need unsolicited advice, based on imagined scenarios no one was talking about, that conveniently allow that person to flout their completely unrelated experience. Thank you for your heroism, though. [golf clap]
"You’re welcome to work in a TB hospital yourself without a mask."
No, I'm going to guess that if he were working in a hospital that specialized in treating a *highly* dangerous airborne pathogen, he'd wear PAPR hood, and not a mask, based on NIH and CDC guidance. For those who might be wondering, "why not just a mask"? Well, as per those same guidelines, "• Some surgical masks *might* offer respiratory protection compared with not wearing a mask. Filtering facepiece respirators offer *more* respiratory protection than surgical masks, and powered air purifying respirator (PAPRs) hoods offer the best protection for most health-care settings".
Now, as for the the debate you *think* you're having, that "more protection" isn't really quantified, except as it related to "might offer". Whether that "more" is 1%, 20%, or even 50% (more than "might"), they sure as hell don't (can't) tell us.
"...I’ll continue with my superstitions if I go back and work there"
Seriously, you either responded to the wrong comment or you're putting words in his mouth, that one must seriously consider whether they're your own, subconsciously.
FYI, I never believe anyone who claims they are a doctor and then pontificate upon their alleged personal experience. BTW TB is caused by bacteria, not viruses, and it has not been a serious public health factor for 50-70 years (except as a secondary infection with HIV patients) and is almost exclusively treated with an ambulatory model, not in hospitals, because extended treatment in a nosocomial environment has been implicated as a key factor in the spread of multi-drug resistant strains.
That does indeed make the conversation complicated, especially for people without medical training. It is unfortunate maybe, but as Matt also writes, each person deserves to say and write what they please. This is also why it’s important to evaluate the evidence that people have for their opinions and advice. If the issue, as with Covid, was a simple one, we would know it because the evidence would be clear and there wouldn’t be any public debate.
Masks worn in hospitals are fitted to the face. They are also replaced frequently. They are worn in sterile rooms. They are accompanied by frequently replaced gloves. A mask that is not fitted is at best a prophylactic for a virus whose agents of infection are the size of Covid-19's. Frequently hand washing and room sanitation have a higher efficy than a standard paper or cloth mask.
All very good points. Wow, you read intellectual authors and what-do-you-know - lots of intelligent comments by a nice group of intelligent readers. Much different from so many threads I’ve read elsewhere!
They are not required in most situations in my State. I keep a paper mask in my purse inside a ziploc baggie. If someone requests I wear one I will put that one on out of respect for their request and replace my 'emergency' face mask later. The used one is thrown away.
People are wearing them now, for the most part, because they have been terrified by Mass Media reporting that is frankly incorrect. Numerous scientific studies are finally surfacing that prove that.
As already pointed out to you, they prevent the spread of blood borne contaminants as well as preventing spit, hair, mucus, and other debris from falling off the face and into the patient.
My response was to Adderholdt as to why masks are worn in hospital settings despite them not preventing transmission of aerosolized virus. I'm not sure why it doesn't appear that way.
Not any more of a false claim than yours? It is nuanced. Multiple MDs, psychiatrists, social workers, special needs advocates, parents, etc etc have spoken out and shown evidence, pointed at studies etc, that the harms of masking our children HEAVILY outweigh the risks... you just don't see/hear them in the news as their voices are supressed.
ESPECIALLY in this age of Omicron, cloth masks are virtually useless. N-95s must be fitted correctly, and then, yes, they may help a bit.... but even then, some virus particles WILL through. I'm an RN who's been working for 43 years... worn lots of masks over the years...
Masking children with "good masks" for coronavius is viciously cruel, and totally NOT evidence-based.
No need to take my word for it... A quick googel search of NIH studies will give you plenty of discussion on this, ie: "Surgical face masks (SFMs) provide a physical barrier between bacteria of oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal origin and an open patient wound. Wearing a SFM in the OR is one of many long standing preventative practices, yet controversy exists as to the clinical effectiveness of SFMs in reducing the frequency of SSIs."
In other words, surgical masks are for droplet precautions, and there are even still questions about how much they prevent infections in the OR. Moot point for Covid19, which is aerosol-transmittle.. surgical masks basically ineffective.
I think it intersteing that, as a non-medical person, you think of the patient side first...while as an RN, I think, "I don't want someone's bodily fluids splashing on my face!" It goes both ways.. LOL.. Just an intersting POV.
According to my orthopedic surgeon, the surgical masks are worn in ORs to prevent sweat and saliva from their speech enter the part of the body being carved up. That’s it.
Bingo! Someone gets it. It’s why they’re called “surgical masks.” As Fauci & others explained early on, the virus is carried in minute droplets, which few masks will stop, particularly not conventional masks that everyone is compelled to wear.
Read the fine print on the package. From the 3M Corporation: “This mask will not prevent illness.” The corporate hegemon speaks truth on occasion. It’s all part of the Global COVID Kabuki Theatre. Some truly enjoy playing their part; others not so much.
Just walked out of Lowe’s where I was asked to mask up… my CO state and county have no mask mandates… I’m vaxxed and boostered ( with some weird side effects) , so I’m just saying NO. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
They wear (sterile, one time use) masks to prevent bits of skin etc falling from their faces onto the open wound they created. There have been studies prior to 2020 showing masks don't prevent the spread of airborne respiratory viruses like the flu. Iirc, they studied nurses, who can be way more counted on to follow proper mask procedure than a general population being forced to do so.
Thank you! And suddenly Biden talks about distributing N95s like they were just invented…. Ever used a spray gun to paint a room, sand drywall or refinish furniture?? I’ve been using N95s for such projects for 30 some years……. So when COVID started, I made a bee line for Home Depot and bought N95s for my immediate family … I stopped mentioning it because I was ridiculed for being paranoid and causing unnecessary panic. Even my own GP gave me an eye roll…..so there’re still unopened in the front hall closet and now, they’re the must have standard…..
I think you know that most people wearing masks in cars are simply people so “not bothered” by the masks that they don’t even notice they have them on and simply forget to take them off.
But of course in today’s world everything is a conscious political act. I’m sure you’ve never accidentally continued to wear your hat in the winter while driving in your car, LOL.
But that’s partly the point… who cares if kids get covid? This is safety -ism to the extreme. It just breeds paranoid asthmatic pussies who think trauma is anything that makes them feel bad.
Haha maybe so. I’m not even against the US becoming a masking culture like Japan. Just don’t force it on me or my kids. I read about a girl with downs had a mask rubber banded to her face when she got off the bus
Please can you drop the hysteria? If Covid the cow’s claim is arguably false it is not dangerous. It is an opinion. Even when statements might be false, they are not dangerous. Suppression of opinion, now that is dangerous. Your point would be stronger if you left off the first sentence. We are all sick of “the sky is falling” rhetoric.
We had children in schools for two years wearing cloth and surgical masks the CDC now says are essentially worthless against Covid transmission without any major outbreaks in schools. So why do they need N95 masks now? They did fine with essentially nothing.
Additionally, Germany and Austria mandated N95 masks for the past year and it made absolutely no difference. Cases are surging. Their numbers are identical to their neighbors.
In fact, there is ZERO correlation between high mask compliance and low case numbers. None.
Throughout the pandemic, many child care centers have stayed open for the children of front-line workers — everyone from doctors to grocery store clerks. YMCA of the USA and New York City's Department of Education have been caring for, collectively, tens of thousands of children since March, and both tell NPR they have no reports of coronavirus clusters or outbreaks.
-------
They are talking about March 2020 in NYC, before masks and when immunity was at its lowest. No coronavirus clusters or outbreaks.
"Leffler et al. (29) used a multiple regression approach, including a range of policy interventions and country and population characteristics, to infer the relationship between mask use and SARS-CoV-2 transmission. They found that transmission was 7.5 times higher in countries that did not have a mask mandate or universal mask use, a result similar to that found in an analogous study of fewer countries (30). Another study looked at the difference between US states with mask mandates and those without, and found that the daily growth rate was 2.0 percentage points lower in states with mask mandates, estimating that the mandates had prevented 230,000 to 450,000 COVID-19 cases by May 22, 2020 (31)."
You're not stopping deaths in the first place. That's what people like you don't understand. You're just piling covid reaction deaths on top of covid deaths and pretend you're the moral ones.
Watch people in public wearing their masks for 30 seconds and you understand why masks are worthless. People are CONSTANTLY fucking with them. Remember how rule #1 is DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE???
Aside from the whole Not Stopping the Virus thing, a huge problem with masks is the failure from a human perspective. Not everyone is going to worry as much as you do about the virus. And if they don't worry as much as you, they won't take your measures to defeat it as seriously.
There is a reason they refer to this as a collective action problem.
As an aside, science is at it heart a moral exercise. Anyone can collect data, but a person needs to make the decision to both share that data and to listen to other, conflicting data.
And those are ethical choices, which stem from humility and a moral decision to reach for the truth.
I urge you to seek out a Holocaust survivor and ask them what they think of mass mask wearing. I encountered an elderly Jewish couple in the grocery store… their words were chilling.
You encountered a Jewish couple in the grocery store? How did you guys get to talking? And this “elderly Jewish couple” (who are apparently holocaust survivors? How “elderly” were they? They must’ve been toddlers during the Holocaust) equated wearing masks with Auschwitz? Really? That is chilling… It’s bullshit, but chilling nonetheless. Cool story.
Okay, well, the Holocaust was a little more than “mass fear mongering” and “controlling the population.” Tell us what they said, exactly. How did you guys even strike up a conversation? Some random old-ass couple just started chatting you up in the grocery store about how wearing masks and the Holocaust are one and the same?
You’re a liar. You never “encountered a Jewish couple” who survived the Holocaust in a grocery store. And wearing a mask isn’t even in the same universe as the Holocaust. Saying bullshit like that is insulting to anybody who has even a cursory understanding of the Holocaust (which you clearly don’t), never mind how insulting it is to actual Holocaust survivors AND the six million people who were killed in concentration camps.
Only a complete moron would equate the Holocaust with mask-wearing.
What is likely much more effective in preventing serious infections (because at this point we're all just gonna have to get COVID to really slow it down) - in the people who already have a very small chance of developing severe infections - is supplementation with vitamin C & D, quercetin & zinc, NAC, etc...
Optimizing immune health, in those that have reasonably healthy immune systems, seems obvious... but we also live in an over-medicated society in which pills and shots have supplanted nutrition in the minds of people as paths to health.
Humans lived largely outdoors since time immemorial...
When humans began living largely indoors their exposure to direct sunlight was dramatically reduced, and vitamin D levels suffered.
Mass vitamin D deficiency has probably been responsible for a variety of human diseases for a long time, as vitamin D is intimately linked with immune regulation and health.
There are decades of science into vitamin D levels and respiratory viruses, cancers, etc... but this science has been ignored, downplayed, trivialized, undermined, dismissed, etc.
The largest revelation for me in this time of COVID is that the science supporting mass vitamin D supplementation as a mitigator of respiratory disease has been there, and known... but the development/implementation of new medical technologies, as usual, was the (more lucrative) option chosen.
Classic pseudoscientific nonsense. Unless you are suffering from Scurvy, Vitamin C isn't going to cure anything. If you arent vaccinated, you are an order of magnitude more likely to die from COVID than if you arent, and no amount of vitamin magic will change this. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Do you think the antibodies you have are coming from inside the shots themselves?
"In previous studies, it is possible to verify that levels below 20 ng/ml of Vitamin D in blood serum are associated with a lower antibody response in viral infections [11-13], however, there is already evidence that the low level of Vitamin D is related to the appearance from autoimmune diseases, for example, systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes [14].
Vitamin D plays a role in innate and adaptive immunity [8] as it is essentials for the regulation of human genes and stimulates the production of catelicidin which increases the production of HCAP-18 and thus improves the function of cells such as macrophages and immunity innate. This relationship is associated between Vitamin D levels [12,13], for example, the expression of increased catelicidins and the intracellular death of Mycobacteria Tubercolosis and yet [2], there is an inverse association between low Vitamin D levels and increased infections in the upper respiratory tract [2,14,15] by flu viruses. Let’s remember that Vitamin D also influences the development of adaptive immunity by inhibiting the proliferation of B cells with differentiation and secretion of immunoglobulins that will supply the proliferation of T cells and thus results in a more pro-inflammatory response change from TH1 to anti-inflammatory TH2 cells [4,12]."
Today in the WSJ they say of the CDC that “ It was late to understand that the virus spreads via tiny air particles, not larger droplets, which meant the CDC was slow to recommend masks. Then last summer, before the Delta variant emerged, it suggested people stop wearing masks.”
This is all backwards. Aerosols are NOT stopped by masking. While they are trying to unscramble the mistakes of the CDC, they add another. Masks are not working and need to be ended.
This is flat out incorrect - KN95 and N95 masks are still very effective; however, cloth masks are not as effective against Omicron yet still better than nothing.
Not true. They are not sized for children and children are not advised to wear then but the WHO. Germany and Austria have mandated these for all for a year and have the same surge in cases as their neighbors with Omicron. The way people actually wear these makes them as ineffective as cloth and surgical masks. The real world data from place to place shows no better results.
N95s if fitted properly at all times MAY provide some protection although right now that is still folklore. But let's say it is the case, do you really think children are going to wear a properly fitted N95 all day? In this age of Omicron, said to be as infectious as measles, just a short time without the protection of a tight-fitting properly worn N95 leaves the alleged effectiveness almost nil. Oh and btw, please cite your source (i.e., a RCT or equivalent) for your statement that masks work. You won't be able to because there are none.
If kids have been wearing worthless clothes masks for two years without major outbreaks in schools, what is the justification for N95 masks in schools?
The CDC has changed its stance on cloth and surgical masking. So that has changed. Based on that, and the fact there were few outbreaks in schools compared to community surges, there is not justification to improve mandatory N95 masking.
That said, if parents want their kids masked in N95 masks, they should feel quite safe since everyone is vaxxed and their child is masked.
I agree. This is the most urgent task. Our research team cited over 200 clinical studies showing how masks injure the wearer. Volume 1 of PDMJ.org We need to stop the forced suffocation of kids.
Part 3 of the link I cited above gives evidence of the hypoxic and hypercapnic damage, aka suffocation, of mask-wearing, both clinical and laboratory evidence from peer reviewed studies.
I think his article brings up the entire opposite point - that masks have worked in the past and the misinformation around them NOT working at all, purported by both Fauci and his Canadian equivalent Dr. Tam, originates from the start of the pandemic. There's more nuance now and variants than the start of the pandemic, but very few people wear the suggested N95 and the ones who do, a significant portion wear it incorrectly making it useless.
How are children harmed by wearing masks when in larger groups? I think you're making a false equivalency between the parents going against obvious recommendations and kids being forced to follow. The parents behaviour can be wrong as well - doesn't our reality kind of undermine the entire use of masks and make any data nonsensical? In different regions worldwide when restaurants get more lax policies on masks, cases go up and you are acting like that's a grand coincidence? Isn't that misinformation for you to make a universal assumption? You're also generalizing pretty far, and making quite the eye-opener, when you say that children are being harmed by masks, but at virtually NO risk of COVID.
Comparing vaccines and masks is fundamentally wrong, they have different functions. One is to limit the amount of spread of recycled air in public, a mask, and the other is to prevent serious effects of COVID, a vaccine. Even comparing two mask wearers is folly, even if they have the same type, because they interact with it differently and may wear it in ineffective ways. Yes, vaccines can limit spread, but that's because it mutes the effects and kills off the virus - it still physically spreads it just gets dealt with.
Caring about wearing a mask is an individualistic stand point on freedom, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's such a minor limitation that it doesn't really bother most people so they don't give a fuck. We accept limits on freedom all the time, especially children who are literally forced to do 99% of things in their life and have no concept of freedom in a society. We indoctrinate them to societal norms, denial of any semblance of relativism, to our made up concepts of universality in an institution for 12+ years - and you're worried about the influence of a mask? Lol Matt's articles are fantastic, but the comment section and their interpretation always concern me.
Masks do not work. Masks delay speech in children. Breathing in a mask for 7 hours is bad for children. Especially children with learning disabilities or asthma, etc. breathing in a mask is harmful during sports. Sitting outside alone is harmful. There is zero correlation between high mask compliance and low case numbers. The most masked places have the same Omicron surges as the least masked. There are no studies that show strong evidence of masking children significantly impacting case numbers. Schools all over the world have been open for a year or more without mask mandates and have not seen surges in cases. If kids wore non-effective cloth masks for two years without significant surging cases in schools, they got along fine with nothing. There is no justification for far more restrictive N95 masks 7 hours a day. That’s absurd. Children are at very low risk. There is little or no benefit from N95 masks for schools. And when will it end? Masking for flu? For Covid every winter? An entire generation of children are being harmed and missing out of their childhoods. It’s disgusting that people minimize this.
Sitting outside alone is my only activity other than sitting inside alone. I like them both. If you're harming yourself sitting outside alone, perhaps your sitting-outside-alone technique requires some buffing. Or perhaps updating.
Sitting outside alone has changed a great deal since it first caught on as a viable-- if mind-cauterizing--activity several hundred thousand years ago. There are many excellent YouTube videos dedicated to safe sitting outside alone, best practices of sitting outside alone, and even how to best think, while sitting outside alone, of the many activities you could engage in with other people if you weren't always sitting outside alone. Doing your best not to harm yourself.
Schools on the East Coast with extremely cold conditions have kids sitting outside and social distancing to eat their lunches. There are many articles about this.
"Masks do not work. Masks delay speech in children. Breathing in a mask for 7 hours is bad for children. Especially children with learning disabilities or asthma, etc. breathing in a mask is harmful during sports." These are opinions, not a fact and there exists no universal mandate. I have asthma and am fine in a mask. I'm confused on why you say "Sitting outside alone is harmful." It's not even a coherent line of thought.
There is a correlation between high masks and low cases - in fact it's pretty substantial. "The most masked places have the same Omicron surges as the least masked" This is blatant misinformation, did you even read the article? Do you understand that saying a statement that you feel is true, doe not make it universally true?
"Schools all over the world have been open for a year or more without mask mandates and have not seen surges in cases" I seriously challenge you to show some actual evidence. Have they been testing students at the same rate as everyone else? The last year the kids have been out of school for half the time, there wasn't Omicron or delta a year ago. Your observations are very biased.
"There are no studies that show strong evidence of masking children significantly impacting case numbers" are there studies showing they harm? Has there even been any reasonable amount of time to conduct such a study?"If kids wore non-effective cloth masks for two years without significant surging cases in schools, they got along fine with nothing." Kids died, what are you talking about?? A lot ended up sick or with "Long COVID" and severe impacts long term. You're actually being delusional.
"There is little or no benefit from N95 masks for schools. And when will it end? Masking for flu? For Covid every winter? An entire generation of children are being harmed and missing out of their childhoods. It’s disgusting that people minimize this. " What future are you creating to delude yourself? How are an entire generation missing out on their childhood? You mean some creation of childhood that you have in your head? People are evolutionary and adaptive, such a brain dead take. The kids are fine, they will adjust just like previous generations before them did when their parents took away various freedoms. If you're actually this worried about the children, and I mean this from a logical view, you really should be out there everyday protesting for an end to child labour and sex trafficking - but instead they are just the ends to a mean for an argument against masks. It's disgusting that people take advantage of them like that.
