MuchoMaas

During the initial COVID outbreak, did Canada allocate huge sums of money ostensibly to shore up the medical system like we did here in the U.S.? Where did all of it go? Certainly none to nurse's salaries.

Probably not even any benefit against severe disease among hospital staff, given that the vast majority of them have already recovered from COVID.

Allen Dulles used to just call up the Washington Post to get reporters fired. This is a legitimate source, to me.

It's sort of the equivalent of when Noam Chomsky says, "sure, JFK and 9/11 may have been carried out by organized conspirators within the U.S. government, but it doesn't matter and there's no point interrogating it because it makes no difference from a policy perspective." In the cases where it's not outright disinfo it's a psychological defense mechanism, a way of ceding the bare minimum of ground to the conspiracy theorists which is demanded by the mountains of evidence, while still hiving it off from the rest of one's worldview.

> The Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement official in the country, personally reviewed the footage surrounding Epstein's prison block to confirm this for himself.

The Attorney General whose father got Epstein his start in life by hiring him to teach math at the prestigious Dalton School with zero qualifications? The Attorney General who spearheaded much of the coverup and spiking of investigations surrounding Iran Contra? That attorney general?

At this point the odds-on favorite to win the Republican nomination in 2024 is Donald Trump, a man with extensive ties to Epstein going back decades, and who is on record issuing vague compliments about his sexual predation.

At this point, it's pretty silly that it is still considered "conspiracy theory" to aver that intelligence agencies have placed agents in major corporations throughout the world. Even mainstream limited hangout-type sources have started to acknowledge this. They discuss it on that Wind of Change podcast about the theory that the CIA wrote the Scorpions' song.

Or, to be more precise, it's silly that it is considered "conspiracy theory" in the way most people use the concept, as coterminous with "a false idea."

> I see lots of commentators arguing about 'lockdowns', but very little discussion what actually constitutes 'lockdowns'. Lockdowns in China looked very different to lockdowns in Europa or lockdowns in the US. Lockdowns in 2020, in most countries, were very different to lockdowns in 2022.

I'm not sure why I'm supposed to care about this distinction when they've all proven to be completely ineffective can-kicking at best, enormously costly interventions whose scope was extended well beyond their initial "15 days to slow the spread" mandate for precious little (if any) benefit and an accumulating roster of harms.

After these pediatric hepatitis cases popped up, there was a vocal contingent of MDs and Zero COVID types on Twitter arguing that it showed the urgent necessity to do whatever it takes to protect children from SARS-CoV-2 infections. It's sad to think that this fearmongering is probably causing a lot of children not to get the pathogen exposure they need in early childhood.

> Likewise, the hostility towards masking is owing to some substantive inability to evaluate second order risks.

Funny, that's how I would describe the widespread insistence that we can indefinitely conceal half of everyone's faces in public (when the only effective masks are ones which create a large amount of plastics pollution), or assiduously suppress the spread of pathogens, without having some as-yet unknown knock-on effects. It's bizarre that so many treat these things as unalloyed goods with zero downside whatsoever.

You think Pax Americana is the only thing standing between Honduras or Colombia or Yemen and instant genocide?

Probably the one that spends more on its military than the next six countries combined? The vast majority of which is dedicated to far-flung imperial projects benefitting only a tiny sliver of its populace?

Why should we go first in eliminating fertilizer?

Maybe we could start with reducing emissions by the military, one of the absolute largest sources on earth? And after that maybe ban private jets and 100,000 sq ft mansions?

> Much of the rhetorical analysis is based on the medical premise that getting vaccinated has no individual or contagion reduction efficacy. Politics aside, this was simply not true (though thanks to variants may be true today). We will never know now if specific variants could have been avoided if people got promptly vaccinated.

Delta arose in India before widespread vaccination was even available there, and Omicron comes from a sublineage which even predates Delta. So we actually know the answer to the question of whether immune escape variant mutation could have been prevented had fewer people been unwilling to take COVID vaccines -- it could not have. (And all this is setting aside the fact that there is not actually a magical solution to the impossible logistical problem of getting a shot into every person on Earth all at once, to say nothing of animal reservoirs.) This should have been expected given that decades of research prior to Operation Warp Speed had failed to discover durable and effective sterilizing vaccines against coronaviruses. Even with the original strains which predominated at the time the vaccines were introduced it was never studied and not clear whether they could prevent transmission, and many public health authorities and the CEO of Pfizer said so at the time.

And this was all quite clear long before the propaganda and scapegoating campaigns the article is criticizing kicked into gear. The CDC Provincetown study which showed the vaccinated were transmitting quite easily came out in late July. And today, a simple comparison of highly vaxxed jurisdictions to less vaxxed ones suggests that the shots are actually raising the incidence of SARS-CoV-2 infection, which may be why we've stopped hearing so much about the "vaxxed vs unvaxxed" outcomes and increasing numbers of public health authorities are removing the breakdowns from their reporting.