Tuesday, May 31, 2022

The rise of ‘bai lan’: why China’s frustrated youth are ready to ‘let it rot'

In recent days, this phrase – and more previously 'tang ping' (lying flat, 躺平), which means rejecting gruelling competition for a low desire life – gained popularity as severe competition and high social expectations prompted many young Chinese to give up on hard work.

But bai lan has a more worrying layer in the way it is being used by young people in China: to actively embrace a deteriorating situation, rather than trying to turn it around. It is close to other Chinese phrases, for example 'to smash a cracked pot' (破罐破摔) and 'dead pigs are not afraid of boiling water' (死猪不怕开水烫).

State media have taken note of this trend. "Why modern young Chinese like to 'bai lan'?" one recent article in official media outlet asked. "In fact, this is as a result of negative auto suggestion, repeatedly telling oneself I cannot make it… And this kind of mentality often leads people to adopt the 'bai lan' attitude."

But the reality is not quite as state media suggested, says Sal Hang, a 29-year-old creative industry professional in Beijing. He says that for his generation of young Chinese, this attitude of letting things rot is likely to be caused by a lack of social mobility and increased uncertainty in today's China.

"Unlike my parents' generation, young Chinese today have much bigger expectations, but there are many more uncertainties for us, too. For example, we cannot make any long-term plans for our lives anymore, because we do not know what is going to happen to us even five years down the road."

Saturday, May 28, 2022

Re: Nine Meals from Anarchy - Doug Casey's International Man

Good points.

On Sat, May 28, 2022 at 5:55 AM Albert wrote:
People will do anything to feed themselves and their family. This is another reason the Democratic Party will suffer in the mid-terms. I had a long discussion with some friends regarding what Biden could possibly do to make things worse than he all ready has. The most common answer was to start a war with Russia. However, no one really considered damaging the food supply. It really doesn't matter if it's done intentionally or unintentionally. It's hard for me accept Biden's administration could be short sighted in regards to baby formula. The shortage of baby formula will cost him severely at the polls. Women don't forget easily if at all. They won't forget the baby formula shortage and the fear it put in their minds. Stack this on top of calling mother's domestic terrorists because they challenged school boards across the country when they discovered the government was indoctrinating their children with Critical Race Theory. No reasonable mother wants their children taught how to hate and self-loathe from public school teachers. Anyways, back to a food shortage, this can turn into a terrible tragedy because it effects everyone. I recommend the government pay attention to the two great motivators of mankind: inspiration or desperation. Unfortunately, we are getting closer everyday to the latter.

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 10:07 PM John wrote:
I don't know anything about this website, but I like this quote...

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."


Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?

"Today's children, as they become more politically aware, will be much more radical than their parents, simply because there will be no other choice for them. This emergent radicalism is already taking people by surprise. The Green New Deal (GND), a term presently most associated with 29-year-old US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has provoked a wildly unhinged backlash from the "pro free market" wing, who argue that it's a Trojan horse, nothing more than an attempt to piggyback Marxism onto the back of climate legislation.

The criticism feels ridiculous. Partly because the GND is far from truly radical and already represents a compromise solution, but mainly because the radical economics isn't a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below "absolutely catastrophic" is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

Right now we can, with a massive investment of effort by 2030, just about keep the warming level below 1.5C. This is "bad, but manageable" territory. Failing to put that effort in sees the world crossing more severe temperature barriers that would lead to outcomes like ecosystem collapse, ocean acidification, mass desertification, and coastal cities being flooded into inhabitability.

We will simply have to throw the kitchen sink at this. Policy tweaks such as a carbon tax won't do it. We need to fundamentally re-evaluate our relationship to ownership, work and capital."

1.  They keep moving the goalpost.  I have seen videos from a decade ago stating that we were on track to increase the average atmospheric temperature by 3 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, and that would be bad, but if we can get it down to 2 degrees Celsius then that would be manageable.  However, in recent years, I have seen videos stating that we are on track to increase the temperature by 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, and that would be bad, but if we can get it down to 1.5 degrees Celsius then that would be manageable.

In the years prior to all these predictions, I was seeing dire predictions of a temperature change of 5 to 12 degrees Celsus by the year 2100.

The reason for these changes is that some of the very dire predictions of the past haven't come true.  They have made claims that the polar ice caps would have melted by now and that we would have a billion climate refugees.