Listen, you can totally be anti-mask, that's cool. But at least be consistent and GENUINE about your argument. This whole "Think of the children" thing is an ethically disingenuous argument. Just say you don't like them and you don't think your kid should have to listen to the state on it. Be based. It's way more honest. No need for bullshit.
You are not up to date on the science. There are many studies showing speech being delayed. Many showing the lack of efficacy of masks. School guidelines in many areas force kids to sit alone outside in the cold to eat their lunches. For the data across counties, states, regions and countries showing the same or worse results in the places with high mask compliance, this forum does not allow me to post screen grabs of grids, which demonstrate this. But I will direct you to some links.
Lmao if speech is delayed - which I think you mean learning to speak? - that's 99% a parenting issue and from unstable learning environments. The "studies" you linked below are a joke - they don't have any controls or aren't studies, just a line of cases and correlation between masks and cases as if no other externalities exist. Isn't it odd that cases spike at all major holidays - where families meet unmasked? Think critically of the information you consume, don't let bias win.
"School guidelines in many areas force kids to sit alone outside in the cold to eat their lunches. For the data across counties, states, regions and countries showing the same or worse results in the places with high mask compliance" Those "studies" are DOG shit and not studies! Correlation =/= causation. They aren't studies at all, it's just how many cases we have and policy on masks lmao it's all relative and you can cherry pick whatever you want when you're only crossing two variables and picking locations to suit your narrative. I'd urge you to take a stats course at your local community college.
This link is total bullshit. I live in LA. We have absolutely not had more COVID cases in the last month than we had in all of 2020. Twitter. Gimme a fucking break.
If your believed masking worked in schools for the last years… Now you know the CDC admits cloth and surgical masks do not work. So... If kids have been wearing worthless clothes masks for two years without major outbreaks in schools, what is the justification for N95 masks in schools?
There HAVE been major outbreaks in schools, though. Multiple schools in SoCal have had to send their students back home and do “ distance learning” or whatever-the-fuck you wanna call it again in the last year. What the fuck are you talking about?
If you believe masks in schools have not stopped spread, then you admit, as does the CDC that we forced children to wear masks 7 hours a day, doing harm to their development and breathing and socialization for no benefit. N95 masks are not recommended for kids by the WHO. Wearing them 7 hours a day fitted to the face so aerosols are not filling the air around the sides is extremely harsh and impossible for children to do. Meanwhile their parents can go to the bar down the street and sit for hours without masks. How does that make any sense?
The data shows no real world community benefit between places with high mask compliance versus low compliance. Both have the same results.
If you believe masks did mitigate surges, then note that the CDC disagrees. They say cloth and surgical masks did and do nothing to stop the spread. If you believe kids in schools did well with “nothing”, then why do they need N95 masks which the WHO does not recommend for children?
The number of deaths from Covid in healthy Kids, according to John’s Hopkins and Dr. Marty Makary, was vanishingly small in two years.
Most Covid cases trace to the home. The safest place for children is in school. School closures adversely impacted learning, particularly for minority kids. Those loses in education are dramatic and will be felt for decades to come. Many of the harms of these policies will be felt increasingly over time.
The risk from Covid is highly age stratified. The risk to Children is not much different than from the flu. Are you proposing children mask up in school every flu season?
The madness of continuing forced masking now that every kid in schools are vaccinated is insanity. And we now know we have been enforcing the wearing of masks that don’t work. None of our interventions have stopped spread. Omicron did the same in highly masked places as it did in lesser masked. Our interventions harm. But they do not stop spread.
The answer is what epidemiologists knew prior to Covid. You let the bull of the low risk population catch the virus while protecting the high risk. Particularly now that vaccines have been available to everyone, young healthy people should return to normal. Them catching Covid protects the high risk. We should put resources into make opportunities for the high risk to avoid the virus. Trying to protect everyone, protects no one.
My ignorance is astonishing because I’m not intimately familiar with the rate of infection amongst “Hispanics and their kids”? Really? I actually think it’s kind of weird that you know this and can just pull it out of your ass. Exactly how much time do you spend, every day, familiarizing yourself with the rate of COVID infection amongst various ethnicities? I know you’re not a doctor, so the fact that you know things like this just proves that you’re a fucking weirdo who spends too much time on the internet.
We protected the laptop class while minorities and the poor had to continue working. That’s why California has a higher infection rate per Hispanics than Florida where the percentage of infections matches population in general.
Yeah, dude, honestly? Any time anybody says,”Bu-bu-but what about the children???” what they’re really saying is,”I don’t like this thing.” They did it with Elvis in the 50’s, they did it with television in the 60’s, they did it with heavy metal and porn and now they’re doing it with masks. They don’t give a shit about “the children”; kids are just a cover for their own bullshit.
I don't want to make assumptions about the other commentor, but that's an interesting observation. Children are the easiest scapegoat/strawman in the world - there's no voice, no union, and they are the most generalized group despite being the least equatable and most diverse lol
One last thing: if they really cared about “the children,” they’d be going on a crusade against smart phones. I have no doubt that children (and adults, too, for that matter) staring at their phones and iPads for hours and hours every day has a much more detrimental effect on their brain development or whatever than wearing a mask at school does.
But, you know, adults like their phones, so… That’s not a problem.
I’ll make assumptions on the other commenter for you: COVID the Cow is a moron. Look at the screen name; that’s all I need to know. Just another “COVID is bullshit!” person. I mean, anybody who says,”Children are being harmed,” because they’re wearing masks is… dumb? Insane? I mean, “harmed,”? Really? Harmed. Children are being “injured” and “harmed” because they wear masks to school? Gimme a fucking break…
Again, just own up to it and say,”I don’t like wearing a mask.” Quit using The Kids as an excuse for your own shit. I don’t like wearing a mask, either, but I do it whenever I go out. Which is why I don’t go out too much anymore haha.
Children are being harmed by wearing masks? How, exactly? I live down the street from a middle school and I see them walking down the street after school, three blocks away. None of them seem particularly perturbed by wearing masks. I mean, they could take them off as soon as they leave, but they don’t. I dunno why exactly that is, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because they’re not even really thinking about it. None of them appear “harmed,” anyway.
There’s a lot of reasons to end “the COVID clown show,” as you put it, but this whole,”Bu-bu-bu-but what about the chillllllldrennnn???” argument is typical panic bullshit.
The fact that you don’t understand the damage, only means you are ignorant of it. Breathing CO2 and spit for 7 hours and not seeing faces harms children. Speech delays. Self-harm. Also, graduations and events they will never have.
Not seeing faces I can understand maybe might affect a kid’s brain development, their ability to recognize… whatever, but “breathing CO2 for seven hours”? Does that also mean that every adult worker who has to wear a mask for their entire shift is also being “harmed”? Or “injured”? However you wanna put it? Because they’re “breathing CO2”?
As far as graduations are concerned, the only thing I remember about my high school graduation (which’ll actually be thirty years ago this June… shit) is watching a buddy of mine puke a couple seats down from me while we sat through the speeches, because he drank too much beforehand. Which was definitely funny, but I mean, graduation? Who fucking cares? Maybe your graduation was a truly meaningful experience, but I think “the children” will get over it. I haven’t thought about my high school graduation since the day it happened, until just now.
And “self-harm”? Kids have been “self-harming” forever. Has there been an increase in “self-harm” post-COVID that can be directly attributed to wearing a mask?
Honestly, I AM “ignorant of it.” I don’t have kids, thank gawd. But I see these middle-school and high school students multiple blocks away from their school, still wearing their masks and talking and hanging out and none of them seem particularly troubled by wearing a mask. When I go to the grocery store or wherever, I tear my mask off the second I’m outta there; I fucking hate wearing them. It doesn’t appear to me that “the children” do, though. If you’re really that worried about “the children,” maybe you should wonder what the effects of staring at their phones for hours on end are. That, to me, is much more troubling than wearing a gawddamn mask.
Smart phones and (anti) Social media are easily more damaging to children and adults for that matter than COVID has been up to now unless you're in LTC and even there, the social deprivation is like but probably not as bad as solitary confinement in prison. I'm a geriatric agressive motorcycle Rider and I accept the risks. About ~35X as dangerous as a car and about 100X as much fun. I choose to wear a quality full face helmet and full body armor knowing that in many situations it won't save me from death or catastrophic injury. Last year the data on COVID was limited and I minimized my risks to the greatest extent practicable...read Instacart and A for almost everything. This year with the knowledge I've been able to filter out of the narrative and background noise I feel much safer and I have no hesitation shopping. I'm vaccinated and I do mask up but I I believe that they only offer marginal if any protection but life is short and great and I'd hate to miss it by living in fear, irrational fear; we know better now and can assess the risks "minimal" with confidence. The fear porn isn't really that effective after two years and needs to stop tout suite.
You are entitled to your personal choices, even if we end up paying for your hospital care. I suspect you would be just as safe or safer without a cloth mask. And you would likely avoid truly risky situations with Covid without the mask. But your choice.
My motorcycle insurance premium is about 60% for my possible personal injury as it should be.I have always worn a well fitting medical grade mask and I don't consider it any form of absolute protection any more than the 2M distancing. I do believe based on my research that being slim, have a great diet and and according to Fitbit today exercising a lot more than average last year gives me an edge on avoiding the worst of COVID. At home in Canada, I have a UVC device in my ductwork for extra protection. Being in Florida for the winter, the attitude towards COVID is about like their attitude to personal protection while riding motorcycles... cavalier is the least perjorative word I can think of but as you say, to each their own and I'm less likely to have a weather related accident.
Cow, your lede of "Masks do not work" is somewhat deceptive. Work for what? Would you like your surgeon and nurses in your appendectomy not wearing masks? It is unreasonable to believe that masks do not stop spread of infection. That they do not stop all spread of infection is another point entirely. That people clearly misunderstand how and when to wear masks is another question. Rather than protest "the level of lying on masks", the effort should be about how masks can be efficacious and how masks have clear limits of protection.
Masks keep blood from spattering in surgeries and keep droplets from coughs from flying. But they do not stop aerosols which are too small for a mask to catch. Even an N95 mask would have to be perfectly fitted to not allow an gaps all day to have any impact. The real world data is clear that places with high mask compliance did the same or even worse than those with low mask compliance in terms of cases.
If you argue that masks failed and we continued to have terrible outbreaks, then you know masks do not work and we forced children in schools to wear them for two years for nothing. Forcing N95s respirators on children 7 hours a day is not recommended by the WHO.
If you believe masks did a reasonable job of controlling a urges in schools, the CDC now admits cloth and surgical masks do pretty much nothing. So kids did fine despite masks doing nothing. So again, how can you justify enforcing N95 masks on them?
Either way, it makes no sense. Within 24 hours, NYT, SF Chronicle, Atlantic and NPR publish arguments against mandating kids masking. These are liberal publications. I’m a Green and I find the crazy partisanship and censorship to be truly evil regarding Covid. The liberal side of the media has a lot to atone for. NYT: https://tinyurl.com/546c94da Chronicle: https://tinyurl.com/2p962y8z Atlantic: https://tinyurl.com/28xhk6hb NPR: https://tinyurl.com/ppeh2nbh
I still would prefer some kind of actual study, not anecdotes of study. My understanding is that masks are just one of many tools in the pandemic control box, and the aerosol v droplets argument is fallacious--no one claims that masks stop all micro or nano level particles, just big glops containing virus. In Asia where I lived, people would wear masks not only because they were fearful of infection, but as often they were fearful of infecting others. The huge number of mask wearers thus show a mass delusion of epic size or that mask wearing is at least somewhat beneficial for controlling sickness.
Take a gander at Sweden on this WHO map of European cases. Note they are doing better than highly N95 mask compliance Germany and Austria. The same as Norway. https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se
At several times in my working career, I wore a mask all day because of toxic air quality. If you say that Covid air is not comparable because the virus is so small, I think you miss the physics. Viruses are so small they have to hitch a ride on something bigger, thus toxic air. I in no way believe masks are a magic bullet, just as vaccination is not a magic bullet, just one tool among many, as I claimed before. If you deny this, I wonder where you get your confidence.
When you wore a mask due to toxic air, did you them take it off to eat and breathe that toxic air?
How do mandatory cloth and surgical masks, which the CDC admits do not work well against respiratory viruses, work just as well in places where there is low mask compliance as they do in places with high mask compliance? And work just as well when you take them off to eat? And work just as well when kids wear them improperly?
Covid is spread by aerosols. Gaps in masks allow aerosols to fill the air. If you can smell someone smoking, your mask is not stopping aerosols spread. If you are coughing you should stay home. Masks are to stop asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread, which are not big drivers of the pandemic. If you have symptoms, and a mask is fooling you into believing you are safe to be out, the mask is actually increasing the danger to others.
In fact, high risk elderly and immunocompromised people do think they can go in high risk indoor crowded spaces because they are masked. This increases risk to the most vulnerable.
Masked surgeries resulted in more, not fewer, infections than unmasked surgeries in a study of 3,089 surgeries. A family member recently required surgery, and all present chose to be unmasked. Healing was fast, outpatient, and you can now hardly see the incision.
So masks don't work even in a surgery? That sounds like pure nonsense, but I am happy to change my mind. How about a source for that study of 3,089 surgeries?
Tellingly from the study, "It would appear that minimum contamination can best be achieved by not wearing a mask at al but operating in silence..." implies that the masks stop contamination when people are talking. Because ordinary people do talk, and talk a lot, is there anywhere a study specifically for Covid that compares a population of mask wearers with a population of non-maskers?
Might be helpful to stop all the lying that comes from the right about vaccine efficacy / safety as well. But I don’t get the impression Matt feels he can make any money off that right now and as a PCP I certainly don’t think it’s worth the effort on my part. Free speech may be profitable and/or emotionally satisfying for the many peddlers of misinformation in today’s society but it’s become too exhausting and unproductive for me to fight against misinformation in my daily practice so I just don’t anymore. I have to take care of my patients’ other problems and I know by now from considerable prior experience that if they have ideologic objections to getting vaccinated I’m not going to penetrate through that no matter how much time and capital I expend.
I don’t think Matt is right here - he’s suggesting something that sounds good but is actually a platitude, i.e., that the more free speech we have the more likely we are to get at the real truth of things. I just don’t agree that’s necessarily true.
Vaccination is great. MRNA vaccines also do not stop the spread of Omicron. None of our interventions stop Omicron. South Africa and many other poor countries with far less vaccination and mask compliance are doing far better both in terms of cases and deaths per 100k.
The American right is pretty clearly and loudly articulating that vaccination is NOT great - honestly, please don’t try to tell me otherwise because I’m running into this every day and like I said, it’s exhausting. About half of my “vaccine objectors” are people who’re honestly searching for information and still have an open mind - these I can usually convince. The other half are ideologic objectors, invariably from the right (they bring their politics right into the exam room) and I don’t even make the slightest effort anymore because I know it’s futile and wastes our already limited time.
In the meantime the only patients I’ve lost to Covid over the past year have been unvaccinated ones, so you can imagine how I feel.
The left is silly when it comes to things like masks and vaccine mandates and thinking it can create a Covid-free world but its errors are those that come from exaggerated caution, not quite the same thing as the right’s repudiation of basic facts and concepts. No, Covid is definitely worse than the flu, the vast majority of those 8.5 million people died of Covid rather than “comorbidities”, the vaccines are fundamentally as safe as any others we currently use and considerably more efficacious than the flu vaccine when it comes to preventing clinical illness.
Again, I disagree with Matt when he thinks that free speech inevitably leads to us finding out the truth of things. Not to say that I think speech should be censored, I absolutely don’t, but I think there are points in history when it doesn’t matter anymore whether speech is free or not, truth simply doesn’t prevail.
Recently, my PCP talked me into a tetanus booster. Then I went home and read this: A recent paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggested that tetanus and diphtheria booster vaccines are not necessary for adults who have completed their childhood vaccination series. This advice aligns with the current World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations
Can you be more specific than broad accusations like "all the lying"? Are BMJ editors liars? They write:
Big pharma is the least trusted industry. At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.
The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future.
People like me have looked at the pro-vaccine studies with a skeptical eye and found them unconvincing. Maybe our politics is shaped by reasoning rather than vice versa.
Basically, your post just presented a host of reasons why pharmaceutical companies might have a motive to lie, without actually presenting a single definite fact that they in fact ARE.
The problem with everything you just pointed out is that it presupposes that thousands upon thousands of ordinary medical providers in the US, who are not employees of these companies, would somehow either not notice or, alternatively, cover up the true facts about these vaccines that the companies themselves were trying to hide, even though one might presuppose that from long association with their patients those providers might actually care about them, and, moreover, aren’t being compensated to do such an awful thing.
The right likes to criticize the left for not presenting hard data about things like masks, and to a considerable extent they’re correct. But the left does supply a lot of data when it comes to safety and efficacy of the vaccines, which I don’t really see the right countering in any rigorous way.
Innuendo isn’t enough here, you need to show some actual data if you’re going to make a credible claim that the vaccines aren’t effective or are unsafe. Data that will cut it for providers and patients who look around on a daily basis and don’t see thousands of patients, friends, or family dropping due to vaccine reactions, or alternatively, ending up in the hospital with severe Covid.
I do take statements from practicing physicians seriously (my sister is one). But there are also plenty of stories about vaccine harm. VAERS data can't just be dismissed with a wave of the hand. It is a crime to submit false reports, and under-reporting is more likely than over-reporting.
To get more clarity, we have randomized trials. Those showed a lot more severe adverse events for the vaccines than cases of severe COVID prevented. That is a definite fact. Many authors here noticed problems like this, and I also wrote about it on my stack. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/severe-adverse-events-vs-severe-covid
The studies I’ve read suggest that the benefit of the vaccines in preventing severe Covid significantly outweighs the risk of severe side effects, aside from the pediatric population where the risks may be relatively equal. I’m not a pediatrician but do have a 15-year-old son and I have my doubts about the value of vaccination in his age group.
As a practicing clinician with nearly 3000 patients on my panel as well as four colleagues with similar panel sizes, our clinical experience suggests pretty strongly that the studies are correct for adult patients.
I guess all of us go from the data we read combined with our own experience, and that may differ from one person to another.
Mike, I appreciate your points, and I believe you are what you say you are. But you say this:
"... aside from the pediatric population where the risks may be relatively equal. I’m not a pediatrician but do have a 15-year-old son and I have my doubts about the value of vaccination in his age group."
According to a lot of the kind of people Matt is talking about, that comment puts you on the side of "irresponsible anti-vax conspiracy nut-jobs" yourself. In fact, some of the people I have seen attacked as "anti-vax" are vaccinated themselves, but question whether everyone, particularly children, need it. And for that they're labelled "dangerous." I have a 6-year-old son, and he's gotten the first shot, but I'm still questioning whether he should have, and whether I should get him the second.
