Sunday, January 29, 2023

Re: Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam

When I posted this to Facebook, someone I know got into a real huff, saying that I don't understand how incredible the technology is.  We went back and forth a bit, but today I wrote this:

There is something about this that I don't understand or my understanding is faulty. The blockchain is essentially a ledger entry stating that you own something distributed over a large number of computers. Instead of a few computers being involved, say at the stock exchange and your broker, a large number of computers have to hold this information, consuming power. You get buzzwords like decentralized, distributed, and public, but how is that better than a centralized ledger?

And since this is largely unregulated, you are dependent upon the goodwill of many actors. We have already seen multiple frauds related to cryptocurrency.

Here I am questioning the value of blockchain, and maybe it does have a value on a technical level that I don't understand, as opposed to before where I was questioning the value of the assets like Bitcoin which I think have no intrinsic value.



On Tue, Jan 24, 2023 at 9:42 PM John  wrote:
I think that the title says it all.  

Forty years ago people thought that antiques were a profitable investment.  It was driven by a high demand for antiques, so people started looking at antiques as an investment.  This was based on the "bigger fool theory", which was that you would buy the item solely as an investment, possibly paying more than its intrinsic value, and you hoped that there was a bigger fool out there who would pay you more money for it.  The problem is that somebody is left holding the bag when demand goes down.  This is a characteristic of many financial bubbles, the first of which started with tulips.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

The problem with crypto-anything is that it doesn't have an intrinsic value and the value is only driven by hype.  As long as the hype continues, you can make money.  But crypto doesn't have a use case that justifies its existence.  Instead of being a useful alternate currency, it has turned into a get-rich-quick scheme.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORdWE_ffirg


Thursday, January 26, 2023

Bill Maher goes NUCLEAR on COVID Tyranny

https://youtube.com/shorts/0MXPmTdfIkI?feature=share

I agree about mandates. I disagree about vaccine hesitancy in the midst of a deadly worldwide pandemic.

If this were smallpox, with a death rate 30 times higher, how many people would be opposed to the vaccine? But when it is your family member who dies from COVID-19, the death is no less significant.

Best wishes,

John Coffey

Tuesday, January 24, 2023

Vaccines



I tried really hard to convince one of my friends in Utah about vaccines, but he will have none of it. He told me that he doesn't believe in any vaccine. Therefore, I told him I don't want to waste any more of my time and will stop bugging him about it.

Unfortunately, he is not a lone case. I have several friends who are opposed to the COVID-19 vaccines. Only 68% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated against COVID-19.

I could have asked him what he would do if a rabid animal bit him?  There is only one cure, and it is a vaccine. Otherwise, it is certain death.

Why is it that Polio and Smallpox are no longer a problem?

--

Crypto: The World’s Greatest Scam

I think that the title says it all.  

Forty years ago people thought that antiques were a profitable investment.  It was driven by a high demand for antiques, so people started looking at antiques as an investment.  This was based on the "bigger fool theory", which was that you would buy the item solely as an investment, possibly paying more than its intrinsic value, and you hoped that there was a bigger fool out there who would pay you more money for it.  The problem is that somebody is left holding the bag when demand goes down.  This is a characteristic of many financial bubbles, the first of which started with tulips.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

The problem with crypto-anything is that it doesn't have an intrinsic value and the value is only driven by hype.  As long as the hype continues, you can make money.  But crypto doesn't have a use case that justifies its existence.  Instead of being a useful alternate currency, it has turned into a get-rich-quick scheme.

Monday, January 23, 2023

I totally forgot that happened during 9/11 !! | JRE #1929 with Louis C.K.

https://youtu.be/niZpfOalvJM

Vaccines Will Not Produce Worse Variants | Science | AAAS

'And past antibodies, there's the whole T-cell system - those T cells are looking to recognize human cells that have been attacked by the virus, whereupon they move in to kill them off before they can break open like a piñata and release a big pile of new viral particles. They are primed for this task by having pieces of viral proteins presented to them by other immune cells, and these T cells become specifically sensitized to the appearance of these in the future - these pieces get taken to the surface of infected cells by the MHC glycoproteins where the T cells can detect them. So you can see that in all of these cases, the key is protein surface recognition, which tells you how viruses can work their way around to evading such attacks. They have to change their surface proteins in such a way that they can still function, but that defeats that antibody/T-cell binding that the immune system has settled in on.

That's not so easy, because (for one thing) there are an enormous number of different antibodies involved (and an enormous number of T-cell recognition proteins). There are any number of ways to bind to a given protein target, and the adaptive immune system's whole function is to be ready for all kinds of targets and to hit them in all kinds of ways. And there's that constraint mentioned above: the virus still has to be able to function! Losing the entire Spike protein or mutating it completely beyond recognition would definitely evade vaccine-induced immunity, but it would also definitely produce a coronavirus that couldn't infect human cells in the way it's completely evolved to do. Coming up with a completely new infection route is (mutationally) extremely costly and complex, and not something that can be done "on the fly". Various coronaviruses use different human cell surface proteins to do their attack, but these have gradually developed and diverged over evolutionary time (hundreds of thousands, or millions of years) through untold numbers of tiny steps.