If you look at the data, it has taken 140 years for the temperature to go up one degree Celsus.  These changes are very slow and don't represent a crisis.  Should we lose some coastlines, people have plenty of time to adapt, or build floodwalls.

2.  There is a difference between what the science is saying about climate change and what the politicians are saying about climate change.  It is a difference between caution with big levels of uncertainty baked into the predictions, versus alarmism.

3.  Climate Alarmism ignores the enormous benefits of carbon fuels and CO2.  Our entire food supply runs on carbon fuels.  Atmospheric CO2 is a valuable resource that is a necessary food for plants.  Over the last 40 million years, the atmospheric levels of CO2 have been in a steep and dangerous decline due to natural processes that sequester carbon, while the recent increase in the level of CO2 has resulted in the greening of the Earth, increased food production, increased rainfall, and a shrinking of deserts, contrary to the opposite predictions.

4.  Should we need to, we could use a technique called "Iron Fertilization" to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.  However, I think that this would be counterproductive.

5.  During the last 2.5 million years we have technically been in an ice age, dominated by long periods of mass glaciation covering much of the northern hemisphere, with only brief ten thousand year warm periods like the one we are living in now.

6.  Capitalism is really a free market, which is your right to own property and own a business.    My retirement fund is invested in the S&P 500, which technically means that I am invested in hundreds of businesses.

7.  Socialism takes away all these rights in the name of euphemistic terms like fairness and environmental protection.  However, the net result is slavery, or at best tyranny.  The government will tell you what you can own, where to live, where you can work, and what you must do.

8.  Rahm Emanual said, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."   Nobody voluntarily goes into a prison unless they are more afraid of what is outside the prison.   People don't voluntarily give up their freedom unless they are afraid of a crisis.  For this reason, the political left is always trying to justify infringement on our freedom by telling us there is a crisis.  (This is "The Walking Dead" theory of socialism promoted by Dan Bongino.  In the show, "The Walking Dead", the survivors of a Zombie Apocalypse try to hide inside a prison because it is well fortified.)  

9.  The real goals of the political left are about power. It is about who is in charge and who gets to run things.

10.  True socialism, which means that the state owns the means of production, is unsustainable.  No socialist system has been able to keep itself going without adopting some free-market measures.

11.  When confronted over their ideas, the left tends to change its definitions.  They will assert that they never meant what they said previously and that the rest of us are just too stupid to understand their theories.  They also claim that they want one thing, like a Nordic-style welfare state with a capitalist economy, while out of the other side of their mouth claim that they want to get rid of capitalism.

Friday, May 27, 2022

Nine Meals from Anarchy - Doug Casey's International Man

I don't know anything about this website, but I like this quote...

"There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy."

It's The Small Things, Charlie Brown — Official Trailer

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-2VQe7JcuE

I think that they have ruined my beloved Peanuts.

It is going eco-friendly over a weed.

Vaccine Lies?

FYI.

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 10:34 AM Albert wrote:
The lies about Covid vaccine keep co I got. I think there is no end to it.



---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John Coffey <john2001plus@gmail.com>
To: Albert

What lies do you think are being told?  The vaccines were very effective against the original variant and became less effective as the virus evolved.  This was expected.

Being vaccinated produces much better results than not being vaccinated.

"The age-standardized IRR for cases in unvaccinated versus fully vaccinated persons was 13.9 during April–May and progressively declined to 8.7 during June, 5.1 during July–November, and 3.1 during December, coinciding with the periods of Delta emergence, Delta predominance, and Omicron emergence, respectively. This decline suggests a change in crude VE for infection from 93% during April–May, to 89% during June, 80% during July–November, and to 68% during December. Age-standardized IRRs for deaths among unvaccinated versus fully vaccinated persons were relatively stable; crude VE for deaths was 95% during April–May, 94% during June, and 94% during July–November.

Rates of COVID-19 cases were lowest among fully vaccinated persons with a booster dose, compared with fully vaccinated persons without a booster dose, and much lower than rates among unvaccinated persons during October–November (25.0, 87.7, and 347.8 per 100,000 population, respectively) and December 2021 (148.6, 254.8, and 725.6 per 100,000 population, respectively) (Table 2)."

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm7104e2.htm


Tuesday, May 17, 2022

The Cycles of Revolutions in Our Midst › American Greatness

At a time of impending recession, runaway inflation, and climbing interest rates, universities are charging students thousands of dollars in increased tuition and fees to subsidize an unproductive diversity, equity, and inclusion industry. And like all good commissariats, the DEI apparatchiks produce no research, do no teaching, and bully and repress those who do.