I have personally witnessed a normal physician discounting an obvious vaccine reaction (fortunately minor) as something else. Therefore I do not trust normal physicians to carefully weigh vaccine harm vs. benefit.
The randomized studies did show benefit. They also showed harm. Overall, the risk/benefit ratio was upside down for individual patients but hospitals liked the reduction in infectious disease patients. That does not conflict with your observation. Meanwhile, variants (who could have predicted antigenic drift, which was discovered in the 1940s) are reducing the benefit.
Maybe. But it’s also possible that the kind of people who congregate on sites like this aren’t the kind to be persuaded in the first place.
immediately attacking anyone who argues an opposing point of not being who they say they are, or working for sinister agencies, or mass murdering people for financial gain, doesn’t suggest much of an open mind. That’s happened to me here as well as numerous other places which is why I’m trying to get away from commenting. I guess I had a kind of “relapse” here, LOL.
I seem to do fine in the office with individual patients, although of course I’m probably not who I really say I am and that comment is hence made up and an example of my unfortunate habit of lying.
I am very concerned with the current trend towards controlled speech. I do think truth prevails over time but it is often a confusing path. I agree you do say speech should not be censored but I feel you lack faith in the messy process
My opinions are quite consistent and certainly haven’t changed during the period of this thread, LOL.
How is all the misinformation about Covid deaths and vaccine efficacy coming from “the establishment”? I can literally tell that vaccines are effective simply from looking around me in my own neighborhood, I don’t need “the Big Bad Left” to “misinform” me.
Most of you reading this will be thinking, "Well, no kidding!". We know how free speech works, we know it's an inelegant but also the only unique solution to the issue of getting to the truth. We know that assigning any authority to be the arbiters of truth can only backfire for who will guard the guardians of truth. We already knowwww thissss, it has been universally baked into our civic understanding of our society.
Unfortunately, Matt's position and I presume the position of most of us here, defenders of free speech if not borderline absolutists, is a majority-held but rapidly-eroding idea in the United States:
"Think the progressive illiberalism of young people is just a phase? Think again. Examining trends in support for free speech in the General Social Survey, which has run since 1972, political scientists Dennis Chong, Jack Citrin, and Morris Levy find that young people today are far less tolerant of forms of speech that affect identity groups than were young people in the past. “In a stunning reversal,” they write, those on the left “are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives of a wide range of controversial speech about racial, gender, and religious identities.”
This is no small matter, it does not bode well for the future, but it's also unsurprising given the educational framework that is currently in place: "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can be forms of violence that deny my existence and are a manifestation of tyrannical oppression".
Allow me to also, since I have a moment, explain why Wokeness / The Successor Ideology / Cancel Culture results in the denigration of free speech.
It's because there is no such thing as free speech. Speech, in the liberal worldview, is the manifestation of an individual's thoughts. But in the woke worldview, there are no individuals, there are only groups that benefit or are oppressed by "the system". That system brainwashes groups through its dominant social discourses into accepting their role in the system and then regurgitating its power dynamics.
Hence, when a person speaks, they are not expressing individual thought, but merely echoing the political and cultural positions that the system has inscribed into their consciousness. Their speech should not be free it should be shouted down, banned, censored, precisely because it is nothing other than the mouthpiece of a tyrannical system. Or so they claim.
This worldview leads to the wokes constantly reminding us the race and sex of a speaker. It leads to minorities that echo "the system's" positions like Larry Elder, being called the "Black Face of White Supremacy" in the LA Times.
It leads, in the end, to a valence of reliability and morality being ascribed to a person's speech before they've even opened their mouths, by dint only of immutable characteristics in an intersectional ranking system of oppression.
Elegantly written and defended, but I think that the lack of tolerance is down to simple narcissism and lack of real challenges. The Twitter/laptop classes that drive this discussion have been over-parented to a ridiculous degree.
I have spent close to a decade studying and going down the rabbit hole of the woke, their literature and academics, their founding philosophies, how it all came together and developed and spread.
I was always dumbfounded at its symptoms, the strange unexplainable assertions and behavior. But when I slowly began to understand that it's an all-encompassing worldview, I was able to see through its lens, and all the unexplainable phenomena began to make sense.
It is still illiberal. It still holds many paradoxical and hypocritical positions. But it is at least somewhat an internally consistent logic, like a religion, like Catholicism. I can at least now see why these things make sense to them.
But the fact we're dealing with a viral meme-plex resembling religion does little to spark optimism. The only option is to stand strong on liberal principles of individual liberty and reason.
I am still going through these links you posted, they are quite interesting regarding the developmental detail in these ideologies in the early day. Any other resources to share?
That is the fear. While I was reading this great TKNews piece, I was thinking how IT should be required reading\study by our schoolchildren. At least, by the teachers. It would be interesting to see the reaction of college students that were exposed to it. Probably many would be "triggered."
One of the things I also appreciate about Substack is that it still allows comments. It's disappointing that mainstream news outlets have stopped allowing them. Restricting people from discovering that others are having similar thoughts and concerns is a good way to quash dissent. (Edited for spelling)
Frankly, I often find the comments far and away the most interesting part of online posting. Here, Matt's most perspicacious insights render it generally a tie.
I have been running an ongoing experiment of the boundaries of the Overton window in “polite” society by posting comments at NYT. The scope of permissible discussion is stunningly narrow. There are basic and obvious facts that you aren’t allowed to say. These people are totalitarian to the core. I’m a lifelong Democrat and I don’t recognize these assholes anymore.
It's pathetic how desperate they are to control the conversation over there. It's not even a conversation, comments aren't posted in real time or in order, if they're posted at all. I'm essentially just trolling when I bother to post there anymore.
At least there's a paywall, or it would be only a matter of time before outfits like Media Matters and the PLA caught on and invaded these comment sections with thousands of fake subscribers spewing weird slogans.
They couldn't do it since the comment sections would turn into mockery of the same writers. The are producing propaganda and the moment population realized it and tried to fight back, they started the process. First, moderators, then ban on comments and now that they are losing viewers to alternative methods (Substack, Spotify and such) they are trying to crush the competition. Ironically of they had comment sections going(with moderators), I don't think Substack would have taken off like it did. People want to bounce their ideas of other people.
Because they really aren't very smart people. Look at Fauci, a monumental mediocrity. He is typical of the folks behind all these hamfisted campaigns to get everyone vaxxed.
You would think if we lived in an actual meritocracy some of these people would at least be half way competent at their job. Oh, wait... So that is what they are so desperately trying to hide.
If WaPo, NYT, The Guardian, and the rest of the mainstream media are so concerned about the spread of misinformation, they should shut themselves down immediately.
Russiagate and the Steele "dossier" is Exhibit A, and the canceling of the New York Post for the Hunter Biden laptop story is Exhibit B.
And there are about 2 million other exhibits to enter into evidence if we need them.
A nice touch of absurdity in the guardian piece Matt links to, 'Facebook needs a much better mechanism to stop the spread of false information about the vaccine, and they need to make sure they’re doing that across languages,” said Jessica González, the co-CEO at Free Press, a media equity group.' A codirector of an organization called 'Free Press' advocating for more censorship.
That was a good one! How about those fun times when Russians tried to shut down Vermont power grid, or when they desperately tried to pay Taliban to target US troops because Taliban war effort was flagging and they were close to losing the war :-)
My favorite is still “fiery but mostly peaceful protest”. It takes a certain kind of nerve to lie about what the camera is showing in real time right behind you.
The Hunter Biden Story was concocted nonsense. Hell, more than a few Post reporters are laughingly on the record as such. The Post is Gotham city's facsimile of the National Enquirer. I thought this was self-evident to any sentient being--left, right, in-between. The story was even the brainchild of Murdoch himself, who had hoped it would provide Trump with the needed boost to overtake Biden in the final days of the campaign.
And speaking of Murdoch, the very concept of Rupert Murdoch being cancelled by anyone, for anything, up to and including the Almighty hisself, is more than a little amusing. Belongs in the realm of the fantastical.
Your defense of Hunter Biden just disqualified you from a scintilla of credibility…. Don Jr faced 16 hours of Congressional grilling over campaign phone calls…if he had done ONE of the things that Hunter Boy has indeed done, let’s just say smoking crack in his tidy whities…the media would have exploded… do you not see the hypocrisy??
I do. An oversight. Don Jr. should have been given 16 hours on the bastinado. And I'm not defending Hunter Biden, I'm drawing attention to the fact that people who buy into such tripe as the Post story ought to park their asses in a mud hut for a year or two and sort things out. Perhaps I didn't make this last part clear in my last post. Fuzzy thinking. Damaged goods. Highly likely in the future to make unsound decisions as they relate to this great nation's politics. Huzzah!
lucrezia, if some New York Post reporters "are laughingly on record" about the Hunter Biden laptop being "concocted nonsense," please provide details.
Also, as a long time subscriber, I am familiar with others comparing the New York Post to the National Enquirer. I agree that the paper sensationalizes certain matters and has a right wing view of things, but generally is accurate. Unlike the NY TImes, reporters like Jason Blair who fake stories are fired, not encouraged. Again, please provide details that would support this assertion.
Certain of that? Viewed through another lens, I might appear as one of the few non-trolls here. Crush that and put it in your pipe and smoke it. Then come follow lucrezia down the path to enlightenment. Come. Come with lucrezia down the path to enlightenment...come...come...
Outstanding Matt - this is clarity you dependably deliver: "Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official."
As the evidence mounts daily that the misinformation has been and is being supplied by the Paid Pharma Propagandists in mainstream media, the only thing they have left is try smear and censor. It's not working, as no one trusts them any longer. Many of these institutions will be bankrupt inside of 2 years, while Substack grows more valuable each passing day. The Deep State's monopoly over the narrative has forever crumbled and they will never get it back.
Not an extraordinary claim at all. What don't you agree with? The polls that show 10% of Americans trust mainstream media? Or would it be the endless lies they have spun, accepting as fact propaganda coming from government officials and the companies that have bought and paid for them? There's so much evidence that it would hard to start somewhere. Let me know which specific area you'd like some evidence in and I'll be happy to bury you in it.
Perhaps if you ask people "Do you trust mainstream media" you can get a very low positive response. This is not the same as asking "Do you trust (name of specific mainstream media source)?" People are sensitive to the implied pejorative, but will not necessarily perceive their own information silo sources as belonging under that moniker.
Regardless, people overwhelmingly have caught onto the fact that the vast majority of talking heads in "mainstream media" are parrots repeating what they are told to say in order to help craft a narrative that is being pushed by the Deep State and corporate oligarchs that fund them. For sure, if I am a die-hard CNN watcher, I am happy to watch their version of unreality being trumpeted on a daily basis. Same for Fox. And it's all brought to us by Pfizer! In the end, I still know they are biased and lying 90% of the time. The days of true, skeptical journalists openly questioning the bullshit of corporations and politicians who are fleecing everyone is gone. What is left is kabuki theater.
Well any evidence would be a great start, and then we can go from there.
What I agree with or disagree with is irrelevant. Either you have evidence of your extraordinary claim or you don't, in which you are opining and sharing feelings on the matter. Which is fine but don't act like its the truth.
The best evidence that the legacy media has long lost its way, is inherently unreliable and untrustworthy, and has largely abdicated its responsibility to be the watchdog of government and the powerful elites, is that so many people now rely on "alternative" media for its news and information, and 95% of this stuff is actually a couple of shit layers below the the MSM. It's ALL besotted with propaganda.
Keep and eye on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and the MLB lockout. If Manfred thinks he can break the Player's Union by going "woke," he'll go woke. If he thinks he can accomplish this by going "anti-woke," he'll not hesitate in advancing the "anti-woke" agenda to bust up---and permanently disperse---the union. Manfred's ultimate agenda is to replace the players with robots and turn major league baseball into the first major all-crypto gambling enterprise on the planet.
Fuck those guys and the people helping support them. "Misinformation" is a rich name for it when the official line has been more wrong than the "misinformation" that is literally killing people. I would bet everything I own that bad government policy, advice, and information has killed hundreds of times more people during the pandemic than "misinformation". Cuomo himself killed thousands by stuffing the ill into nursing homes. Look at the increased suicide and overdose rates that have also skyrocketed. Crime is up, depression is up, and they haven't saved any lives.
I have read that in the former USSR, no one believed what the government said... Even if what the government said was true. Suppression of free speech leads inevitably to a situation where no one believes official statements even when they are true and urgent.
The recurring panic in corporate/gov-Dem mouthpiece media about Substack is actually hilarious. These clowns are totally impotent. The best they can do is complain. The beauty of Substack is that they have no leverage at. No advertisers to harass. No big tech partners to censor or demonetize. The piece quotes WaPo: "These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints . . ." Exactly! I PAY for content on Substack that accommodates my viewpoints. But I don't pay for misinformation. I pay for FREE SPEECH on topics I care about, including free speech and a free press as a topic. And there is nothing these fools can do about it. Substack's entire business model is based upon people like me paying subscription fees. Period. That's it! Substack has zero interest is censorship beyond that which can hurt them (i.e., defamation, obscenity, and such), because censorship can only cost them money in canceled subscriptions. You gotta love it!
There are still plenty of things to go after. DNS hosting. Substack's ISP/datacenter. DDOS protection. Payment processors.
Not sure if they're that desperate (yet), but I've seen it happen to several other sites with a lot less influence. Websites are a lot more fragile than people realize.
If only it were that simple. Even banks are starting to get in on it now. Some have started to restrict business with the firearms industry, for example.
A right wing internet commentator (who I don't think would mind being called that), Nick Fuentes, had his bank account seized and frozen by the FBI for alleged involvement in 1/6 without ever being convicted of anything. Done by the FBI, not the bank. I'm not sure if this was technically legal on their part, but it stinks of political retaliation. Point being, even bank accounts aren't safe.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I genuinely do think cryptocurrency is the way forward (I don't own any but I'm looking into it). And EVEN THEN, some exchange sites block contributions to certain addresses, so you have to transfer it to your own wallet and do it yourself.
But something anonymous like Monero getting widespread adoption would go a long way toward breaking the financial controls. I think that's why there's been a full court press against cryptocurrency from the left lately: There's no manager to see.
They're not, but they're being urged into the arena by many disparate parties. The more interesting question is why they have not begun "surveilling" crypto, which is nothing more than a pyramid scheme and a pseudo-financial system for facilitating criminal activity through money laundering. With a few monkey .jpgs thrown in to amuse the marks.
Hmm... having a problem replying to this. Concidence?
If it ate my last post I'll try to quickly resummarize: Most crypto is easy to track because it uses a public ledger. However Monero goes out of its way to obfuscate transactions. There are ongoing attempts to break it but it's usually considered more or less safe and anonymous if used correctly. It definitely beats the alternatives, at least.
I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency specifically, but I work in infosec and know 5 or 6 things about digital privacy.
@Bob-San, agreed. Glenn Greenwald’s piece a couple of months ago regarding Parlor being deplatformed is a good example. Another was the credit card companies/PayPal not accepting payments/donations to Julian Assange several years ago.
I suspect that sooner or later they are going to have to up the stakes in this gig. They have no other option, I don’t think. But as Matt opines above, it will only make their predicament worse.
This all speaks to a larger issue, all the political, economic, and social institutions are becoming increasing dysfunctional. This isn’t a recent phenomena but part of a trend where by the powers that be keep doubling down to prop them, only to make the situation worse.
Points taken. Certainly with internet infrastructure and payment processing there is vulnerability. But the larger Substack becomes, the less of a threat these vulnerabilities are, since the cost of doing so gets larger. The Parler case is different. It had massive vulnerability as a phone app, since Apple and Google could effectively kill it.
While y'all are right that Substack still has exposure to big tech and payment processors, the business model makes it much less vulnerable.
@jeff, I don’t disagree with you on the parlor/payments or the difficulties with scaling to size.
Though, I still think they aren’t going to up the stakes, regardless of size. What those stakes are, I can not predict (could rely on cancel culture to get of a ceo, for exampl) The recent Spotify folding under pressure on the joe Rogan issue is probably a good example and at minimum I suspect he will tone it down a bit.
Anyway, the trend is clear that censorship has Been increasingly over the last 10 years, big time.
It happened once with Parler. No reason it can't be done again. We're not just talking platform freedom anymore. If the people operating the underlying infrastructure boot you off it doesn't matter what moderation is or isn't happening on the site itself.
Don't forget Gab which then was smart enough to start over with its own servers etc. The payment processors have gone after them now too. I am supporting them just as a big FU to those trying to take them out. I call this spite purchasing and have increased it recently.
In what sense? It's Karens demanding to speak to the manager until they discontinue services to the site. "Do you REALLY want your company associated with these kinds of people? No? Then stop doing business with them or we complain on Twitter." There's no violence or threat of violence involved.
I don't like it, but I don't see how it's illegal, much less terrorism.
The only possible exception is DDOS protection. DDOS IS illegal. But asking Cloudflare (or whoever) to drop a site's DDOS protection isn't. It's not RIGHT, and it's a bit like complaining to a private security company to stop protecting a house in an area where police won't go: We all know what happens afterwards.
But public pressure campaigns aren't illegal and they aren't terrorism.
Apart from the Civil War which ended in 1865, I think we are living in the most dangerous times in regard to the continuance of our constitutional Republic. The Deep State/MIC/Intelligence Community and it’s alliance with the financialized economy of the big banks, corporate media, big tech, big pharma, big agriculture, etc., work incessantly to make sure we do not keep our Republic, as Franklin warned. These articles are very good at bringing things to light. We need to fight to retain our inalienable rights, the protection of the minority from a tyranny of the majority, and the right to remain at peace and not be suckered into endless wars that enrich the elites at the expense of everyone else.
Taibbi writes "Clean your own houses, and maybe you won’t have such a hard time being believed."
Truer words have not been spoken. Precisely the issue. Zero credibility. Zero trust.
The memory hole reminds of the Enron's, Madoff's, Foamed Run-ways, Robo-signing mills of foreclosure. Hard to build trust over hanging chads, weapons of mass destruction, Hurricane Katrina response, breaking the middle east into a thousand pieces of McDonaldland Green Zones, Bailing out the bankers while interest rates for retiree pensions go negative.
Free markets are the supposed answer but how does one explain the Sacklers' penance or Martin Skreli's markup of insulin? We are supposedly the greatest country on earth, but we cannot provide healthcare to all Americans nor can we deal with a public health emergency without politicization and incompetence reaching a 3rd grade level response (and that's an insult to 3rd graders). Matt gets this spot on.
Attacking free speech is easier for the PMC than doing any kind of self-reflection or admission that their agenda is possibly the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Powell Memo.
But when an anonymous Wikipedia editor claims a Nobel Prize winning virologist is "spreading misinformation"; and when previously respected journalists and doctors are banned from media platforms for citing inconvenient truths or just asking questions, I'm going to go hmmmm (and stay unvaxxed).