But it can be done, in principle. And as with everything in evolution, if it gets done at all, it'll get done by similarly untold numbers of individual mutants, and mutants on top of those mutants, until something appears that can both avoid being inactivated by the immune response and still infect cells and reproduce. There is no guarantee that such a virus can exist, and there is no guarantee that it can't. Evaluating the number of possibilies is frankly beyond computation - we didn't, for example, see the details of the Delta variant coming, and if you'd given someone that exact sequence last year, there's no guarantee that they would have been able to predict how much more infectious it would be.

The more chances you give the coronavirus to reproduce, the more mutations it will explore. Its proofreading system for reproduction is pretty good but not perfect, and that's where the mutations come from. It's a numbers game all the way. The virus is not thinking about how to evade vaccine-induced immunity; it's throwing stuff randomly against every available wall in every available direction, and whatever sticks gets a chance to go on throwing some more. Remember, an unvaccinated person is still mounting an antibody defense against the virus - they're just having to do it from scratch, rather than having a pre-primed leg up like someone who's been vaccinated. The longer these infections go on inside human bodies, the more bets the virus gets to put down on the table. The good news is that so far, there is not much evidence that the virus is doing much evasion inside a given person during the course of normal infection.

So one key way to cut down on the odds of a nasty mutant popping up is to just keep the virus from reproducing so much. Cut down on the number of people it infects. When it does infect people, cut down on the amount of time it spends reproducing inside the body. These countermeasures are exactly what a mass vaccination program does. Fewer people get infected in the first place, and when they do get infected, their disease course tends in the great majority of cases to be shorter and milder. A nasty variant is almost certainly going to come up by accident, so let's not have so many accidents going on constantly around the clock, around the world.
...
a true vaccine-evading mutant is going to need a set of several mutations (off the existing variants) all at the same time. The vaccine-induced immune response looks like it's knocking down a lot of these intermediate-step mutations before they can keep on throwing off subsequent mutations on top of the first ones. These pathways are choked off before they can even get explored, and this "evolutionary smothering" is something that you don't see so dramatically when you're doing those in vitro experiments with specifically targeted small molecules mentioned at the top of this post. A broad antibody and T-cell response is a different thing altogether.

There is, then, every reason at both the population and individual level to expect that vaccination will strongly decrease the chances of a more dangerous coronavirus strain taking hold. If we'd had them earlier and were able to deploy them quickly and widely enough, we never would have seen the Delta variant in the first place. If we keep deploying them now, we will keep worse variants from even being able to form. Anyone who tells you that vaccines will make things worse is at best deeply misinformed and at worst lying to you for profit.'

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/vaccines-will-not-produce-worse-variants

Saturday, January 21, 2023

Comments on Climate Change

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNwcWe85Wnc

In addition to the stuff I usually write, I wrote the following...

The "Climate Realists" often get a bad rap and are made into straw men.  Almost nobody is denying that the average atmospheric temperature is going up nor that we are the cause.  However, there is a great deal more to this story.  It is important to note how fast the temperature is changing, and what the best solutions are to remedy this.

I seriously question the impartiality of the IPCC.  They are a government organization that is paid billions so they should try to be objective in how they arrive at their conclusions.  However, they refused to hire anyone who did not already believe in catastrophic man-made warming.  This is coming to the conclusion first, and then providing the evidence for it, rather than allowing the evidence to guide them impartially.  They also successfully demanded that scientific publications like Nature censor contrary opinions.  The former head of the IPCC, who got kicked out for sexual harassment, stated that anthropogenic catastrophic warming was his "religion", showing a complete lack of objectivity.  One-third of the people hired at the IPCC are members of an environmental lobbying organization, which for a government-paid organization is a complete conflict of interest.

Gas stove fumes and broken public health discourse

Before anyone is bothered by a political topic, let me say that this guy tries to be middle of the road, possibly slightly left of center by my standards.  He tries really hard to examine all sides of the issue, and I think he does a really thorough job here.


I'm personally not fond of gas stoves because I don't like having an open flame in my home.  My house came with a gas stove and I use it.

Some people were joking, and they really just meant this as a joke and it shouldn't be taken too seriously, "You can have my gas stove when you pry it from my cold dead fingers."

Politicians trying to control time...

Friday, January 20, 2023

This is pure EVIL. 😡 - YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NrSbVdhw_Sk



If you search Google over what country Shell Oil is from, you get the United States, but Shell is a subsidiary of Shell PLC, a company from The Netherlands, which apparently has a headquarters in London.  It was Shell PLC that was causing all the problems in Nigeria.