Their chief legacy is the millions of opportunistic mediocrities emerging from the shadows to mouth wokester shibboleths about climate change, diversity, equity, and inclusion, identity politics, and transgenderism, while damning the customs, traditions, history, and values of a prior society that alone is responsible for their very affluence and leisure. 

The stuff of life—water storage for agriculture, gas and oil production for transportation and home livability, building materials for shelter, deterrent police to ensure safe streets, and competent medical officials and scientists—is now subordinated to ideological censure and audit. All that is not a sustainable proposition for a sophisticated but vulnerable multiracial democracy of 330 million. Nihilist ideology finally trickles down to shelves empty of baby formula, idled diesel semis, and parked cars left open to thieves in hopes they will merely steal rather than also vandalize. Boutique university theories turn deadly when any society is unhinged enough to adopt them.

So this cannibalistic woke revolution is no Wobbly mine take-over, no 1960s Woodstock, not even a Black Panther, Weatherman, or Symbionese Liberation Army violent spasm. Instead, wokeism is so institutionalized that, like the Soviet Party or the adherents of Mao's little red book, joining the virtue-signaling wokesters is seen as a smart career move. Going woke is a bully's paradise, an indemnity against a past ill-considered tweet or a future peccadillo. Indeed, it is quasi-religious groupthink proselytizing. 

The world is fragmenting and changing in all different directions. Unfortunately, contemporary America is offering no guidance. To the extent it seeks to lead and inspire, its current elite wish to take other nations and cultures down a nihilist pathway of self-loathing that few wish to follow.

Title IX charges for pronouns

Begin forwarded message:

From: Larry

A Wisconsin school district has filed sexual harassment complaints against three middle schoolers for calling a classmate by a wrong pronoun.

The school district in Kiel, a city of 3,600 residents, has charged the three eighth-graders at the Kiel Middle School with sexual harassment after an incident in April in which the students refused to use "they" to refer to a classmate who had switched pronouns a month before the alleged incident, according to reports.

"I received a phone call from the principal …forewarning me, letting me know that I was going to be receiving an email with sexual harassment allegations against my son," said Rosemary Rabidoux, whose 13-year-old son Braden is one of the students charged with sexual harassment.

"I immediately went into shock," she continued in an interview with FOX 11. "I'm thinking sexual harassment? That's rape, that's inappropriate touching, that's incest. What has my son done?"

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty is defending the accused students, and claims that misuse of pronouns is not covered by Title IX, the US Education Department's statute that protects people from discrimination based on sex in education.

"Title IX sexual harassment typically covers things like rape, dating violence, quid pro quo sexual favors — really egregious stuff," WILL's deputy counsel Luke Berg told the network. "There's nothing even remotely close to that alleged in this case."

Kiel, Wisconsin school charges kids for using wrong pronouns (nypost.com)


The school board of Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Fairfax, Virginia, is reviewing updated rules that could potentially expose students to suspension or expulsion for "maliciously misgendering" their peers based on "frequency and intensity."

The Fairfax County Public Schools Students Rights and Responsibilities (SRR) handbook, which will be voted on May 26, includes in its updated version rules that make "malicious deadnaming" and "malicious misgendering" of classmates a Level 4 offense, which allows for a suspension up to five days "if frequency and intensity are present," according to page 19 of the document.

"Using slurs based upon the actual or perceived gender identity" is forbidden under the rules of the document, "which includes, but is not limited to, malicious deadnaming or malicious misgendering."

The document defines "deadnaming" as "when someone, intentionally or not, refers to a person who is transgender or gender-expansive by a name other than their own chosen name."

The handbook explains that "Level 4 responses" include individualized intervention that often requires disciplinary action. The principal is able to refer such violations to the superintendent, which the document says "may result in a number of different responses based on circumstances and rarely results in an expulsion."

Fairfax County Schools may suspend for 'malicious misgendering' (nypost.com)

Monday, May 16, 2022

The dangers of the COVID-19 spike protein

The dangers of the spike protein.