Look at it this way, the people who claim to be against fascism are the biggest fascists, the people who claim to be for freedom hate all your rights, the ones who claim to fight against hatred are the most hateful people on the planet, the ones who denounce your lack of national patriotism are globalists, the ones who want you to give up your guns ship entire arsenals to some of the shadiest governments on the planet, the ones shouting "support our troops" hate the enlisted, the brilliant military strategists have shown themselves to be incompetent idiots, the ones who complain about political "norms" constantly are the ones who are always violating them, the ones who whine about foreign governments censoring their citizens are the first to censor, and law enforcement keeps creating its own crimes. It's the authoritarian hypocrisy Olympics!
I might work on it a bit. I left out the hypocritical whiners on "democracy", "misinformation", "science", "capitalism" (aka modern monopolized crony capitalism), "privilege", "crime" and so much more!
"If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed."
This is a perfect summary of where we are with today's media. For years many of us have known the media lie. Now people are waking up to the fact the guardians of truth who check the media on our behalf (the 'fact checkers') lie through their teeth too.
Is it any wonder why Substack is growing so fast, and why people like me financially support Mike and many others? This is one of the only places we can find countervailing opinions and facts. And that's very sad.
“Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official.” 🙌🏻🙌🏻👊🏻
I clicked like but that isn't true. We now live in an inverted totalitarianism system with the oligarchy and the largest corporations in charge and our government's carrying water for them. Big tech actually knows what's in your mind better than you do and they exploit it for more than selling you stuff you don't need that you buy with money you don't have. They are connected at the hip with the security state; you might call them Big Brother. The largest construction projects in the US are Data center's; 10s of billions worth; what do you think that's all about? You don't have to be a nut to question W T F is going on and what's the end game.
"Big Tech actually knows what's in your mind better than you do..."
"You don't have to be a nut to question W T F is going on and what's the end game..."
1. Stuff that you don't need...
2. Stuff that you buy with...
3. Money you don't have...
If this isn't the end game, then what is? Or is it too frightening to lend words to?
A few possible explanations:
https://christopherfalcon.substack.com/p/technocratic-totalitarianism?r=ylx40&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
https://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/davos-man-and-open-borders/
YES!
That's pretty much it. Although I don't know about Them being joined at the hip; it seems to me that they're more like a headless octopus with triple-jointed tentacles. But they're definitely joined. No one should confuse the result with omniscience; the data point connections are probably generating more noise, more misinformation, and more opportunities for overly ambitious and extravagant misinterpretation than if the overseers were simply operating in an admitted vacuum of ignorance. A condition which is at least humbling.
Medicare is getting a substantial premium increase. Literally ~half the increase is for an Alzheimer's drug that A doesn't work and B where there was actually direct collusion between the FDA and the Big pharma corporation. Of course there's been regulatory capture since forever but this was a New low in criminality. I don't exaggerate, actual criminal behavior. Check it out.
I checked it out. Interesting. Seems the FDA has been under fire from
Alzheimer patients and their families and Alzheimer advocates to approve SOME therapeutical drug that treats the disease and get it on the market. Seems dubious, insofar the drug (Adhulem, produced by Biogen Pharma) has been widely panned by neurologists, and only slows the onset of Alzheimer symptoms. Biogen has reduced the cost of the drug by half. No evidence of criminality.
A few snippets pulled from the links (worth a read) below that give a rather concise overview:
"...U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra on Monday ordered Medicare to reassess a big premium increase facing millions of enrollees this year, attributed in large part to a pricey new Alzheimer's drug with questionable benefits....Becerra's directive came days after drugmaker Biogen slashed the price of its $56,000-a-year medication, Aduhelm, to $28,200 a year — a cut of about half."
"...There were previously no drugs cleared by the FDA that can slow the mental decline from Alzheimer’s, which is the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. The agency has approved Alzheimer’s drugs aimed at helping symptoms, not actually slowing the disease itself...Federal regulators have faced intense pressure from friends and family members of Alzheimer’s patients asking to fast-track aducanumab, but the road to regulatory approval has been a controversial one since it showed promise in 2016."
"...Becerra's move came after prominent Democratic senators urged the Biden administration to take immediate steps to cut rising drug costs for seniors. Much bigger curbs on drug prices promised by Democrats are hung up in Congress along with the rest of President Joe Biden's massive social agenda legislation. That bill would cap at $2,000 a year the amount Medicare recipients have to pay out-of-pocket for medicines, require drugmakers to pay the government rebates if they hike prices faster than inflation, and authorize Medicare to negotiate prices for certain medications."
"...Aduhelm is the first Alzheimer’s medication in nearly 20 years. It doesn’t cure the life-sapping condition, but the Food and Drug Administration determined that its ability to reduce clumps of plaque in the brain is likely to slow dementia in its earlier stages. However, many experts say that benefit has not been clearly demonstrated."
"...Call In The Detectives: With the temperature being turned up on the agency, Acting FDA Commissioner Dr. Janet Woodcock, who was not involved in the approval decision, has asked the Office of the Inspector General to conduct an investigation into her agency over the matter. Biogen says it welcomes a probe."
https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/medicare-told-reassess-premium-hike-alzheimers-drug-82178309
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/07/fda-approves-biogens-alzheimers-drug-the-first-new-therapy-for-the-disease-in-nearly-two-decades.html
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/new-details-emerge-drug-may-slow-alzheimer-s-disease-n1096561
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/aging/fda-approves-controversial-alzheimer-s-drug-biogen-n1269645
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/07/22/biogen-defends-controversial-alzheimers-drug-as-fd/
Try spending $15 bucks on Public Citizen to find out what really happens in the drug approval process. It's basically a corruption based system in so many ways. Science says no; management overrules, drug makes money for Wall Street which is why they're in business. The difference between this drug/scam is the direct collusion. It's very much like the Boeing 737 max; the FAA got in bed with the corporation to a greater degree than before. The drug has not proven efficacious. This is NOT unusual for New meds that get on the market. What is New is the level of corruption and direct participation of the regulator? in the process. In China, the regulator and the CEO would be in jail where they belong.
We've become numbly inured to the corruption that surrounds us in the U.S. The Chinese, on the other hand, are regularly reminded by their government that this sort of behavior quickly leads to a bunk bed in a Xinjiang gulag. So it's rare. On the other hand, you and I would be summarily dispatched to the gulag for little more than these two posts.
Interesting point about data centers. Technology= loss of freedom.
That would make a great motivational poster. (That's the cynic in me speaking.)
You can't interject principles into an amoral, and fundamentally nihilistic, social organizing system like neoliberalism. They are incongruent.
The new S & M from big tech; Surveillance and Manipulation!
Interesting linking disinformation and pornography. I imagine the cohort which most strenuously objects to misinformation is reliably indifferent to pornography, and almost certainly not responsible for its ubiquitousness. Conversely, it's a safe wager that the most ardent patrons of pornography are indifferent to disinformation and probably too distracted to care.
true...I'm betting the cohort screaming about their liberty to not take the vaccine are anti-choice when it comes to abortion.
To take a vaccine and to become pregnant are both choices (don't kid yourself into thinking otherwise) and to (potentially) die from a vaccine and to (affirmatively) kill an unborn baby are also choices. But the outcomes from those choices are quite different.
Pretty sure censoring porn is just as bad as censoring anything else.
I know it is - I look at what happened once Canada adopted the anti-porn laws Andrea Dworkin and Katherine MacKinnon got passed in Minnesota, only to have them struck down by US courts as "unconstitutionally overbroad".
Canada's Supreme Court said "True, but We Must PROTECT Women From the Evil Effects of Pornography!" Much of what they ended up censoring was either done by women for women, and a lot of the rest was only "porn" if you think ESQUIRE is beyond the pale, and PLAYBOY was obscene....
And you can't be bothered to parent? You'd censor everybody because you refuse to take responsibility for your own children, but expect society to do your job for you?
I don't have kids - though my former Partner and I volunteered with a number of Profoundly Gifted ones, as former Gifted Children ourselves who dealt with the educational system not knowing what to do with us. So I have little to no sympathy for parents who blindly trust institutions with their children.
It's people fucking, but in higher definition.
Incidentally, sex still leads to children. I'm sure more than a few of us were conceived in some relatively amorous conditions (November birthdays, anyone? Your conception date could very well be Valentine's Day).
Porn is like anything else: you can indulge, but take care to watch for blow back.
Also, you're probably playing some really shit video games by yourself.
Pun intended? :)
Lol no
“Fueling drug addiction”? So you’re saying that all porn stars are “drug addicts” (because why else would they fuck for money unless they were junkies, right?). Do you have any evidence that the rate of drug addiction is significantly higher in the porn industry than it is in, say, the restaurant business? Or any other business? I worked in restaurants for two decades and I can assure you that the majority of the people in that industry are either high, hungover or both.
I’m curious what you’re doing right now to stem the evil tide of drug addiction, since that’s what you really care about. “It isn’t porn; it’s the drugs that bother me.” That’s what you’re implying, correct?
Your argument doesn't even make any sense, unless you're so censorious you think the only book anybody should read is the Christianist Bible.
How about "weather porn"? Could use some now with the big snowstorm due to the NY City tomorrow!
I agree, weather porn has replaced "if it bleeds, it leads". That is especially true where I live in New England where people clear all the grocery store shelves of bread and milk at the hint of a serious snowstorm.
Real quick
Did they do a Sharknado where they all have COVID yet?
At least everyone knows that porn represents fantasy, not necessarily real-world experience. And the few who don't realize that, I pity their partners.
Probably not too many partners with the "true believers"
You sound like someone who is hung like a baby carrot - my porn tapes are legit!!!
Tapes?
A connoisseur is among us!
Tapes are the real thing, it's all "Fake Porn," now!
What? There’s nothing “fake” about the chick I just watched on xvideos getting the shit fucked out of her. That was real. Take your puritanical bullshit somewhere else.
Actually, it might not be very real. Porn is theatrical, and like any theater, it is composed of illusions, or as one pornographer said, 'What happens in the studio has almost nothing to do with what you wind up seeing in the movie.' In other words, it's not different from other artistic media. If you doubt this, check with some of the people who do the work.
Thank you, someone who understands my innocent comment. I cannot believe the responses I have received. Of course porn is fantasy, the makers of porn want to explore the fantasies of their consumers. I have no ill will towards porn or the consumers, however, I am aware of the effect that online porn has had on the sexual attitudes and expectations of young people and, like Barbie for young girls, it sets the bar pretty high. In any case, I certainly stepped in it.
Obviously, a lot of the performers are probably exaggerating their enjoyment; they’re actors, after all. But I’ve known a few porn stars who really did like the work. They just like being sleazy (and getting paid for it), which I’m all for. I’m always FOR women feeling more comfortable doing the things they like to do, free of judgement. And, in a case of life possibly imitating art, every chick I’ve fucked in the last twenty-five years or so (probably around 400 women) has definitely been dirtier and more awesome than before, like, 1995. That could maybe have something to do with me and being comfortable with my own personal kinks, it could have to do with a generation-and-a-half growing up with easy access to porn. I don’t know. I try not to think about it or analyze it too much. But it’s definitely fun.
Re: what I said about the the chick I just watched on xvideos getting fucked being “real,” specifically: what I meant was, there was definitely a big dick in her mouth and pussy. That was real. It happened. It’s not “disinformation” or whatever that dipshit said.
I think it’s funny that anybody could watch porn and think,”There’s no way that’s what sex is really like…” Maybe not for y’all, but I fuck like a pornstar haha!
I wasn't thinking how the actors felt about the work but rather that their behavior and mentality when they were working would be different -- more oriented toward its subsequent representation on the screen than toward getting pleasure out of it (or any other personal benefit).
So what you’re really saying is,”It’s not possible that the woman getting fucked in this porn clip is enjoying this sex as much as she seems to be; she’s just pretending.” Which, bullshit.
Great. Cool comment.
You just go online to yell at people? Really, take your pathetic habits to the street where you can stand on a street corner and hurl epithets.
Who’s yelling? There wasn’t a single exclamation point in my post. I’m laughing, actually. Laughing at you.
Do not confuse things. Porn is porn, do not like it do not "use" it whatever it means Censoring people questioning the official narratives is suppressing political dissent and freedom.
And Jew Hate too
Love you bio!
Sorry that as a human being I have opinions and the freedom to express them. I could continue by babbling incoherently about nothing, but you already covered that.
You might not ever hear back from the fact checkers with that assignment.
Hmm…. fact checker? A rich pool for pick up lines.
Great article. As brutal as your description of the Covid clown show was, you understated it. Masks do not work. At all. Children are being harmed. This is a dire issue. We have to end the forced masking of children 7 hours a day while adults go to the bar down the street and drink for hours without a mask. Children are at virtually no risk. And vaccines and masks do NoT stop Omicron spread. The level of lying on masks is stunning. We need to demand this end right now!
"Sweden decides against recommending COVID vaccines for kids aged 5-12" https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/sweden-decides-against-recommending-covid-vaccines-kids-aged-5-12-2022-01-27/
"Boris Johnson tells schools in England to end mask-wearing policy" https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/21/boris-johnson-tells-schools-england-end-mask-wearing-policy
Is that misinformation?
Facts which contradict the narrative are the most dangerous of all.
Funny how the only study(that I know of) came out of Bangladesh showing marginal effect of masks. Seems like an easy study to do
This bothers me, too. You would think, since people in some east Asian cities have been masking for decades during flu season, that there would be a wealth of information available as to the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of the practice. You would think that public health officials in the West would be able to draw on this data to support their mask mandates. Or to call the whole thing off as useless, or -- middle ground -- to say masking is perhaps marginally effective so have at it if you wish. But no, we must obey the diktats of the Fauci -- for he IS science -- even after he flip-flopped and lied about it early on.
They do call on studies that they have done themselves, which are so badly designed they are laughable. They are NEVER controlled, and are always small.
Indeed the Arizona study on school children done by the CDC...absolutely farcical.
Controlled studies are easy to do, and there have been dozens during the last hundred years. Every one showed that masks did not stop spread. Even the N95 masks do no good.
@Linda—Agreed. And isn’t the takeaway that the n95 mask filter up to .3 to .5 microns while the viruses is .1 microns?
Additionally, there is no way that some air is not going to leak through the edges of the mask. (I saw somebody quoted 18% leakage). I imagine you can put some duct tape around the edges but then you would be breathing probably more triple the amount of carbon dioxide than normal, which in turn will eventually make you gumpy. Or maybe this is the ultimate goal:-)
It is not only bad for your heart to keep breathing in your own CO2, but it makes you stupider. That's not a joke--the more CO2 you breathe in, the more intelligence you lose.
You are not “breathing in your own CO2” as the mask allows for air to be freely exchanged, as witnessed by the fact that the mask does not cut off your oxygen. The mask, if well sealed, filters out the virus that may be in the air. It does not filter out air, or prevent the expulsion of CO2. The more bad science you are immersed in, the more intelligence you lose.
I'm not going to get into it with you, John, but multiple scientific studies show you are wrong on both counts.
Agreed. We seemed to throw out everything we believed and knew about respiratory viruses during this pandemic
Here is an analysis of the data that shows both why the studies are hard to do and how the study itself showed masks don’t do anything. https://www.argmin.net/2021/12/01/unblinding/
Indeed, it is relatively straightforward, but not easy, to determine whether masks can directly affect the wearer, very difficult, if it is possible at all, to show second degree or indirect effects. Besides, results of all the studies are so close as to be statistically insignificant. The rate of infection is so low that samples sizes would have to be larger than realistically possible to perform a truly controlled study.
As far as I know, the Danish study was the closest to a decent study on primary control. Now I hear people betting on N95 as primary control, but I haven’t seen any trial studies. My own opinion is that the rational behind “my mask protects you” was lost when people realized the primary transmission was aerosols. Every time I look for studies on masks now, all I find is modeling or filter efficiency studies.
There are lots of controlled studies, and even meta-analyses of studies. The CDC's own guidance for masks with the flu virus is that they don't do any good. The flu virus virions are larger than COVID virions. Both are airborne. Ergo, mask wearing is ludicrous. It was always ludicrous. They knew that in 1918, when they did a study comparing two cities, one of which masked and the other didn't. Flu spread at exactly the same rate. There have been dozens of studies since on masking, and they all show the same thing.
Indeed, all these studies show there is no statistical difference in infection rates between a masked population and an unmasked population. The whole thing is government sponsored silliness.
Oh well, when I go to work with COVID patients I still opt for an N95 and the rest of the PPE. So far I have been lucky not to get COVID given the apparent uselessness of said masks. I am reluctant to wander the ward without one. Would you go maskless in the COVID ward and am I just superstitious?
I hope you are just an orderly because this comment shows a lack of critical thinking unbefitting of a health professional. You do know that the vast majority of health professionals have caught Covid, presumably many from their patients despite their use of N95s. Maybe you do have a magic mask.
Well, I would presume you would want to follow the science, and as a health professional you would know that virions are much smaller than the weave of surgical or N95 masks, and since COVID is airborne, any mask that does not block virions or allows breathing would not contain them. Ergo...the fact that no controlled study has ever shown a benefit. But you'd know that, right, since you've read the studies? You do know that "I've always worn a mask and I haven't gotten COVID, so masks must prevent COVID" is not a legitimate study, right?
Same holds true for ALL your coworkers, None have gotten COVID?
I don’t know. Do you think ivermectin has cured somebody when they get Covid, take ivermectin, and feel better the next day?
Here's something you might want to read. Links to hundreds of studies. https://palexander.substack.com/p/masks-for-children-the-evidence-indicates
You have to take the mask off at some point, even an N-95. Then "Bang" goes that theory.
True, although I think you should be able to see a difference in the rate of transmission between groups if the sizes were large enough. Quite a few people in any group would never be around people outside their household without a mask on. It’s obvious at this point that everybody is getting exposed.
Maybe this is an issue of the definition of "mask." Here is a recent study from the Max Plank Instutute in Germany that shows FFP2 masks are highly effective.
https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protection
Modeling.
Substack newsletter idea for you: Writes "Chinese Spitting: Ancient Folkway, or Crude Habit Just For the Hell of It"
This is a dangerous false claim. Masks (good ones) work are very effective at reducing your chance of getting infected. Children don't understand the consequences of their or their parents' actions, unlike well informed adults.
Well informed adults know that there is NO reason to mask children.
Those not in the Corporacratic Covid Cult.
You are completely wrong. N95 masks have been mandated and complied with in Germany and Austria for a year, but their cases are surging. There is ZERO correlation between masking and low case numbers.
Even N95 masks have to be worn and used correctly to have proper effect. And replaced often. If that's not done - and a lot of people simply will not do it properly - then effectiveness is poor.
Here, let me translate for you, since I understand a little Arrogant Butthole myself. "If only THOSE people could and would do it right, then this whole virus thing would vanish. The poor, the ignorant, the unwashed, if only the goddamn PROLES would just do as they are told by their betters," you patronizingly explained in Upper Buttholese, "why then this whole pesky virus would vanish. Indeed." Then you sniffed and said, "Oh, pissboy, bring my bucket!"
Sorry I came across that way to you. However, I was only pointing out a fact. N95 masks have to be used properly to work, and most people won't take the time to learn how.
Sorry I came across so extra snarky. I think we're all a bit jumpy nowadays. Cheers and good tidings!