From what I can tell, it is more of an international company.

Jordan Peterson RESPONDS To His Retrainment

Bill Maher Speaks The Truth About Slavery

Meme the Left Day of - YouTube

Our Offer to Steven Crowder

This is an interesting soap opera between The Daily Wire and Stephen Crowder, both of which are prominent conservative streamers.  Although reportedly they were on friendly terms, Stephen Crowder took offense to an offer made by The Daily Wire to join their company and publicized their presumably confidential negotiations in an attack video.  

I don't see how The Daily Wire is at fault here.  If Crowder didn't like their offer then that should have been the end of it, or he could have tried to negotiate a better deal.

I think that even highly successful people let emotion cloud their reason, if not more so because they are highly successful.  Ego gets in the way.


A few years ago, Youtube streamers were on the fringe of media.  Now they are endorsing products in national ad campaigns.  I watch more Youtube than any other media or streaming service.

Facts That Can Save Your Life - Part 7

Newly discovered Fauci emails say COVID looked potentially 'engineered'

Wednesday, January 18, 2023

Toby Young | This House Believes Woke Culture Has Gone Too Far - 3/8 | Oxford Union - YouTube


Critical Race Theory emerged around 1960 as an offshoot of Critical Marxism Theory.  Inherent in its doctrine is the idea that contrary opinions are a form of violence and should not be tolerated.

Comedian Leaves Oxford Union SPEECHLESS


I do not believe that Climate Change is a serious problem.  It is a minor problem exaggerated.  It might not be a problem at all. 

The IPCC tends to use the worst-case scenario in its predictions.  One-third of the people on the IPCC are members of an environmental lobbying organization.  There is also a big difference between the IPCC report and the summary report written by and for politicians.

Tuesday, January 17, 2023

Tucker Carlson: This is very serious

This is a beyond-absurd conspiracy theory tying together different events like it was proof of anything.  The logic is so thin it is almost nonexistent.  I cannot watch Tucker Carlson anymore.  This is unfortunate because I used to like him.  When his wacko theory is proven false, will he apologize for misleading the American people?  

What concerns me is that I have friends who grab onto conspiracy theories like they are gospel.

Joe Rogan & Peter Zeihan discuss EV's

Monday, January 16, 2023

US Safety Agency to Consider Ban on Gas Stoves Amid Health Fears - Bloomberg

"A federal agency says a ban on gas stoves is on the table amid rising concern about harmful indoor air pollutants emitted by the appliances."

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-09/us-safety-agency-to-consider-ban-on-gas-stoves-amid-health-fears

'Then a member of that five-person commission suggested to Bloomberg News in a story this week that a ban on new gas stoves could be one of many options to be pursued in the future. But the member, Biden nominee Richard Trumka Jr., had previously failed to get his fellow commissioners to support even regulating stoves, as POLITICO's E&E News reported Tuesday. Instead, the commission plans to gather "public input" on stoves' health hazards and possible solutions.

"I am not looking to ban gas stoves and the CPSC has no proceeding to do so," Chair Alexander Hoehn-Saric later said in a statement.

By then, though, the issue had escalated to culture-war level.'


There is a pattern that I see repeated so often that it must be deliberate:  An outrageous idea becomes public.  There is a huge backlash.  Then the political left claims that we didn't understand and they never wanted to do what they previously said that they wanted to do.

Friday, January 13, 2023

Laughable Video from World Economic Forum Head on How to Gain Trust

Climate Science: What Does it Say? | Dr. Richard Lindzen

The Issue of Optimal Deprivation

The Most AWFUL Woman

CDC identifies possible 'safety concern' for certain people receiving COVID vaccines | Fox News

"Rapid-response investigation of the signal in the VSD raised a question of whether people 65 and older who have received the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine, Bivalent were more likely to have an ischemic stroke in the 21 days following vaccination compared with days 22-44 following vaccination."

In a statement to Fox News Digital, a spokesperson for Pfizer said, "Pfizer and BioNTech have been made aware of limited reports of ischemic stroke that have been observed in the CDC Vaccine Safety DataLink (VSD) database in people 65 and older following vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 Vaccine by Pfizer and BioNTech."

The agency also said that the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) managed by CDC and FDA has not seen an increase in reporting of ischemic strokes following the updated (bivalent) vaccine.

"Neither Pfizer and BioNTech nor the CDC or the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have observed similar findings across numerous other monitoring systems in the U.S. and globally and there is no evidence to conclude that ischemic stroke is associated with the use of the companies' COVID-19 vaccines," the spokesperson continued. 