"SARS-CoV-2 Spike Proteins Disrupt the Blood-Brain Barrier, Potentially Raising Risk of Neurological Damage in COVID-19 Patients"



"Recent publications provide new findings that may help decipher the pathogenesis of long-COVID. One paper reported perivascular inflammation in brains of deceased patients with COVID-19, while others showed that the spike protein could damage the endothelium in an animal model, that it could disrupt an in vitro model of the blood-brain barrier (BBB), and that it can cross the BBB resulting in perivascular inflammation. Moreover, the spike protein appears to share antigenic epitopes with human molecular chaperons resulting in autoimmunity and can activate toll-like receptors (TLRs), leading to release of inflammatory cytokines. Moreover, some antibodies produced against the spike protein may not be neutralizing, but may change its conformation rendering it more likely to bind to its receptor. As a result, one wonders whether the spike protein entering the brain or being expressed by brain cells could activate microglia, alone or together with inflammatory cytokines, since protective antibodies could not cross the BBB, leading to neuro-inflammation and contributing to long-COVID. Hence, there is urgent need to better understand the neurotoxic effects of the spike protein."

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12035-021-02696-0

"A lot of people think of it as a respiratory disease, but it's really a vascular disease," says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. "That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings."

"If you remove the replicating capabilities of the virus, it still has a major damaging effect on the vascular cells, simply by virtue of its ability to bind to this ACE2 receptor, the S protein receptor, now famous thanks to COVID,"

https://www.salk.edu/news-release/the-novel-coronavirus-spike-protein-plays-additional-key-role-in-illness/

COVID-19 spike proteins may cause neurological issues

"Researchers from the University of Bristol have found that, in cells in a dish in the lab, the spike protein binds to cells called pericytes which line the small vessels of the heart. This binding triggers a cascade of changes which disrupt normal cell function, and can lead to the release of chemicals that cause inflammation. This happened even when the protein was no longer attached to the virus.

There is some previous evidence to suggest that following Covid-19 illness, the spike protein can remain in the bloodstream after the virus has gone and travel far from the site of infection. This research could help explain and ultimately treat some of the effects of severe Covid-19 infection, where levels of the virus are particularly high. "

https://www.bhf.org.uk/what-we-do/news-from-the-bhf/news-archive/2021/august/covid-19-spike-protein-binds-to-and-changes-cells-in-the-heart


 "while other papers showed that the spike protein by itself (without being part of the corona virus) can damage endothelial cells and disrupt the blood-brain barrier. These findings may be even more relevant to the pathogenesis of long-COVID syndrome that may affect as many as 50% of those infected with SARS-CoV-2. "


"Very recently, Tavassoly et al. proposed a view that seeded protein aggregation by SARS-CoV-2 could be attributed to long-term post-infection complications including neurodegeneration [4]. They suggested that SARS-CoV-2 spike protein S1 region binds to heparin and heparin binding proteins (HBPs) present in brain which are prone to self-assembly, aggregation, and fibrillation processes. They also showed that the peptide from S protein (S–CoV-peptide; ∼150 aa) has more aggregation formation propensity than the known aggregation-prone proteins, suggesting that this peptide is prone to act as functional amyloid and form toxic aggregates. Thus, the heparin binding and aggregation propensity of S1 protein has been suggested the ability of S1 to form amyloid and toxic aggregates that can act as seeds to aggregate many of the misfolded brain proteins and can ultimately leads to neurodegeneration. It has been suggested that SARS-CoV-2 infection invades the CNS by controlling protein synthesis machinery, disturbs endoplasmic reticulum and mitochondrial function and increases the accumulation of misfolded proteins, thereby activates protein aggregation, mitochondrial oxidative stress, apoptosis and neurodegeneration [3,5,10].

Interestingly, it has been shown that HSV-1 spike protein binds to heparin and increases the aggregation of amyloid β (Aβ42) peptides on its surface spikes [11]. This study suggests that the heparin-binding site of the spike protein might act as a binding site for Aβ42 peptides and thus could dock to the viral surface and catalyze aggregation of Aβ42. As the receptor binding domain (RBD) of SARS-CoV-2, which is located within the S1 subunit of spike glycoprotein has several heparin binding sites [[12], [13], [14]], the same mechanism of aggregation of neurodegeneration causing proteins such as Aβ, α-synuclein, tau, prions, and TDP-43 can be observed in COVID-19 infection in the brain."





The vaccine spike protein is different.


In actual fact, the two spike proteins behave very differently in the body. According to Health Feedback, the spike proteins generated by Covid-19 vaccines differ in three key ways to those attached to SARS-CoV-2. Firstly, in the case of the vaccines, the cells mostly break down the spike proteins into fragments. Secondly, the spike protein generated by a Covid-19 vaccine doesn't assemble into new viral particles, unlike the spike protein from SARS-CoV-2. Thirdly, the spike protein in Covid-19 vaccines is genetically modified to enhance the immune response and to stop it binding to cell receptors in the same way the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein would.