What is the point of discussing if most average people know how to wear N95s correctly in a society where only maybe 10-20% of airplane passengers are even bothering with KN95/N95s?
Amen bro
so the old Socialism joke? They're just doing it wrong?
A nurse told me this on Sunday, February 28, 2020.....seems to still be true on Friday, January 28, 2022. I remember the date because it's the last time we were all together! Masks are a joke and an entire generation of children will have suffered for no valid reason.
You may be right, but just as a casual observation, I have been wearing a mask in public for the better part of the last two years. In that time I have not contracted a virus of any kind. That could just be coincidence, but I don't remember ever going even six months without getting something before this and I'm 64. My wife and my daughters and their families all have had the same experience. Maybe we've just been really lucky...
Do you carry a tiger protecting rock? Because I would bet good money that you haven't been attacked by a tiger.
Correlation is not causation.
More casual observation: I have, like you, mostly worn masks in public since early 2020. I have not had reason to suspect I caught COVID, but I've caught colds and flus and other bugs in that time.
I did go maskless this past summer on a visit to friends in places with higher COVID rates than my home area, among mostly mask-free people, and caught zip.
Earlier, friends of mine caught COVID despite being masked among the masked.
It's pretty clear mileages vary, and masks are no panacea.
Have you been tested to determine whether you're immune to COVID? Because one of the biggest problems with this whole mess is that the propaganda has deliberately led people to envision the virus as worse than smallpox and the Black Plague combined. In fact, while it's not pleasant, it's usually no worse than any other bad cold or nasty flu. I know, because I've now had both major versions.
The fact that for many a bout of COVID can be totally asymptomatic has been carefully underplayed to reinforce the demand for masking and social distancing and running to get your increasingly useless vaccine boosters while saving up to buy more test kits when the government stops providing freebies. People like you and me (I just turned 74) are warned in tones of doom we're at risk of death if we don't obey.
Nevertheless, if you want to be a target for rabid hysterical condemnation, just tell people you've had it and it's not that bad. With the media pounding on "death tolls" every day for two years, the public conception is that anyone who got COVID was doomed. Now, as it becomes clearly that just ain't so, we're switching to the horror of "long COVID".
And now Pfizer is lobbying to make an annual COVID vaccine mandatory. The Great COVID Con marches on. #FollowThe💰
I have had the same experience. Barely anything that qualifies as a cold in the last 2 years and never sick once. On the other hand, I also haven't been inside an office since March 2020, an airplane since 2019, or hanging out in crowded spaces inside or outside since then too. But I have continuously been with close friends and family - unmaksed.
While masks do help in stopping the spread of regular colds and such like, that we are physically interacting with far fewer people than before likely also plays a role.
That is very similar to my own experience; in fact, I got one of the last boxes of N95 masks on Amazon (that I could find, late Feb 2020) and used those. It could be the mask, luck, natural immunity, or even having an asymptomatic infection. Who knows?
COVID May yet turn out to be a nothing burger; less than a million deaths in a country of 330 millions over two years, mostly seniors OR it may mutate into the end of life as we know it scenario. The US killed millions in Vietnam and Korea alone and of course many more died in the few years of WW I & 2 and society survived and moved on. I believe that the likely scenario here will be the same but it's not beyond the range of possiblity that this could end society as we know it.
This number, around a million deaths, is no longer valid per the CDC's revision downward based on clarification of 'Died WITH Covid' vs 'Died FROM Covid'. The new 'Died FROM Covid' is closer to 400K.
Who knows what the truth is? Even with a worse case scenario it doesn't start to compare to cardio vascular or cancer or even the medical industrial system over time. Yes Virginia, the medical system is dangerous to your health; kill's hundreds of thousands annually. The number three killer according to the AMA.
More misinformation & lies.
Out of the ~900000 deaths attributed to COVID the CDC says 90% of these the underlying cause of the death was the virus. For the other 10%, COVID was the contributing cause.
Please try to stay up to date. Stale, out-dated propaganda does you nor anyone else any good. Try to do better.
Medical personnel have been wearing masks in hospitals for more than a hundred years for nothing? I find that hard to believe.
As a surgeon, masks and gloves in a surgical setting are worn primarily for preventing the spread of blood borne pathogens, not aerosolized viruses unless the blood itself becomes aerosolized through the use of high speed hand pieces and such. We are talking much different particle sizes for blood bound viruses that make masking effective, and Covid particle size which really does make most masking that I see Americans doing a totally silly enterprise. But of course nobody seems to want to get medical information from doctors these days.
I’m an internist.
Worked in a TB hospital in Russia for about a year surrounded by MDRTB patients and wore a mask every day I was there, along with all the other doctors I worked with. Doctors have been wearing masks in TB hospitals for close to a century at this point, and no, it’s not because of “aerosolized blood particles”, because we’re not doing surgery while we’re on our rounds. Yes, some of our patients hemoptysize, but it’s a pretty unlikely event during an average clinical day and not the reason we wear masks, LOL.
You’re welcome to work in a TB hospital yourself without a mask, I’m certainly not going to try to convince you otherwise because you sound as though you have all the correct information already and don’t need any advice from me.
But as for me, I’ll continue with my superstitions if I go back and work there.
You may be a doctor, even a good one, but you have angry opinions and clearly did not read what I wrote without prejudging or understanding it. First sentence I wrote: “in a surgical setting,” not “in a Russian TB hospital.” You should also read the rest of what I wrote because it is nuanced far more than your sledgehammer response. I read a ton; have two doctorates; treat patients everyday; travel to treat people on multiple continents charitably every year; and readily admit that I have far more questions than answers on this and many other medical topics. Anyone who thinks they have all the answers scares me tremendously. Unlike you did me, I refuse to insult you with an off-handed derogatory comment.
A meta analysis study in 2015 published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine concluded “overall there is a lack of substantial evidence to support claims that facemasks protect either patient or surgeon from infectious contamination. More rigorous contemporary research is needed to make a definitive comment on the effectiveness of surgical facemasks.” And that, in a peer-reviewed journal, sums up the spectrum of facemask research and knowledge to that date.
"...in a surgical setting".
That's a key distinction he made there, doc. And a pertinent one, considering that doctors don't *normally* go around wearing masks outside of surgery "for hundreds of years", except when in the presence of an airborne pathogen. Like say, TB, and yes, Covid.
"We are talking much different particle sizes for blood bound viruses that make masking effective, and Covid particle size which really does make ***most masking that I see Americans doing*** a totally silly enterprise"
You're really trying to pick a fight when none is there to be had.
"...because you sound as though you have all the correct information already and don’t need any advice from me."
Yes, people generally don't want or need unsolicited advice, based on imagined scenarios no one was talking about, that conveniently allow that person to flout their completely unrelated experience. Thank you for your heroism, though. [golf clap]
"You’re welcome to work in a TB hospital yourself without a mask."
No, I'm going to guess that if he were working in a hospital that specialized in treating a *highly* dangerous airborne pathogen, he'd wear PAPR hood, and not a mask, based on NIH and CDC guidance. For those who might be wondering, "why not just a mask"? Well, as per those same guidelines, "• Some surgical masks *might* offer respiratory protection compared with not wearing a mask. Filtering facepiece respirators offer *more* respiratory protection than surgical masks, and powered air purifying respirator (PAPRs) hoods offer the best protection for most health-care settings".
Now, as for the the debate you *think* you're having, that "more protection" isn't really quantified, except as it related to "might offer". Whether that "more" is 1%, 20%, or even 50% (more than "might"), they sure as hell don't (can't) tell us.
"...I’ll continue with my superstitions if I go back and work there"
Seriously, you either responded to the wrong comment or you're putting words in his mouth, that one must seriously consider whether they're your own, subconsciously.
FYI, I never believe anyone who claims they are a doctor and then pontificate upon their alleged personal experience. BTW TB is caused by bacteria, not viruses, and it has not been a serious public health factor for 50-70 years (except as a secondary infection with HIV patients) and is almost exclusively treated with an ambulatory model, not in hospitals, because extended treatment in a nosocomial environment has been implicated as a key factor in the spread of multi-drug resistant strains.
Of course, a real doctor would have known that.
As Matt implies, some doctors have been doing their best to discredit each other.
That does indeed make the conversation complicated, especially for people without medical training. It is unfortunate maybe, but as Matt also writes, each person deserves to say and write what they please. This is also why it’s important to evaluate the evidence that people have for their opinions and advice. If the issue, as with Covid, was a simple one, we would know it because the evidence would be clear and there wouldn’t be any public debate.
I do believe I'll listen to that.
Masks worn in hospitals are fitted to the face. They are also replaced frequently. They are worn in sterile rooms. They are accompanied by frequently replaced gloves. A mask that is not fitted is at best a prophylactic for a virus whose agents of infection are the size of Covid-19's. Frequently hand washing and room sanitation have a higher efficy than a standard paper or cloth mask.
All very good points. Wow, you read intellectual authors and what-do-you-know - lots of intelligent comments by a nice group of intelligent readers. Much different from so many threads I’ve read elsewhere!
If masks do exactly nothing, then why wear them at all then?
To show your allegiance to the tribe.
To virtue signal.
To conceal your identity on the next looting spree.
Because they hide my smokers wrinkles even though I’ve never smoked… so sunglasses and mask, I’m 39!!!?
They are not required in most situations in my State. I keep a paper mask in my purse inside a ziploc baggie. If someone requests I wear one I will put that one on out of respect for their request and replace my 'emergency' face mask later. The used one is thrown away.
People are wearing them now, for the most part, because they have been terrified by Mass Media reporting that is frankly incorrect. Numerous scientific studies are finally surfacing that prove that.
As already pointed out to you, they prevent the spread of blood borne contaminants as well as preventing spit, hair, mucus, and other debris from falling off the face and into the patient.
There are more transmittable diseases in the world than C19.
So?
My response was to Adderholdt as to why masks are worn in hospital settings despite them not preventing transmission of aerosolized virus. I'm not sure why it doesn't appear that way.
Surgical masks are worn to stop spit i.e. droplets. COVID is aerosol. Surgical masks do nothing to stop aerosol.
Prove it. Else you are making this up to suit your apparent anti-masking agenda.
Not any more of a false claim than yours? It is nuanced. Multiple MDs, psychiatrists, social workers, special needs advocates, parents, etc etc have spoken out and shown evidence, pointed at studies etc, that the harms of masking our children HEAVILY outweigh the risks... you just don't see/hear them in the news as their voices are supressed.
ESPECIALLY in this age of Omicron, cloth masks are virtually useless. N-95s must be fitted correctly, and then, yes, they may help a bit.... but even then, some virus particles WILL through. I'm an RN who's been working for 43 years... worn lots of masks over the years...
Masking children with "good masks" for coronavius is viciously cruel, and totally NOT evidence-based.
Why is everyone in operating theater always wearing masks?
Would you you want them not to wear them when you are being operated on?
I do agree the issue is nuanced.
No need to take my word for it... A quick googel search of NIH studies will give you plenty of discussion on this, ie: "Surgical face masks (SFMs) provide a physical barrier between bacteria of oropharyngeal and nasopharyngeal origin and an open patient wound. Wearing a SFM in the OR is one of many long standing preventative practices, yet controversy exists as to the clinical effectiveness of SFMs in reducing the frequency of SSIs."
In other words, surgical masks are for droplet precautions, and there are even still questions about how much they prevent infections in the OR. Moot point for Covid19, which is aerosol-transmittle.. surgical masks basically ineffective.
I think it intersteing that, as a non-medical person, you think of the patient side first...while as an RN, I think, "I don't want someone's bodily fluids splashing on my face!" It goes both ways.. LOL.. Just an intersting POV.
Thanks, Grace. Since asking you the question, I went to the link posted below by @Mitch Barrie. It addresses the issue directly.
According to my orthopedic surgeon, the surgical masks are worn in ORs to prevent sweat and saliva from their speech enter the part of the body being carved up. That’s it.
Bingo! Someone gets it. It’s why they’re called “surgical masks.” As Fauci & others explained early on, the virus is carried in minute droplets, which few masks will stop, particularly not conventional masks that everyone is compelled to wear.
Read the fine print on the package. From the 3M Corporation: “This mask will not prevent illness.” The corporate hegemon speaks truth on occasion. It’s all part of the Global COVID Kabuki Theatre. Some truly enjoy playing their part; others not so much.
Just walked out of Lowe’s where I was asked to mask up… my CO state and county have no mask mandates… I’m vaxxed and boostered ( with some weird side effects) , so I’m just saying NO. 🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️
They wear (sterile, one time use) masks to prevent bits of skin etc falling from their faces onto the open wound they created. There have been studies prior to 2020 showing masks don't prevent the spread of airborne respiratory viruses like the flu. Iirc, they studied nurses, who can be way more counted on to follow proper mask procedure than a general population being forced to do so.
Asked and answered. See Wanderman's (a surgeon) post herein.
Thank you! And suddenly Biden talks about distributing N95s like they were just invented…. Ever used a spray gun to paint a room, sand drywall or refinish furniture?? I’ve been using N95s for such projects for 30 some years……. So when COVID started, I made a bee line for Home Depot and bought N95s for my immediate family … I stopped mentioning it because I was ridiculed for being paranoid and causing unnecessary panic. Even my own GP gave me an eye roll…..so there’re still unopened in the front hall closet and now, they’re the must have standard…..
I did the same thing and got lots of eyerolls and ridicule....from the same people who are now wearing a mask as they drive alone in their car.
I think you know that most people wearing masks in cars are simply people so “not bothered” by the masks that they don’t even notice they have them on and simply forget to take them off.
But of course in today’s world everything is a conscious political act. I’m sure you’ve never accidentally continued to wear your hat in the winter while driving in your car, LOL.
Yup…. Common sense is no longer common….
But that’s partly the point… who cares if kids get covid? This is safety -ism to the extreme. It just breeds paranoid asthmatic pussies who think trauma is anything that makes them feel bad.
Kids are supposed to get sick. That’s how our immune systems develop.
Basic science in the schools please.
What? Have children learn how to think instead of simply obeying what they are told by the authority of SCIENCE!
"Paranoid asthmatic pussies" are the one cohort that ought to be made to wear masks all the time, pandemic or no pandemic. Just my opinion.
Haha maybe so. I’m not even against the US becoming a masking culture like Japan. Just don’t force it on me or my kids. I read about a girl with downs had a mask rubber banded to her face when she got off the bus
Yes, lets restrict the breathing of people who have problems breathing.
Please can you drop the hysteria? If Covid the cow’s claim is arguably false it is not dangerous. It is an opinion. Even when statements might be false, they are not dangerous. Suppression of opinion, now that is dangerous. Your point would be stronger if you left off the first sentence. We are all sick of “the sky is falling” rhetoric.
We had children in schools for two years wearing cloth and surgical masks the CDC now says are essentially worthless against Covid transmission without any major outbreaks in schools. So why do they need N95 masks now? They did fine with essentially nothing.
Additionally, Germany and Austria mandated N95 masks for the past year and it made absolutely no difference. Cases are surging. Their numbers are identical to their neighbors.
In fact, there is ZERO correlation between high mask compliance and low case numbers. None.
They did fine with literally nothing:
https://www.npr.org/2020/06/24/882316641/what-parents-can-learn-from-child-care-centers-that-stayed-open-during-lockdowns
Throughout the pandemic, many child care centers have stayed open for the children of front-line workers — everyone from doctors to grocery store clerks. YMCA of the USA and New York City's Department of Education have been caring for, collectively, tens of thousands of children since March, and both tell NPR they have no reports of coronavirus clusters or outbreaks.
-------
They are talking about March 2020 in NYC, before masks and when immunity was at its lowest. No coronavirus clusters or outbreaks.
Thats from June 2020, 2 variants and an eternity ago. Not terribly helpful
Meanwhile, 1000 children have died from COVID.
Yes, now covid is much more mild.
If youre vaccinated.
That doesn’t justify censoring speech.
And Israel’s record vax#s and masks now has the highest rate of Covid.
Prove it.
Meanwhile, a little science for ya - https://www.pnas.org/content/118/4/e2014564118
"Leffler et al. (29) used a multiple regression approach, including a range of policy interventions and country and population characteristics, to infer the relationship between mask use and SARS-CoV-2 transmission. They found that transmission was 7.5 times higher in countries that did not have a mask mandate or universal mask use, a result similar to that found in an analogous study of fewer countries (30). Another study looked at the difference between US states with mask mandates and those without, and found that the daily growth rate was 2.0 percentage points lower in states with mask mandates, estimating that the mandates had prevented 230,000 to 450,000 COVID-19 cases by May 22, 2020 (31)."
LOL IF masks work at all, all they do is extend the duration of the crisis. Do you think those cases are STILL prevented a year and a half later?
What's a few deaths if we can shorten the "crisis" eh?
You're not stopping deaths in the first place. That's what people like you don't understand. You're just piling covid reaction deaths on top of covid deaths and pretend you're the moral ones.
Watch people in public wearing their masks for 30 seconds and you understand why masks are worthless. People are CONSTANTLY fucking with them. Remember how rule #1 is DON'T TOUCH YOUR FACE???
It takes even less time for children.
Aside from the whole Not Stopping the Virus thing, a huge problem with masks is the failure from a human perspective. Not everyone is going to worry as much as you do about the virus. And if they don't worry as much as you, they won't take your measures to defeat it as seriously.
There is a reason they refer to this as a collective action problem.
Exactly. Science can inform but it can't make decisions.
As an aside, science is at it heart a moral exercise. Anyone can collect data, but a person needs to make the decision to both share that data and to listen to other, conflicting data.
And those are ethical choices, which stem from humility and a moral decision to reach for the truth.
You're speaking to the heart of the article I'm working on right now :) I'll let you know when it's done :)
I think you are wrong.
https://hectordrummond.com/the-face-mask-faq/
AMAZING link. TY
I urge you to seek out a Holocaust survivor and ask them what they think of mass mask wearing. I encountered an elderly Jewish couple in the grocery store… their words were chilling.
You encountered a Jewish couple in the grocery store? How did you guys get to talking? And this “elderly Jewish couple” (who are apparently holocaust survivors? How “elderly” were they? They must’ve been toddlers during the Holocaust) equated wearing masks with Auschwitz? Really? That is chilling… It’s bullshit, but chilling nonetheless. Cool story.
What?
Mass fear mongering… controlling the population.
Okay, well, the Holocaust was a little more than “mass fear mongering” and “controlling the population.” Tell us what they said, exactly. How did you guys even strike up a conversation? Some random old-ass couple just started chatting you up in the grocery store about how wearing masks and the Holocaust are one and the same?
You’re a liar. You never “encountered a Jewish couple” who survived the Holocaust in a grocery store. And wearing a mask isn’t even in the same universe as the Holocaust. Saying bullshit like that is insulting to anybody who has even a cursory understanding of the Holocaust (which you clearly don’t), never mind how insulting it is to actual Holocaust survivors AND the six million people who were killed in concentration camps.
Only a complete moron would equate the Holocaust with mask-wearing.