 

'Toxic' spike protein claims misinterpret vaccine study

"There is no spike protein in the vaccines first of all. The amounts that are made after the mRNA is injected are very small and it almost exclusively stays locally. It is nowhere near the amount he was talking about," Dr Ratner said.

US fact checking website Health Feedback, which uses experts to verify claims about health science, said Dr Bridle's statement "rests on the assumption that if the viral spike protein causes cardiovascular toxicity in COVID-19 patients, the spike protein produced in vaccinated people should be toxic as well".

However, Health Feedback said this assumption was incorrect: "While both mRNA vaccines and viral vector vaccines carry the instructions to produce the entire spike protein, the cells break down much of the protein into small fragments. Furthermore, unlike infection, the spike protein from COVID-19 vaccination doesn't get assembled into new viral particles."

Prof Munro told AAP FactCheck that mRNA vaccines were "proving to be incredibly effective and safe" in protecting both the recipients and others from COVID-19, backing up clinical trials which "consistently demonstrated an excellent safety profile".




Will spike proteins generated through COVID vaccines cause illnesses to spread in schools?



"Vaccine skeptics have seized on the study to cast doubt on the safety of vaccines. But a review of the study's findings shows that the concerns raised by vaccine doubters are much ado about nothing.

The Study

The vascular endothelium is an important player in the illness and death associated with COVID-19. The endothelium is a system of cells that line and protect the inside of blood vessels. SARS-CoV2 injures the endothelium leading to blood clots, heart attack, pulmonary embolism, and stroke. Despite the established link between COVID-19 and these cardiovascular complications, the mechanism by which they develop is unknown.

Researchers from Jiaotong University; the University of California, San Diego; and the Salk Institute used a pseudovirus coated with spike protein to investigate the effects of the viral protein on endothelial cells. Pseudoviruses – which were first developed over 50 years ago – contain the outer shell of the virus, but they lack the viral genes needed to reproduce.

Hamsters treated with the spike protein coated pseudovirus showed lung damage similar to that seen in humans infected with SARS-CoV2. When researchers added pseudovirus to cultured endothelial cells they found that the mitochondria inside the cells were injured. Since mitochondria are responsible for providing energy to cells, their dysfunction can cause cell death.

When isolated pulmonary arteries were exposed to the spike protein carrying pseudovirus there was some disruption in the ability of the blood vessels to dilate. The decreased ability to expand blood vessels that serve the lungs could impair the ability of the body to take up oxygen from lungs that are damaged by the virus.

The novelty of this study was the discovery that the spike protein itself causes damage, and that the pathway triggered by the spike protein could explain the widespread cardiovascular complications that develop in COVID-19 patients.

A Twisted Tale

Shortly after Lei and colleagues published their study, vaccine skeptics touted the findings as proof that newly developed COVID-19 vaccines are dangerous. Afterall, if COVID-19 vaccines produce spike protein to trigger immunity, and that same spike protein causes injury, then vaccines are really no different than the disease they are designed to prevent.

The problem with these claims is that science doesn't support their arguments.

The Long Road to Perdition....

In order to damage the endothelium of blood vessels, COVID-19 vaccines have to enter the vascular system and infect cells that circulate in the blood. Data collected by the European Medicines Agency shows that no significant amount of vaccine enters the circulation (3). The confinement of the expressed spike protein away from the circulatory system significant prevents it from causing damage to the vascular endothelium.


Redesigning the Spike Protein

The spike protein attaches SARS-CoV2 to cells through a receptor called ACE2. In order to fully interact, the spike protein must undergo a conformational change.

A research team lead by Dr. Barney Graham from the Vaccine Research Center at the NIH National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases created an engineered form of the spike protein that is unable to make the shape change required to effectively bind to cells (5). The Pfizer/BioNTech, Moderna, Novavax, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines all use this inactivated spike protein, which means any spike protein that is produced by the vaccine is not able to be activated. This safety-switch limits the ability of the spike protein to bind ACE2 and limits its ability to cause damage.