I did. Many of them. Thanks for the suggestion.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/anti-vaxxers-and-the-holocaust/
Haven’t seen that study for viruses
What is likely much more effective in preventing serious infections (because at this point we're all just gonna have to get COVID to really slow it down) - in the people who already have a very small chance of developing severe infections - is supplementation with vitamin C & D, quercetin & zinc, NAC, etc...
Optimizing immune health, in those that have reasonably healthy immune systems, seems obvious... but we also live in an over-medicated society in which pills and shots have supplanted nutrition in the minds of people as paths to health.
Humans lived largely outdoors since time immemorial...
When humans began living largely indoors their exposure to direct sunlight was dramatically reduced, and vitamin D levels suffered.
Mass vitamin D deficiency has probably been responsible for a variety of human diseases for a long time, as vitamin D is intimately linked with immune regulation and health.
There are decades of science into vitamin D levels and respiratory viruses, cancers, etc... but this science has been ignored, downplayed, trivialized, undermined, dismissed, etc.
The largest revelation for me in this time of COVID is that the science supporting mass vitamin D supplementation as a mitigator of respiratory disease has been there, and known... but the development/implementation of new medical technologies, as usual, was the (more lucrative) option chosen.
Classic pseudoscientific nonsense. Unless you are suffering from Scurvy, Vitamin C isn't going to cure anything. If you arent vaccinated, you are an order of magnitude more likely to die from COVID than if you arent, and no amount of vitamin magic will change this. Please stop spreading misinformation.
Do you think the antibodies you have are coming from inside the shots themselves?
"In previous studies, it is possible to verify that levels below 20 ng/ml of Vitamin D in blood serum are associated with a lower antibody response in viral infections [11-13], however, there is already evidence that the low level of Vitamin D is related to the appearance from autoimmune diseases, for example, systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis and type I diabetes [14].
Vitamin D plays a role in innate and adaptive immunity [8] as it is essentials for the regulation of human genes and stimulates the production of catelicidin which increases the production of HCAP-18 and thus improves the function of cells such as macrophages and immunity innate. This relationship is associated between Vitamin D levels [12,13], for example, the expression of increased catelicidins and the intracellular death of Mycobacteria Tubercolosis and yet [2], there is an inverse association between low Vitamin D levels and increased infections in the upper respiratory tract [2,14,15] by flu viruses. Let’s remember that Vitamin D also influences the development of adaptive immunity by inhibiting the proliferation of B cells with differentiation and secretion of immunoglobulins that will supply the proliferation of T cells and thus results in a more pro-inflammatory response change from TH1 to anti-inflammatory TH2 cells [4,12]."
https://www.heighpubs.org/hjcv/ijcv-aid1010.php#:~:text=Vitamin%20D%20plays%20a%20role%20in%20innate%20and%20adaptive%20immunity,as%20macrophages%20and%20immunity%20innate.
(Also, please stop using the term "misinformation" as an excuse for your being too lazy to actually look up some of the science yourself... )
Today in the WSJ they say of the CDC that “ It was late to understand that the virus spreads via tiny air particles, not larger droplets, which meant the CDC was slow to recommend masks. Then last summer, before the Delta variant emerged, it suggested people stop wearing masks.”
This is all backwards. Aerosols are NOT stopped by masking. While they are trying to unscramble the mistakes of the CDC, they add another. Masks are not working and need to be ended.
This is flat out incorrect - KN95 and N95 masks are still very effective; however, cloth masks are not as effective against Omicron yet still better than nothing.
Not true. They are not sized for children and children are not advised to wear then but the WHO. Germany and Austria have mandated these for all for a year and have the same surge in cases as their neighbors with Omicron. The way people actually wear these makes them as ineffective as cloth and surgical masks. The real world data from place to place shows no better results.
N95s if fitted properly at all times MAY provide some protection although right now that is still folklore. But let's say it is the case, do you really think children are going to wear a properly fitted N95 all day? In this age of Omicron, said to be as infectious as measles, just a short time without the protection of a tight-fitting properly worn N95 leaves the alleged effectiveness almost nil. Oh and btw, please cite your source (i.e., a RCT or equivalent) for your statement that masks work. You won't be able to because there are none.
https://ianmsc.substack.com/p/every-comparison-shows-masks-are
Infected with what? Colds?
"Dangerous claim"....."consequence of their actions"....."well informed"... LMFAO
If kids have been wearing worthless clothes masks for two years without major outbreaks in schools, what is the justification for N95 masks in schools?
The argument is the same as for communism: "It's not that masking/vax/lockdowns don't work it's that they weren't implemented correctly."
Thanks for the non-sequitur.
Thats a silly question - because nothing has changed in 2 years O_O
The CDC has changed its stance on cloth and surgical masking. So that has changed. Based on that, and the fact there were few outbreaks in schools compared to community surges, there is not justification to improve mandatory N95 masking.
That said, if parents want their kids masked in N95 masks, they should feel quite safe since everyone is vaxxed and their child is masked.
Within 24 hours, NYT, SF Chronicle, Atlantic and NPR publish arguments against mandating kids masking. The liberal bastion has been breached.
NYT: https://tinyurl.com/546c94da
Chronicle: https://tinyurl.com/2p962y8z
Atlantic: https://tinyurl.com/28xhk6hb
NPR: https://tinyurl.com/ppeh2nbh
I pray you don't have children!
I agree. This is the most urgent task. Our research team cited over 200 clinical studies showing how masks injure the wearer. Volume 1 of PDMJ.org We need to stop the forced suffocation of kids.
I’m sorry, but I must’ve missed that news story about how a kid “suffocated” from wearing a mask. Can you link me to that story, please?
Part 3 of the link I cited above gives evidence of the hypoxic and hypercapnic damage, aka suffocation, of mask-wearing, both clinical and laboratory evidence from peer reviewed studies.
I think his article brings up the entire opposite point - that masks have worked in the past and the misinformation around them NOT working at all, purported by both Fauci and his Canadian equivalent Dr. Tam, originates from the start of the pandemic. There's more nuance now and variants than the start of the pandemic, but very few people wear the suggested N95 and the ones who do, a significant portion wear it incorrectly making it useless.
How are children harmed by wearing masks when in larger groups? I think you're making a false equivalency between the parents going against obvious recommendations and kids being forced to follow. The parents behaviour can be wrong as well - doesn't our reality kind of undermine the entire use of masks and make any data nonsensical? In different regions worldwide when restaurants get more lax policies on masks, cases go up and you are acting like that's a grand coincidence? Isn't that misinformation for you to make a universal assumption? You're also generalizing pretty far, and making quite the eye-opener, when you say that children are being harmed by masks, but at virtually NO risk of COVID.
Comparing vaccines and masks is fundamentally wrong, they have different functions. One is to limit the amount of spread of recycled air in public, a mask, and the other is to prevent serious effects of COVID, a vaccine. Even comparing two mask wearers is folly, even if they have the same type, because they interact with it differently and may wear it in ineffective ways. Yes, vaccines can limit spread, but that's because it mutes the effects and kills off the virus - it still physically spreads it just gets dealt with.
Caring about wearing a mask is an individualistic stand point on freedom, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it's such a minor limitation that it doesn't really bother most people so they don't give a fuck. We accept limits on freedom all the time, especially children who are literally forced to do 99% of things in their life and have no concept of freedom in a society. We indoctrinate them to societal norms, denial of any semblance of relativism, to our made up concepts of universality in an institution for 12+ years - and you're worried about the influence of a mask? Lol Matt's articles are fantastic, but the comment section and their interpretation always concern me.
Masks do not work. Masks delay speech in children. Breathing in a mask for 7 hours is bad for children. Especially children with learning disabilities or asthma, etc. breathing in a mask is harmful during sports. Sitting outside alone is harmful. There is zero correlation between high mask compliance and low case numbers. The most masked places have the same Omicron surges as the least masked. There are no studies that show strong evidence of masking children significantly impacting case numbers. Schools all over the world have been open for a year or more without mask mandates and have not seen surges in cases. If kids wore non-effective cloth masks for two years without significant surging cases in schools, they got along fine with nothing. There is no justification for far more restrictive N95 masks 7 hours a day. That’s absurd. Children are at very low risk. There is little or no benefit from N95 masks for schools. And when will it end? Masking for flu? For Covid every winter? An entire generation of children are being harmed and missing out of their childhoods. It’s disgusting that people minimize this.
What evidence do you have children are being harmed? Is it worse than death?
You keep repeating this nonsense with no evidence. Here's another meta-study for you about mask effectiveness:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33431650/
Sitting outside alone is my only activity other than sitting inside alone. I like them both. If you're harming yourself sitting outside alone, perhaps your sitting-outside-alone technique requires some buffing. Or perhaps updating.
Sitting outside alone has changed a great deal since it first caught on as a viable-- if mind-cauterizing--activity several hundred thousand years ago. There are many excellent YouTube videos dedicated to safe sitting outside alone, best practices of sitting outside alone, and even how to best think, while sitting outside alone, of the many activities you could engage in with other people if you weren't always sitting outside alone. Doing your best not to harm yourself.
Schools on the East Coast with extremely cold conditions have kids sitting outside and social distancing to eat their lunches. There are many articles about this.
Here is what we should actually be doing...
1) Increase availability of early treatments
2) Stop asymptomatic testing
3) End contact tracing
4) End mask mandate
5) End vax passports
6) No school closures
7) End 10 day quarantine
8) Remove plastic barriers
9) Stop scrubbing surfaces
10) Under 65, return to normal!
Sitting outside alone is “harmful”? How? What does that even mean?
"Masks do not work. Masks delay speech in children. Breathing in a mask for 7 hours is bad for children. Especially children with learning disabilities or asthma, etc. breathing in a mask is harmful during sports." These are opinions, not a fact and there exists no universal mandate. I have asthma and am fine in a mask. I'm confused on why you say "Sitting outside alone is harmful." It's not even a coherent line of thought.
There is a correlation between high masks and low cases - in fact it's pretty substantial. "The most masked places have the same Omicron surges as the least masked" This is blatant misinformation, did you even read the article? Do you understand that saying a statement that you feel is true, doe not make it universally true?
"Schools all over the world have been open for a year or more without mask mandates and have not seen surges in cases" I seriously challenge you to show some actual evidence. Have they been testing students at the same rate as everyone else? The last year the kids have been out of school for half the time, there wasn't Omicron or delta a year ago. Your observations are very biased.
"There are no studies that show strong evidence of masking children significantly impacting case numbers" are there studies showing they harm? Has there even been any reasonable amount of time to conduct such a study?"If kids wore non-effective cloth masks for two years without significant surging cases in schools, they got along fine with nothing." Kids died, what are you talking about?? A lot ended up sick or with "Long COVID" and severe impacts long term. You're actually being delusional.
"There is little or no benefit from N95 masks for schools. And when will it end? Masking for flu? For Covid every winter? An entire generation of children are being harmed and missing out of their childhoods. It’s disgusting that people minimize this. " What future are you creating to delude yourself? How are an entire generation missing out on their childhood? You mean some creation of childhood that you have in your head? People are evolutionary and adaptive, such a brain dead take. The kids are fine, they will adjust just like previous generations before them did when their parents took away various freedoms. If you're actually this worried about the children, and I mean this from a logical view, you really should be out there everyday protesting for an end to child labour and sex trafficking - but instead they are just the ends to a mean for an argument against masks. It's disgusting that people take advantage of them like that.
Listen, you can totally be anti-mask, that's cool. But at least be consistent and GENUINE about your argument. This whole "Think of the children" thing is an ethically disingenuous argument. Just say you don't like them and you don't think your kid should have to listen to the state on it. Be based. It's way more honest. No need for bullshit.
You are not up to date on the science. There are many studies showing speech being delayed. Many showing the lack of efficacy of masks. School guidelines in many areas force kids to sit alone outside in the cold to eat their lunches. For the data across counties, states, regions and countries showing the same or worse results in the places with high mask compliance, this forum does not allow me to post screen grabs of grids, which demonstrate this. But I will direct you to some links.
Lmao if speech is delayed - which I think you mean learning to speak? - that's 99% a parenting issue and from unstable learning environments. The "studies" you linked below are a joke - they don't have any controls or aren't studies, just a line of cases and correlation between masks and cases as if no other externalities exist. Isn't it odd that cases spike at all major holidays - where families meet unmasked? Think critically of the information you consume, don't let bias win.
"School guidelines in many areas force kids to sit alone outside in the cold to eat their lunches. For the data across counties, states, regions and countries showing the same or worse results in the places with high mask compliance" Those "studies" are DOG shit and not studies! Correlation =/= causation. They aren't studies at all, it's just how many cases we have and policy on masks lmao it's all relative and you can cherry pick whatever you want when you're only crossing two variables and picking locations to suit your narrative. I'd urge you to take a stats course at your local community college.
Trivializing harm to children is pretty low, even for online rambling. https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1486141465864638466
Another firm outbid your firm for a major mask contract?
Here are some links. https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1487180853398491137
This link is total bullshit. I live in LA. We have absolutely not had more COVID cases in the last month than we had in all of 2020. Twitter. Gimme a fucking break.
https://twitter.com/ianmSC/status/1487157449039638528
If your believed masking worked in schools for the last years… Now you know the CDC admits cloth and surgical masks do not work. So... If kids have been wearing worthless clothes masks for two years without major outbreaks in schools, what is the justification for N95 masks in schools?
Answer this.
There HAVE been major outbreaks in schools, though. Multiple schools in SoCal have had to send their students back home and do “ distance learning” or whatever-the-fuck you wanna call it again in the last year. What the fuck are you talking about?
If you believe masks in schools have not stopped spread, then you admit, as does the CDC that we forced children to wear masks 7 hours a day, doing harm to their development and breathing and socialization for no benefit. N95 masks are not recommended for kids by the WHO. Wearing them 7 hours a day fitted to the face so aerosols are not filling the air around the sides is extremely harsh and impossible for children to do. Meanwhile their parents can go to the bar down the street and sit for hours without masks. How does that make any sense?
The data shows no real world community benefit between places with high mask compliance versus low compliance. Both have the same results.
If you believe masks did mitigate surges, then note that the CDC disagrees. They say cloth and surgical masks did and do nothing to stop the spread. If you believe kids in schools did well with “nothing”, then why do they need N95 masks which the WHO does not recommend for children?
The number of deaths from Covid in healthy Kids, according to John’s Hopkins and Dr. Marty Makary, was vanishingly small in two years.
Most Covid cases trace to the home. The safest place for children is in school. School closures adversely impacted learning, particularly for minority kids. Those loses in education are dramatic and will be felt for decades to come. Many of the harms of these policies will be felt increasingly over time.
The risk from Covid is highly age stratified. The risk to Children is not much different than from the flu. Are you proposing children mask up in school every flu season?
The madness of continuing forced masking now that every kid in schools are vaccinated is insanity. And we now know we have been enforcing the wearing of masks that don’t work. None of our interventions have stopped spread. Omicron did the same in highly masked places as it did in lesser masked. Our interventions harm. But they do not stop spread.
The answer is what epidemiologists knew prior to Covid. You let the bull of the low risk population catch the virus while protecting the high risk. Particularly now that vaccines have been available to everyone, young healthy people should return to normal. Them catching Covid protects the high risk. We should put resources into make opportunities for the high risk to avoid the virus. Trying to protect everyone, protects no one.
My ignorance is astonishing because I’m not intimately familiar with the rate of infection amongst “Hispanics and their kids”? Really? I actually think it’s kind of weird that you know this and can just pull it out of your ass. Exactly how much time do you spend, every day, familiarizing yourself with the rate of COVID infection amongst various ethnicities? I know you’re not a doctor, so the fact that you know things like this just proves that you’re a fucking weirdo who spends too much time on the internet.
Get a life, dude.
We protected the laptop class while minorities and the poor had to continue working. That’s why California has a higher infection rate per Hispanics than Florida where the percentage of infections matches population in general.
Yeah, dude, honestly? Any time anybody says,”Bu-bu-but what about the children???” what they’re really saying is,”I don’t like this thing.” They did it with Elvis in the 50’s, they did it with television in the 60’s, they did it with heavy metal and porn and now they’re doing it with masks. They don’t give a shit about “the children”; kids are just a cover for their own bullshit.
I don't want to make assumptions about the other commentor, but that's an interesting observation. Children are the easiest scapegoat/strawman in the world - there's no voice, no union, and they are the most generalized group despite being the least equatable and most diverse lol
One last thing: if they really cared about “the children,” they’d be going on a crusade against smart phones. I have no doubt that children (and adults, too, for that matter) staring at their phones and iPads for hours and hours every day has a much more detrimental effect on their brain development or whatever than wearing a mask at school does.
But, you know, adults like their phones, so… That’s not a problem.
I’ll make assumptions on the other commenter for you: COVID the Cow is a moron. Look at the screen name; that’s all I need to know. Just another “COVID is bullshit!” person. I mean, anybody who says,”Children are being harmed,” because they’re wearing masks is… dumb? Insane? I mean, “harmed,”? Really? Harmed. Children are being “injured” and “harmed” because they wear masks to school? Gimme a fucking break…
Again, just own up to it and say,”I don’t like wearing a mask.” Quit using The Kids as an excuse for your own shit. I don’t like wearing a mask, either, but I do it whenever I go out. Which is why I don’t go out too much anymore haha.
Children are being harmed by wearing masks? How, exactly? I live down the street from a middle school and I see them walking down the street after school, three blocks away. None of them seem particularly perturbed by wearing masks. I mean, they could take them off as soon as they leave, but they don’t. I dunno why exactly that is, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s because they’re not even really thinking about it. None of them appear “harmed,” anyway.
There’s a lot of reasons to end “the COVID clown show,” as you put it, but this whole,”Bu-bu-bu-but what about the chillllllldrennnn???” argument is typical panic bullshit.
The fact that you don’t understand the damage, only means you are ignorant of it. Breathing CO2 and spit for 7 hours and not seeing faces harms children. Speech delays. Self-harm. Also, graduations and events they will never have.
Not seeing faces I can understand maybe might affect a kid’s brain development, their ability to recognize… whatever, but “breathing CO2 for seven hours”? Does that also mean that every adult worker who has to wear a mask for their entire shift is also being “harmed”? Or “injured”? However you wanna put it? Because they’re “breathing CO2”?
As far as graduations are concerned, the only thing I remember about my high school graduation (which’ll actually be thirty years ago this June… shit) is watching a buddy of mine puke a couple seats down from me while we sat through the speeches, because he drank too much beforehand. Which was definitely funny, but I mean, graduation? Who fucking cares? Maybe your graduation was a truly meaningful experience, but I think “the children” will get over it. I haven’t thought about my high school graduation since the day it happened, until just now.
And “self-harm”? Kids have been “self-harming” forever. Has there been an increase in “self-harm” post-COVID that can be directly attributed to wearing a mask?
Honestly, I AM “ignorant of it.” I don’t have kids, thank gawd. But I see these middle-school and high school students multiple blocks away from their school, still wearing their masks and talking and hanging out and none of them seem particularly troubled by wearing a mask. When I go to the grocery store or wherever, I tear my mask off the second I’m outta there; I fucking hate wearing them. It doesn’t appear to me that “the children” do, though. If you’re really that worried about “the children,” maybe you should wonder what the effects of staring at their phones for hours on end are. That, to me, is much more troubling than wearing a gawddamn mask.
Studies show that the concentration of inhaled CO2 affects cognitive function. 1000 ppm is a typical threshold for performance decline. Masks lead to about 7,500 ppm concentration for the inhaled air. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/face-masks-co2-and-cognitive-impairment
What's so bad about making women wear burqas then?
https://www.mpg.de/17916867/coronavirus-masks-risk-protection
Smart phones and (anti) Social media are easily more damaging to children and adults for that matter than COVID has been up to now unless you're in LTC and even there, the social deprivation is like but probably not as bad as solitary confinement in prison. I'm a geriatric agressive motorcycle Rider and I accept the risks. About ~35X as dangerous as a car and about 100X as much fun. I choose to wear a quality full face helmet and full body armor knowing that in many situations it won't save me from death or catastrophic injury. Last year the data on COVID was limited and I minimized my risks to the greatest extent practicable...read Instacart and A for almost everything. This year with the knowledge I've been able to filter out of the narrative and background noise I feel much safer and I have no hesitation shopping. I'm vaccinated and I do mask up but I I believe that they only offer marginal if any protection but life is short and great and I'd hate to miss it by living in fear, irrational fear; we know better now and can assess the risks "minimal" with confidence. The fear porn isn't really that effective after two years and needs to stop tout suite.
You are entitled to your personal choices, even if we end up paying for your hospital care. I suspect you would be just as safe or safer without a cloth mask. And you would likely avoid truly risky situations with Covid without the mask. But your choice.
My motorcycle insurance premium is about 60% for my possible personal injury as it should be.I have always worn a well fitting medical grade mask and I don't consider it any form of absolute protection any more than the 2M distancing. I do believe based on my research that being slim, have a great diet and and according to Fitbit today exercising a lot more than average last year gives me an edge on avoiding the worst of COVID. At home in Canada, I have a UVC device in my ductwork for extra protection. Being in Florida for the winter, the attitude towards COVID is about like their attitude to personal protection while riding motorcycles... cavalier is the least perjorative word I can think of but as you say, to each their own and I'm less likely to have a weather related accident.
Cow, your lede of "Masks do not work" is somewhat deceptive. Work for what? Would you like your surgeon and nurses in your appendectomy not wearing masks? It is unreasonable to believe that masks do not stop spread of infection. That they do not stop all spread of infection is another point entirely. That people clearly misunderstand how and when to wear masks is another question. Rather than protest "the level of lying on masks", the effort should be about how masks can be efficacious and how masks have clear limits of protection.
Masks keep blood from spattering in surgeries and keep droplets from coughs from flying. But they do not stop aerosols which are too small for a mask to catch. Even an N95 mask would have to be perfectly fitted to not allow an gaps all day to have any impact. The real world data is clear that places with high mask compliance did the same or even worse than those with low mask compliance in terms of cases.
If you argue that masks failed and we continued to have terrible outbreaks, then you know masks do not work and we forced children in schools to wear them for two years for nothing. Forcing N95s respirators on children 7 hours a day is not recommended by the WHO.
If you believe masks did a reasonable job of controlling a urges in schools, the CDC now admits cloth and surgical masks do pretty much nothing. So kids did fine despite masks doing nothing. So again, how can you justify enforcing N95 masks on them?
Either way, it makes no sense. Within 24 hours, NYT, SF Chronicle, Atlantic and NPR publish arguments against mandating kids masking. These are liberal publications. I’m a Green and I find the crazy partisanship and censorship to be truly evil regarding Covid. The liberal side of the media has a lot to atone for. NYT: https://tinyurl.com/546c94da Chronicle: https://tinyurl.com/2p962y8z Atlantic: https://tinyurl.com/28xhk6hb NPR: https://tinyurl.com/ppeh2nbh
I still would prefer some kind of actual study, not anecdotes of study. My understanding is that masks are just one of many tools in the pandemic control box, and the aerosol v droplets argument is fallacious--no one claims that masks stop all micro or nano level particles, just big glops containing virus. In Asia where I lived, people would wear masks not only because they were fearful of infection, but as often they were fearful of infecting others. The huge number of mask wearers thus show a mass delusion of epic size or that mask wearing is at least somewhat beneficial for controlling sickness.
Take a gander at Sweden on this WHO map of European cases. Note they are doing better than highly N95 mask compliance Germany and Austria. The same as Norway. https://covid19.who.int/region/euro/country/se
Within 24 hours, NYT, SF Chronicle, Atlantic and NPR publish arguments against mandating kids masking. The media is finally following the science. NYT: https://tinyurl.com/546c94da Chronicle: https://tinyurl.com/2p962y8z Atlantic: https://tinyurl.com/28xhk6hb NPR: https://tinyurl.com/ppeh2nbh
At several times in my working career, I wore a mask all day because of toxic air quality. If you say that Covid air is not comparable because the virus is so small, I think you miss the physics. Viruses are so small they have to hitch a ride on something bigger, thus toxic air. I in no way believe masks are a magic bullet, just as vaccination is not a magic bullet, just one tool among many, as I claimed before. If you deny this, I wonder where you get your confidence.
When you wore a mask due to toxic air, did you them take it off to eat and breathe that toxic air?
How do mandatory cloth and surgical masks, which the CDC admits do not work well against respiratory viruses, work just as well in places where there is low mask compliance as they do in places with high mask compliance? And work just as well when you take them off to eat? And work just as well when kids wear them improperly?
Covid is spread by aerosols. Gaps in masks allow aerosols to fill the air. If you can smell someone smoking, your mask is not stopping aerosols spread. If you are coughing you should stay home. Masks are to stop asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread, which are not big drivers of the pandemic. If you have symptoms, and a mask is fooling you into believing you are safe to be out, the mask is actually increasing the danger to others.
In fact, high risk elderly and immunocompromised people do think they can go in high risk indoor crowded spaces because they are masked. This increases risk to the most vulnerable.
Masked surgeries resulted in more, not fewer, infections than unmasked surgeries in a study of 3,089 surgeries. A family member recently required surgery, and all present chose to be unmasked. Healing was fast, outpatient, and you can now hardly see the incision.
So masks don't work even in a surgery? That sounds like pure nonsense, but I am happy to change my mind. How about a source for that study of 3,089 surgeries?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC2493952/pdf/annrcse01509-0009.pdf
“The rate of wound infections [while unmasked] was less than half what it was when everyone wore masks.”
Tellingly from the study, "It would appear that minimum contamination can best be achieved by not wearing a mask at al but operating in silence..." implies that the masks stop contamination when people are talking. Because ordinary people do talk, and talk a lot, is there anywhere a study specifically for Covid that compares a population of mask wearers with a population of non-maskers?
Australia is looking worse than us right now around covid, for banning that tennis player.
Australia anyone? Anyone?
Might be helpful to stop all the lying that comes from the right about vaccine efficacy / safety as well. But I don’t get the impression Matt feels he can make any money off that right now and as a PCP I certainly don’t think it’s worth the effort on my part. Free speech may be profitable and/or emotionally satisfying for the many peddlers of misinformation in today’s society but it’s become too exhausting and unproductive for me to fight against misinformation in my daily practice so I just don’t anymore. I have to take care of my patients’ other problems and I know by now from considerable prior experience that if they have ideologic objections to getting vaccinated I’m not going to penetrate through that no matter how much time and capital I expend.
I don’t think Matt is right here - he’s suggesting something that sounds good but is actually a platitude, i.e., that the more free speech we have the more likely we are to get at the real truth of things. I just don’t agree that’s necessarily true.
Vaccination is great. MRNA vaccines also do not stop the spread of Omicron. None of our interventions stop Omicron. South Africa and many other poor countries with far less vaccination and mask compliance are doing far better both in terms of cases and deaths per 100k.
The American right is pretty clearly and loudly articulating that vaccination is NOT great - honestly, please don’t try to tell me otherwise because I’m running into this every day and like I said, it’s exhausting. About half of my “vaccine objectors” are people who’re honestly searching for information and still have an open mind - these I can usually convince. The other half are ideologic objectors, invariably from the right (they bring their politics right into the exam room) and I don’t even make the slightest effort anymore because I know it’s futile and wastes our already limited time.
In the meantime the only patients I’ve lost to Covid over the past year have been unvaccinated ones, so you can imagine how I feel.
The left is silly when it comes to things like masks and vaccine mandates and thinking it can create a Covid-free world but its errors are those that come from exaggerated caution, not quite the same thing as the right’s repudiation of basic facts and concepts. No, Covid is definitely worse than the flu, the vast majority of those 8.5 million people died of Covid rather than “comorbidities”, the vaccines are fundamentally as safe as any others we currently use and considerably more efficacious than the flu vaccine when it comes to preventing clinical illness.
Again, I disagree with Matt when he thinks that free speech inevitably leads to us finding out the truth of things. Not to say that I think speech should be censored, I absolutely don’t, but I think there are points in history when it doesn’t matter anymore whether speech is free or not, truth simply doesn’t prevail.
Recently, my PCP talked me into a tetanus booster. Then I went home and read this: A recent paper published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases suggested that tetanus and diphtheria booster vaccines are not necessary for adults who have completed their childhood vaccination series. This advice aligns with the current World Health Organization (WHO) recommendations
https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/do-adults-really-need-tetanus-booster-shots-2020051219786
Yay, vaccines!
Can you be more specific than broad accusations like "all the lying"? Are BMJ editors liars? They write:
Big pharma is the least trusted industry. At least three of the many companies making covid-19 vaccines have past criminal and civil settlements costing them billions of dollars. One pleaded guilty to fraud. Other companies have no pre-covid track record. Now the covid pandemic has minted many new pharma billionaires, and vaccine manufacturers have reported tens of billions in revenue.
The BMJ supports vaccination policies based on sound evidence. As the global vaccine rollout continues, it cannot be justifiable or in the best interests of patients and the public that we are left to just trust “in the system,” with the distant hope that the underlying data may become available for independent scrutiny at some point in the future.
https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o102
People like me have looked at the pro-vaccine studies with a skeptical eye and found them unconvincing. Maybe our politics is shaped by reasoning rather than vice versa.
Basically, your post just presented a host of reasons why pharmaceutical companies might have a motive to lie, without actually presenting a single definite fact that they in fact ARE.
The problem with everything you just pointed out is that it presupposes that thousands upon thousands of ordinary medical providers in the US, who are not employees of these companies, would somehow either not notice or, alternatively, cover up the true facts about these vaccines that the companies themselves were trying to hide, even though one might presuppose that from long association with their patients those providers might actually care about them, and, moreover, aren’t being compensated to do such an awful thing.
The right likes to criticize the left for not presenting hard data about things like masks, and to a considerable extent they’re correct. But the left does supply a lot of data when it comes to safety and efficacy of the vaccines, which I don’t really see the right countering in any rigorous way.
Innuendo isn’t enough here, you need to show some actual data if you’re going to make a credible claim that the vaccines aren’t effective or are unsafe. Data that will cut it for providers and patients who look around on a daily basis and don’t see thousands of patients, friends, or family dropping due to vaccine reactions, or alternatively, ending up in the hospital with severe Covid.
I do take statements from practicing physicians seriously (my sister is one). But there are also plenty of stories about vaccine harm. VAERS data can't just be dismissed with a wave of the hand. It is a crime to submit false reports, and under-reporting is more likely than over-reporting.
To get more clarity, we have randomized trials. Those showed a lot more severe adverse events for the vaccines than cases of severe COVID prevented. That is a definite fact. Many authors here noticed problems like this, and I also wrote about it on my stack. https://norstadt.substack.com/p/severe-adverse-events-vs-severe-covid
The studies I’ve read suggest that the benefit of the vaccines in preventing severe Covid significantly outweighs the risk of severe side effects, aside from the pediatric population where the risks may be relatively equal. I’m not a pediatrician but do have a 15-year-old son and I have my doubts about the value of vaccination in his age group.
As a practicing clinician with nearly 3000 patients on my panel as well as four colleagues with similar panel sizes, our clinical experience suggests pretty strongly that the studies are correct for adult patients.
I guess all of us go from the data we read combined with our own experience, and that may differ from one person to another.
Mike, I appreciate your points, and I believe you are what you say you are. But you say this:
"... aside from the pediatric population where the risks may be relatively equal. I’m not a pediatrician but do have a 15-year-old son and I have my doubts about the value of vaccination in his age group."
According to a lot of the kind of people Matt is talking about, that comment puts you on the side of "irresponsible anti-vax conspiracy nut-jobs" yourself. In fact, some of the people I have seen attacked as "anti-vax" are vaccinated themselves, but question whether everyone, particularly children, need it. And for that they're labelled "dangerous." I have a 6-year-old son, and he's gotten the first shot, but I'm still questioning whether he should have, and whether I should get him the second.
I have personally witnessed a normal physician discounting an obvious vaccine reaction (fortunately minor) as something else. Therefore I do not trust normal physicians to carefully weigh vaccine harm vs. benefit.
The randomized studies did show benefit. They also showed harm. Overall, the risk/benefit ratio was upside down for individual patients but hospitals liked the reduction in infectious disease patients. That does not conflict with your observation. Meanwhile, variants (who could have predicted antigenic drift, which was discovered in the 1940s) are reducing the benefit.
Ever consider your ability to persuade just sucks?
Have you considered getting good?
Maybe. But it’s also possible that the kind of people who congregate on sites like this aren’t the kind to be persuaded in the first place.
immediately attacking anyone who argues an opposing point of not being who they say they are, or working for sinister agencies, or mass murdering people for financial gain, doesn’t suggest much of an open mind. That’s happened to me here as well as numerous other places which is why I’m trying to get away from commenting. I guess I had a kind of “relapse” here, LOL.
I seem to do fine in the office with individual patients, although of course I’m probably not who I really say I am and that comment is hence made up and an example of my unfortunate habit of lying.
Be cautious with your totalitarian tendencies
What’s “totalitarian” in what I just wrote. Be specific.
I am very concerned with the current trend towards controlled speech. I do think truth prevails over time but it is often a confusing path. I agree you do say speech should not be censored but I feel you lack faith in the messy process
You’re right, I do lack faith. But that’s not totalitarian, that’s simply a sign of despair. Quite a different thing.
Because you have been rude and offensive in the past, I am not even reading your comments. You are not worth it.
Clearly you are a highly educated abs classy human.
I’ve already made it clear I very much agree that science has been weaponized. I just happen to think both sides are doing it.
My opinions are quite consistent and certainly haven’t changed during the period of this thread, LOL.
How is all the misinformation about Covid deaths and vaccine efficacy coming from “the establishment”? I can literally tell that vaccines are effective simply from looking around me in my own neighborhood, I don’t need “the Big Bad Left” to “misinform” me.
Most of you reading this will be thinking, "Well, no kidding!". We know how free speech works, we know it's an inelegant but also the only unique solution to the issue of getting to the truth. We know that assigning any authority to be the arbiters of truth can only backfire for who will guard the guardians of truth. We already knowwww thissss, it has been universally baked into our civic understanding of our society.
Unfortunately, Matt's position and I presume the position of most of us here, defenders of free speech if not borderline absolutists, is a majority-held but rapidly-eroding idea in the United States:
https://www.city-journal.org/cancel-culture-generational-divide
"Think the progressive illiberalism of young people is just a phase? Think again. Examining trends in support for free speech in the General Social Survey, which has run since 1972, political scientists Dennis Chong, Jack Citrin, and Morris Levy find that young people today are far less tolerant of forms of speech that affect identity groups than were young people in the past. “In a stunning reversal,” they write, those on the left “are now consistently less tolerant than conservatives of a wide range of controversial speech about racial, gender, and religious identities.”
This is no small matter, it does not bode well for the future, but it's also unsurprising given the educational framework that is currently in place: "sticks and stones can break my bones but words can be forms of violence that deny my existence and are a manifestation of tyrannical oppression".
Allow me to also, since I have a moment, explain why Wokeness / The Successor Ideology / Cancel Culture results in the denigration of free speech.
It's because there is no such thing as free speech. Speech, in the liberal worldview, is the manifestation of an individual's thoughts. But in the woke worldview, there are no individuals, there are only groups that benefit or are oppressed by "the system". That system brainwashes groups through its dominant social discourses into accepting their role in the system and then regurgitating its power dynamics.
Hence, when a person speaks, they are not expressing individual thought, but merely echoing the political and cultural positions that the system has inscribed into their consciousness. Their speech should not be free it should be shouted down, banned, censored, precisely because it is nothing other than the mouthpiece of a tyrannical system. Or so they claim.
This worldview leads to the wokes constantly reminding us the race and sex of a speaker. It leads to minorities that echo "the system's" positions like Larry Elder, being called the "Black Face of White Supremacy" in the LA Times.
It leads, in the end, to a valence of reliability and morality being ascribed to a person's speech before they've even opened their mouths, by dint only of immutable characteristics in an intersectional ranking system of oppression.
Great explanation. My solution is to tell these people to go pound sand and never apologize. Ridicule and move on
Thank them for the rent free head space.
Almost as if by design...
Elegantly written and defended, but I think that the lack of tolerance is down to simple narcissism and lack of real challenges. The Twitter/laptop classes that drive this discussion have been over-parented to a ridiculous degree.
You know, that’s a really good description of a phenomenon I’ve had trouble understanding. Thanks.
I have spent close to a decade studying and going down the rabbit hole of the woke, their literature and academics, their founding philosophies, how it all came together and developed and spread.
I was always dumbfounded at its symptoms, the strange unexplainable assertions and behavior. But when I slowly began to understand that it's an all-encompassing worldview, I was able to see through its lens, and all the unexplainable phenomena began to make sense.
It is still illiberal. It still holds many paradoxical and hypocritical positions. But it is at least somewhat an internally consistent logic, like a religion, like Catholicism. I can at least now see why these things make sense to them.
But the fact we're dealing with a viral meme-plex resembling religion does little to spark optimism. The only option is to stand strong on liberal principles of individual liberty and reason.
I've read some Substack works from John McWhorter (before he sold out /s). He had made a compelling case that "Wokeism" is in fact a religion.
I would say "cultish", but po tay toe, po tah toe
He recently published a book on this exact topic. "The religion of anti-racism" I believe.
That article makes a good argument for encouraging your kids to major in STEM fields in college.
I am still going through these links you posted, they are quite interesting regarding the developmental detail in these ideologies in the early day. Any other resources to share?
Sticks and stones are the voice of the oppressed speaking out in peaceful protest but words are violence that causes real harm.
Sticks and stones may break my bones but most of these fucks wouldn’t know a verbal beat down if it skill fucked them in the eye socket.
Poetical
I werd gud
Beautiful.
That is the fear. While I was reading this great TKNews piece, I was thinking how IT should be required reading\study by our schoolchildren. At least, by the teachers. It would be interesting to see the reaction of college students that were exposed to it. Probably many would be "triggered."
It’s up to us to fix it.
Follow our own advice: build a better argument to undermine censorship and show people the way.
unfortunately you can have a cogent argument, but the response is either be called a Trumpster, Fascist, or more commonly a racist.