Stuck in a Hole

In addition to engineering the spike protein so it can not be fully activated the protein is tagged with an extra piece called a "transmembrane anchor" (6). The transmembrane anchor allows the spike protein to appear on the surface – or membrane – of the cell, but it is held in place by the anchor. This prevents the spike protein from drifting away and creates a fixed target for the immune system to recognize the foreign protein."

https://covid19resources.ca/2021/05/13/the-thorny-problem-of-covid-19-vaccines-and-spike-proteins/

So far, there is no scientific evidence available that suggests that spike proteins created in our bodies from the COVID-19 vaccines are toxic or damaging our organs. COVID-19 vaccines are relatively new and long-term side effects are yet to be known. However, the vaccines have met the safety standards of many government and international safety agencies.

Several systems help us monitor vaccine safety. In the United States these include the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), The Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), the Post-License Rapid Immunization Safety Monitoring (PRISM), and the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment Project (CISA). These systems are used by scientists to monitor side effects and any other patterns of risks from vaccines.

The COVID-19 vaccine has been administered to 135 million people in the United States. As expected with any vaccine, some fully vaccinated people still got sick, hospitalized, and/or died. These "breakthrough cases" are a very small percentage of those vaccinated (<0.001%) and are being studied to detect any relevant patterns.

So far no scientific evidence is available that gives credence to claims that spike proteins created from vaccines travel in our bloodstreams. Research shows that spike proteins stay stuck to the surface of the cells around the vaccine's injection site. They are not known to wander around to other parts of the body.

A very tiny dose of the vaccine does make it to the bloodstream (about 1%), but as soon as it gets to the liver, the enzymes there destroy it completely. The U.S. CDC refers to the spike protein made from the vaccine as "harmless."



But researchers and health officials told FactCheck.org there is no "mistake" and that there is no evidence to support Bridle's claims.

There is no evidence that the spike protein in vaccines "is toxic or that it lingers at any toxic level in the body after vaccination," an FDA spokesperson told us in an email.

Jason McLellan, a structural biologist at the University of Texas at Austin who has been studying spike proteins in other coronaviruses for years and whose work was fundamental for the development of COVID-19 vaccines, said Bridle's statements are not correct.  

"The spike protein is not pathogenic. It is not a toxin," McLellan told us in an email. "I have not seen any data to support what Bridle claims."




How long does the mRNA vaccine stay in the body?
https://youtu.be/dTXnCcBHGDM?t=58

"The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines work by introducing mRNA (messenger RNA) into your muscle cells. The cells make copies of the spike protein and the mRNA is quickly degraded (within a few days). The cell breaks the mRNA up into small harmless pieces. mRNA is very fragile; that's one reason why mRNA vaccines must be so carefully preserved at very low temperatures."


Does the COVID-19 vaccine cause Prion disease?




Safety of the COVID-19 mRNA vaccines.

"The clinical trials for the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines found both to be safe overall. When serious side effects did occur, they happened at comparable rates between people who had received the vaccine and those who had received a placebo injection."


"Notably, the study identified 34 cases of heart inflammation in patients aged 12 to 39 years. 85% of these cases occurred in males. 82% of these people were hospitalized for a median of 1 day. The authors calculated that among patients aged 12 to 39 years, there is a slight risk of 6.3 additional myocarditis cases per million doses during the first week after vaccination.

However, a separate study recently published in the New England Journal of Medicine shows that heart inflammation events are far more likely after COVID-19 infection than vaccination."







"But because reinfection is possible and COVID-19 can cause severe medical complications, it's recommended that people who have already had COVID-19 get a COVID-19 vaccine. A recent study showed that unvaccinated people who already had COVID-19 are more than twice as likely as fully vaccinated people to be reinfected with COVID-19.

Recent research also suggests that people who got COVID-19 in 2020 and then received mRNA vaccines produce very high levels of antibodies that are likely effective against current and, possibly, future variants. Some scientists call this hybrid immunity."

Why You Should NOT Move to Florida!

Sunday, May 15, 2022

The Warmongers: A non-fiction book: Katz, Howard S.: 9780916728069: Books: Amazon.com


Around 1989 or 1990, my manager lent me this book, which I read.  It is a conspiracy theory.  It accuses the banking system of promoting war to make money.

What I find interesting is that near the end of the book he predicts that the cabal is gearing up for war with China.  At the time, this seemed very unlikely.  It seems more possible now.

Saturday, May 7, 2022

Socialism DOES Work | Jeremy Corbyn | Oxford Union

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZvAvNJL-gE

"The great lesson of the 20nth century is that socialism is a failure."