It used to go "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
Now it's more like "Sticks and stones may be dodged when thrown, but words cut all the way through me."
and "Silence is Violence"
While violence (if perpetrated by the "right people") is mere speech.
as long as they are "Mostly Peaceful"
Gotta love those "mostly peaceful" rioters, arsonists, assaulters, murderers, looters, etc.
Anything not completely aligned with Woke Ideology "is violence".
One of the things I also appreciate about Substack is that it still allows comments. It's disappointing that mainstream news outlets have stopped allowing them. Restricting people from discovering that others are having similar thoughts and concerns is a good way to quash dissent. (Edited for spelling)
Frankly, I often find the comments far and away the most interesting part of online posting. Here, Matt's most perspicacious insights render it generally a tie.
Even better, it allows unmoderated comments.
I have been running an ongoing experiment of the boundaries of the Overton window in “polite” society by posting comments at NYT. The scope of permissible discussion is stunningly narrow. There are basic and obvious facts that you aren’t allowed to say. These people are totalitarian to the core. I’m a lifelong Democrat and I don’t recognize these assholes anymore.
It's pathetic how desperate they are to control the conversation over there. It's not even a conversation, comments aren't posted in real time or in order, if they're posted at all. I'm essentially just trolling when I bother to post there anymore.
At least there's a paywall, or it would be only a matter of time before outfits like Media Matters and the PLA caught on and invaded these comment sections with thousands of fake subscribers spewing weird slogans.
"It's disappointing that mainstream news outlets have stopped allowing them."
But hardly surprising.
They couldn't do it since the comment sections would turn into mockery of the same writers. The are producing propaganda and the moment population realized it and tried to fight back, they started the process. First, moderators, then ban on comments and now that they are losing viewers to alternative methods (Substack, Spotify and such) they are trying to crush the competition. Ironically of they had comment sections going(with moderators), I don't think Substack would have taken off like it did. People want to bounce their ideas of other people.
Agreed. I don't even bother with sites that don't allow commenting. Increasingly those are all mainstream sites.
Also, how do these people not realize that they're only making things worse...?
So much to the effect of, "we need to wiretap these crazy conspiracy theorists who think the government is spying on them."
Because they really aren't very smart people. Look at Fauci, a monumental mediocrity. He is typical of the folks behind all these hamfisted campaigns to get everyone vaxxed.
You would think if we lived in an actual meritocracy some of these people would at least be half way competent at their job. Oh, wait... So that is what they are so desperately trying to hide.
@marginalresponse-"we need to wiretap these crazy conspiracy theorists who think the government is spying on them” —that’s hilarious!
If WaPo, NYT, The Guardian, and the rest of the mainstream media are so concerned about the spread of misinformation, they should shut themselves down immediately.
Russiagate and the Steele "dossier" is Exhibit A, and the canceling of the New York Post for the Hunter Biden laptop story is Exhibit B.
And there are about 2 million other exhibits to enter into evidence if we need them.
A nice touch of absurdity in the guardian piece Matt links to, 'Facebook needs a much better mechanism to stop the spread of false information about the vaccine, and they need to make sure they’re doing that across languages,” said Jessica González, the co-CEO at Free Press, a media equity group.' A codirector of an organization called 'Free Press' advocating for more censorship.
Kuwaiti babies being thrown out of incubators comes to mind.
That was a good one! How about those fun times when Russians tried to shut down Vermont power grid, or when they desperately tried to pay Taliban to target US troops because Taliban war effort was flagging and they were close to losing the war :-)
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/Fake-News-of-Russian-Cyber-Attack-On-Vermont-Utility-Goes-Viral-Before-Trut
Yep. The Deep State's Greatest Hits are a laugh riot!
Somewhere down that exhibit list, but one of my favorites for the sheer absurdity of what MSM wants us to believe, the "70000 moderate rebels": https://gagrule.net/mps-quiz-cameron-where-are-the-magical-70000-moderate-syrian-rebels/
My favorite is still “fiery but mostly peaceful protest”. It takes a certain kind of nerve to lie about what the camera is showing in real time right behind you.
2 million?
I've told you a thousand times not to exaggerate
More like ten thousand.
The Hunter Biden Story was concocted nonsense. Hell, more than a few Post reporters are laughingly on the record as such. The Post is Gotham city's facsimile of the National Enquirer. I thought this was self-evident to any sentient being--left, right, in-between. The story was even the brainchild of Murdoch himself, who had hoped it would provide Trump with the needed boost to overtake Biden in the final days of the campaign.
And speaking of Murdoch, the very concept of Rupert Murdoch being cancelled by anyone, for anything, up to and including the Almighty hisself, is more than a little amusing. Belongs in the realm of the fantastical.
Lost laptops (and guns) are behaviors consistent with drug addiction. With a bit of search one can find fully exposed pictures of President's son, I am sure it was FSB that took those selfies. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/shocking-photos-of-hunter-bidens-crack-addict-teeth/VURR4M7EFMHDUIIYDLFTOBEWGQ/
Or his missing teeth
Thanks, but I'm searching for pictures of a President's son fully exposed.
Your defense of Hunter Biden just disqualified you from a scintilla of credibility…. Don Jr faced 16 hours of Congressional grilling over campaign phone calls…if he had done ONE of the things that Hunter Boy has indeed done, let’s just say smoking crack in his tidy whities…the media would have exploded… do you not see the hypocrisy??
I do. An oversight. Don Jr. should have been given 16 hours on the bastinado. And I'm not defending Hunter Biden, I'm drawing attention to the fact that people who buy into such tripe as the Post story ought to park their asses in a mud hut for a year or two and sort things out. Perhaps I didn't make this last part clear in my last post. Fuzzy thinking. Damaged goods. Highly likely in the future to make unsound decisions as they relate to this great nation's politics. Huzzah!
lucrezia, if some New York Post reporters "are laughingly on record" about the Hunter Biden laptop being "concocted nonsense," please provide details.
Also, as a long time subscriber, I am familiar with others comparing the New York Post to the National Enquirer. I agree that the paper sensationalizes certain matters and has a right wing view of things, but generally is accurate. Unlike the NY TImes, reporters like Jason Blair who fake stories are fired, not encouraged. Again, please provide details that would support this assertion.
Take your meds pls
Outstanding riposte!
Hi troll
Certain of that? Viewed through another lens, I might appear as one of the few non-trolls here. Crush that and put it in your pipe and smoke it. Then come follow lucrezia down the path to enlightenment. Come. Come with lucrezia down the path to enlightenment...come...come...
Outstanding Matt - this is clarity you dependably deliver: "Even in a society with fairly robust protections, as ours once was, the most dangerous misinformation is always, without exception, official."
As the evidence mounts daily that the misinformation has been and is being supplied by the Paid Pharma Propagandists in mainstream media, the only thing they have left is try smear and censor. It's not working, as no one trusts them any longer. Many of these institutions will be bankrupt inside of 2 years, while Substack grows more valuable each passing day. The Deep State's monopoly over the narrative has forever crumbled and they will never get it back.
Wow Joseph! I wish I had your optimism!
That's quite the extraordinary claim. Do you have any evidence of this?
Not an extraordinary claim at all. What don't you agree with? The polls that show 10% of Americans trust mainstream media? Or would it be the endless lies they have spun, accepting as fact propaganda coming from government officials and the companies that have bought and paid for them? There's so much evidence that it would hard to start somewhere. Let me know which specific area you'd like some evidence in and I'll be happy to bury you in it.
Perhaps if you ask people "Do you trust mainstream media" you can get a very low positive response. This is not the same as asking "Do you trust (name of specific mainstream media source)?" People are sensitive to the implied pejorative, but will not necessarily perceive their own information silo sources as belonging under that moniker.
Regardless, people overwhelmingly have caught onto the fact that the vast majority of talking heads in "mainstream media" are parrots repeating what they are told to say in order to help craft a narrative that is being pushed by the Deep State and corporate oligarchs that fund them. For sure, if I am a die-hard CNN watcher, I am happy to watch their version of unreality being trumpeted on a daily basis. Same for Fox. And it's all brought to us by Pfizer! In the end, I still know they are biased and lying 90% of the time. The days of true, skeptical journalists openly questioning the bullshit of corporations and politicians who are fleecing everyone is gone. What is left is kabuki theater.
Well any evidence would be a great start, and then we can go from there.
What I agree with or disagree with is irrelevant. Either you have evidence of your extraordinary claim or you don't, in which you are opining and sharing feelings on the matter. Which is fine but don't act like its the truth.
lol easy there tiger
The best evidence that the legacy media has long lost its way, is inherently unreliable and untrustworthy, and has largely abdicated its responsibility to be the watchdog of government and the powerful elites, is that so many people now rely on "alternative" media for its news and information, and 95% of this stuff is actually a couple of shit layers below the the MSM. It's ALL besotted with propaganda.
Thats not evidence of a conspiracy, its evidence of a different problem.
Where did I mention conspiracy? Why are you mentioning conspiracy? "The best evidence that the legacy media has lost its way..."
not you, james
Pharma commercials.
How fast this disappeared down the memory chute: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-largest-health-care-fraud-settlement-its-history
Keep and eye on MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and the MLB lockout. If Manfred thinks he can break the Player's Union by going "woke," he'll go woke. If he thinks he can accomplish this by going "anti-woke," he'll not hesitate in advancing the "anti-woke" agenda to bust up---and permanently disperse---the union. Manfred's ultimate agenda is to replace the players with robots and turn major league baseball into the first major all-crypto gambling enterprise on the planet.
This stupidity again? Go ahead e.pierce, show us the causation between the NBA embracing social justice causes and viewership going down.
By the way, hows the "woke" embracing NFL doing these days?
Need a hug? I promise I'll wear an N95 mask.
Fuck those guys and the people helping support them. "Misinformation" is a rich name for it when the official line has been more wrong than the "misinformation" that is literally killing people. I would bet everything I own that bad government policy, advice, and information has killed hundreds of times more people during the pandemic than "misinformation". Cuomo himself killed thousands by stuffing the ill into nursing homes. Look at the increased suicide and overdose rates that have also skyrocketed. Crime is up, depression is up, and they haven't saved any lives.
I have read that in the former USSR, no one believed what the government said... Even if what the government said was true. Suppression of free speech leads inevitably to a situation where no one believes official statements even when they are true and urgent.
The recurring panic in corporate/gov-Dem mouthpiece media about Substack is actually hilarious. These clowns are totally impotent. The best they can do is complain. The beauty of Substack is that they have no leverage at. No advertisers to harass. No big tech partners to censor or demonetize. The piece quotes WaPo: "These newer platforms cater to subscribers who seek out specific content that accommodates their viewpoints . . ." Exactly! I PAY for content on Substack that accommodates my viewpoints. But I don't pay for misinformation. I pay for FREE SPEECH on topics I care about, including free speech and a free press as a topic. And there is nothing these fools can do about it. Substack's entire business model is based upon people like me paying subscription fees. Period. That's it! Substack has zero interest is censorship beyond that which can hurt them (i.e., defamation, obscenity, and such), because censorship can only cost them money in canceled subscriptions. You gotta love it!
There are still plenty of things to go after. DNS hosting. Substack's ISP/datacenter. DDOS protection. Payment processors.
Not sure if they're that desperate (yet), but I've seen it happen to several other sites with a lot less influence. Websites are a lot more fragile than people realize.
Might have to go back to mailing in checks and money orders. Those were the days...
If only it were that simple. Even banks are starting to get in on it now. Some have started to restrict business with the firearms industry, for example.
https://www.amalgamatedbank.com/firearms
A right wing internet commentator (who I don't think would mind being called that), Nick Fuentes, had his bank account seized and frozen by the FBI for alleged involvement in 1/6 without ever being convicted of anything. Done by the FBI, not the bank. I'm not sure if this was technically legal on their part, but it stinks of political retaliation. Point being, even bank accounts aren't safe.
At the risk of sounding like a shill, I genuinely do think cryptocurrency is the way forward (I don't own any but I'm looking into it). And EVEN THEN, some exchange sites block contributions to certain addresses, so you have to transfer it to your own wallet and do it yourself.
But something anonymous like Monero getting widespread adoption would go a long way toward breaking the financial controls. I think that's why there's been a full court press against cryptocurrency from the left lately: There's no manager to see.
I'm no crypto expert, but I would be shocked if TPTB are not already hard at work on surveilling it completely.
They're not, but they're being urged into the arena by many disparate parties. The more interesting question is why they have not begun "surveilling" crypto, which is nothing more than a pyramid scheme and a pseudo-financial system for facilitating criminal activity through money laundering. With a few monkey .jpgs thrown in to amuse the marks.
Hmm... having a problem replying to this. Concidence?
If it ate my last post I'll try to quickly resummarize: Most crypto is easy to track because it uses a public ledger. However Monero goes out of its way to obfuscate transactions. There are ongoing attempts to break it but it's usually considered more or less safe and anonymous if used correctly. It definitely beats the alternatives, at least.
I'm not an expert on cryptocurrency specifically, but I work in infosec and know 5 or 6 things about digital privacy.
I was going to bring up crypto to get around this, but you're already on the ball :)
@Bob-San, agreed. Glenn Greenwald’s piece a couple of months ago regarding Parlor being deplatformed is a good example. Another was the credit card companies/PayPal not accepting payments/donations to Julian Assange several years ago.
I suspect that sooner or later they are going to have to up the stakes in this gig. They have no other option, I don’t think. But as Matt opines above, it will only make their predicament worse.
This all speaks to a larger issue, all the political, economic, and social institutions are becoming increasing dysfunctional. This isn’t a recent phenomena but part of a trend where by the powers that be keep doubling down to prop them, only to make the situation worse.
OKAY..nuff said...
Points taken. Certainly with internet infrastructure and payment processing there is vulnerability. But the larger Substack becomes, the less of a threat these vulnerabilities are, since the cost of doing so gets larger. The Parler case is different. It had massive vulnerability as a phone app, since Apple and Google could effectively kill it.
While y'all are right that Substack still has exposure to big tech and payment processors, the business model makes it much less vulnerable.
@jeff, I don’t disagree with you on the parlor/payments or the difficulties with scaling to size.
Though, I still think they aren’t going to up the stakes, regardless of size. What those stakes are, I can not predict (could rely on cancel culture to get of a ceo, for exampl) The recent Spotify folding under pressure on the joe Rogan issue is probably a good example and at minimum I suspect he will tone it down a bit.
Anyway, the trend is clear that censorship has Been increasingly over the last 10 years, big time.
I agree it could get very nasty, Mr Bob. But we will always find a way. How about private peer-to-peer with payments via cryptocurrency.
Domestic Terrorism is only right wingers - don't you read the news?
Am I the only one who is having trouble with the "like heart" today? Anyway, I like this.
It happened once with Parler. No reason it can't be done again. We're not just talking platform freedom anymore. If the people operating the underlying infrastructure boot you off it doesn't matter what moderation is or isn't happening on the site itself.
Don't forget Gab which then was smart enough to start over with its own servers etc. The payment processors have gone after them now too. I am supporting them just as a big FU to those trying to take them out. I call this spite purchasing and have increased it recently.
In what sense? It's Karens demanding to speak to the manager until they discontinue services to the site. "Do you REALLY want your company associated with these kinds of people? No? Then stop doing business with them or we complain on Twitter." There's no violence or threat of violence involved.
I don't like it, but I don't see how it's illegal, much less terrorism.
The only possible exception is DDOS protection. DDOS IS illegal. But asking Cloudflare (or whoever) to drop a site's DDOS protection isn't. It's not RIGHT, and it's a bit like complaining to a private security company to stop protecting a house in an area where police won't go: We all know what happens afterwards.
But public pressure campaigns aren't illegal and they aren't terrorism.
lol, some one call it right wing snowflakery
Until Peppermint Patty indicates they are monitoring emails :)
Apart from the Civil War which ended in 1865, I think we are living in the most dangerous times in regard to the continuance of our constitutional Republic. The Deep State/MIC/Intelligence Community and it’s alliance with the financialized economy of the big banks, corporate media, big tech, big pharma, big agriculture, etc., work incessantly to make sure we do not keep our Republic, as Franklin warned. These articles are very good at bringing things to light. We need to fight to retain our inalienable rights, the protection of the minority from a tyranny of the majority, and the right to remain at peace and not be suckered into endless wars that enrich the elites at the expense of everyone else.
These are dangerous times indeed. We need to fight for truth, rationality and freedom of thought.
Taibbi writes "Clean your own houses, and maybe you won’t have such a hard time being believed."
Truer words have not been spoken. Precisely the issue. Zero credibility. Zero trust.
The memory hole reminds of the Enron's, Madoff's, Foamed Run-ways, Robo-signing mills of foreclosure. Hard to build trust over hanging chads, weapons of mass destruction, Hurricane Katrina response, breaking the middle east into a thousand pieces of McDonaldland Green Zones, Bailing out the bankers while interest rates for retiree pensions go negative.
Free markets are the supposed answer but how does one explain the Sacklers' penance or Martin Skreli's markup of insulin? We are supposedly the greatest country on earth, but we cannot provide healthcare to all Americans nor can we deal with a public health emergency without politicization and incompetence reaching a 3rd grade level response (and that's an insult to 3rd graders). Matt gets this spot on.
Attacking free speech is easier for the PMC than doing any kind of self-reflection or admission that their agenda is possibly the worst thing to happen to the United States since the Powell Memo.
I don't want to be a vax skeptic.
But when an anonymous Wikipedia editor claims a Nobel Prize winning virologist is "spreading misinformation"; and when previously respected journalists and doctors are banned from media platforms for citing inconvenient truths or just asking questions, I'm going to go hmmmm (and stay unvaxxed).
The Center for Countering Digital Hate reminds me of the Ministry of Love for some reason.
Look at it this way, the people who claim to be against fascism are the biggest fascists, the people who claim to be for freedom hate all your rights, the ones who claim to fight against hatred are the most hateful people on the planet, the ones who denounce your lack of national patriotism are globalists, the ones who want you to give up your guns ship entire arsenals to some of the shadiest governments on the planet, the ones shouting "support our troops" hate the enlisted, the brilliant military strategists have shown themselves to be incompetent idiots, the ones who complain about political "norms" constantly are the ones who are always violating them, the ones who whine about foreign governments censoring their citizens are the first to censor, and law enforcement keeps creating its own crimes. It's the authoritarian hypocrisy Olympics!
thanks! im getting a sign made with this on it to put on my lawn
I might work on it a bit. I left out the hypocritical whiners on "democracy", "misinformation", "science", "capitalism" (aka modern monopolized crony capitalism), "privilege", "crime" and so much more!
Absolutely. I doubt they have any sense of irony.
"If the fact-checkers are themselves untrustworthy, and you can’t get around the fact-checkers, that’s when you’re really screwed."
This is a perfect summary of where we are with today's media. For years many of us have known the media lie. Now people are waking up to the fact the guardians of truth who check the media on our behalf (the 'fact checkers') lie through their teeth too.
Is it any wonder why Substack is growing so fast, and why people like me financially support Mike and many others? This is one of the only places we can find countervailing opinions and facts. And that's very sad.