"After the fall of communism, everybody in the world agreed that socialism was a failure. Everybody in the world, more or less, agreed that capitalism was a success. And every capitalist country in the world apparently deduced from that what the West needed was more socialism."


What Orwell Believed

I am shocked to learn that George Orwell was a socialist. 

It is ironic that the type of government he believed in, Democratic Socialism, leads to Totalitarianism. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x57DvB3Oc8&t=596s

Why Do We Believe Things That Aren't True?

The 60's Radicals America Forgot

This is long, but very informative.




Best wishes,

John Coffey

Friday, May 6, 2022

Re: I could not believe Bork did not believe in Natual law

For people to have natural rights, there must be some entity granting those rights.  Since the ways of God are at best kind of mysterious, I'm not willing to say that rights are God granted.

People by their nature have the tendency to prefer free choice.  People also have the tendency to exploit, enslave and kill their fellow human beings.   We band together to form government to protect ourselves from externalities.  Thus rights become a legal issue and are sometimes controversial as to what constitutes a right.  I prefer to stick to the Constitution because I think that the Founders had a pretty good thing going.

We could say that natural rights derive from the fact that we own our own bodies. I don't disagree, but this seems limited to me because most of the things we do involve interaction with other people.  Somebody might think that they have a right to my property, and only a legal system protects that.  In order to protect rights, the community has to have a set of core beliefs that they share.

Somebody had to decide to form a town where I live, on land that was probably conquered, and that my land could be privately owned and sold.

--
Best wishes,

John Coffey




On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 1:17 PM Larry  wrote:
Then I read this amazing 1992 article by Bork explaining why he did not...




conquer and honor and lift up all those have gotten in the way

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: John

Does that sentence make any sense?

On Fri, May 6, 2022 at 1:49 PM Larry wrote:
I might point out — and Jill and I talk about this: If we don't get smart in this country, and the other team doesn't understand what's going on — you know, 25 out of every 100 children in grades kindergarten through senior in high school speak Spanish.  Twenty-five out of every one hundred.  It's overwhelmingly in the interest not only of those kids, but of all Americans that we invest — we invest in the community.  And we'll conquer and honor and lift up all those folks who, in fact, are — have gotten in the way.
Biden 5/5/22



Hitler and Economics | Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

Socialism Does NOT Work | Daniel Hannan

Was National Socialism fascist?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gfYbEk6rBY

The Fascists wrote, "Everything in the state, nothing outside the state." They claimed that all industries must be used to support the state. Mussolini and his acolytes had been communists before Fascism. Commentaries tend to dance around this state control, which makes Fascism closer to Socialism. National Socialism was socialist and so was Fascism, but people prefer to not focus on the socialism aspect of it.

This video spends half its time talking about and criticizing semantics, so I feel like it misses the mark. After World War II, the political left tried to associate fascism with the political right and mostly succeeded with this smear campaign. However, this was to cover up how they initially embraced Fascism as a form of socialism.

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Tuesday, May 3, 2022

Violent 11-year-old girl is terrorizing unsuspecting people in Boston. Cops know all about her — but can't do much because of her age.

CNN guest's appearance goes viral as he delivers hysterical rant on the need to control unfettered free speech - TheBlaze

"This is dangerous!" he shouted. "We can't think anymore in this country — we don't have people ... in Congress who can make regulations that can make it work. I think we can look to the Western countries in Europe for how they are trying to limit it, but you need — you need — controls on this. You need regulation. You cannot let these guys control discourse in this country or we are headed to hell. We are there. Trump opened the gates of hell and now they're chasing us down."

Sunday, May 1, 2022

Redefining American Capitalism | Libertarianism

I sometimes get annoyed by this guy for his leftism.  He presents some interesting thoughts here.  I share his skepticism of Ayn Rand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kWjJPQXCyc

Capitalism is often used as a pejorative.  I think that the correct term is a "free market", meaning that you are free to make choices.  The opposite of a free market is different degrees of tyranny.  

This notion of deregulation in 2008 is inaccurate. There were far more regulations in 2008 than in 2000. Part of that regulation was the Community Reinvestment Act, which was a real thing, requiring banks to lend to people who were not otherwise creditworthy. Since Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs) were buying up most of the loans, this removed risk from the loan market. Banks aren't normally in the business of making bad loans until the government gets involved.

The Man Who Accidentally Killed The Most People In History