"Compared to published incidence rates of ischemic stroke in this older population, the companies to date have observed a lower number of reported ischemic strokes following the vaccination with the Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent vaccine. The CDC continues to recommend vaccination with the Pfizer-BioNTech Omicron BA.4/BA.5-adapted bivalent COVID-19 vaccine for all authorized ages and indications."

Thursday, January 12, 2023

Bill Maher Makes Neil deGrasse Tyson Go Silent with His COVID Rant

sleeping position prevents dementia

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Larry 

Sleeping on your side is generally considered the healthiest sleeping position — this is because it gives good support for your spine, while also minimizing acid reflux.  

On Thu, Jan 12, 2023 at 9:52 AM Larry wrote:

Sleeping in a certain position helps lower the risk of dementia, studies have found.

Sleep expert Narwan Amini said: "Sleeping on your side has been found to be the most beneficial position for your brain, with the position helping your brain to clear out interstitial waste faster than other positions.

"This leads to multiple benefits including potentially reducing the risk of developing neurological diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's."

The sleeping position that slashes your risk of developing dementia (nypost.com)


Biden rules out gas-stove ban after Republican backlash

Wednesday, January 11, 2023

Mexico Has Become a War Zone

COVID vaccine related deaths

Andy Saffle
Well then someone needs to explain why the COVID Vaccinated men Are dropping like flies From Sudden Heart failure and that COVID Vaccinated men, for some odd reason have the highest Rates if Myocarditis ever seen...

Andy Saffle "Well then someone needs to explain why the COVID Vaccinated men Are dropping like flies From Sudden Heart failure".
This is a total lie.
"All the data listed in that story came from the VARES system".
With 200 million vaccinated people in the United States, a certain number of them are going to have adverse events regardless of whether they are vaccinated or not. The data showed a much lower death rate for vaccinated people, including non-COVID deaths.



John Coffey well that didn't age well did it.. I'm seeing 3 to 5 different #diedsuddenly stories daily. Mostly young athletes, men and women, died of some type of cardiac event... That MMA women prodigy who was 18 and literally just dropped dead.. her family released a photo of what the Morgue pulled out of her blood during embalming . I'm on top of this brother. I know of 200 others that have had similar clots pulled out during embalming... They only thing they have in common is the Covid Vaccine.. WHICH IS CAUSING MYOCARDITIS AND CLOTTING, and the manufacturers are admitting this.. they are also admitting this this MRNA tech.was never tested before release an authorization.. I'll gladly show some of the pictures of the clotting if you would like

Andy Saffle
John Coffey not even an hour difference and this one pops up( I know he isn't an athlete)


John Coffey here's another that popped this morning.. this guy definitely qualifies as an athlete


John Coffey
Anecdotal evidence is not scientific. People have been dying of heart attacks long before vaccines. The articles you quote don't mention the vaccine. Confirmation Bias causes people to believe Anecdotal evidence as proof because it confirms their preconceived notions.
We arrive at the truth through peer-reviewed studies that take into account how vaccines affect large groups of people.
The data shows that mRNA-vaccinated people have a lower death rate even from non-COVID illnesses. Whatever risk there may be is very low compared to the risk of COVID-19, which according to a study that I already quoted shows that the risk of myocarditis/pericarditis is 1000 to 2000 times higher with the disease than it is with the vaccine.
Although the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine was associated with rare blood clots, which caused it to be banned in some areas, there is no evidence that the mRNA vaccine causes blood clots.
Glenn Beck has trafficked in a ton of conspiracy theories. I don't consider him nor The Blaze to be a reliable source of information. You are being lied to by people who want to exploit you.
The most damning study I found said that the vaccine is associated with 2 deaths per million doses. Although that sounds high, that is low enough to be random noise when you consider that people die all the time from many causes. Meanwhile, in the United States, 1.1% of cases died from the disease with 1.1 million deaths. My cousin on her deathbed expressed regret about not getting the vaccine.

You can go through life believing in BS and that is your right. I just don't think that it is in your best interest. People who believe in these false theories put themselves and others at greater risk.

Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Brain Shrinkage and COVID-19: How the Virus Affects Your Brain

one 2022 study used two magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scans in 785 participants. Researchers found brain changes in the 401 cases who tested positive for COVID-19 between each scan. Changes included:

reduced gray matter (the outer layer of the brain)
tissue damage in areas of the brain connected to smell
decreased brain size

The study also found that the same participants who showed brain shrinkage were at a greater risk of experiencing cognitive decline. There was more tissue damage in the areas of the brain that control smell.

Fact Check-No evidence vaccination efforts are causing new COVID-19 variants | Reuters

There is no evidence that COVID-19 vaccinations have caused the original coronavirus to mutate. As explained here by the World Health Organization (WHO), when a virus is spreading widely in a population and infecting many people, it is more likely to mutate. "The more opportunities a virus has to spread, the more it replicates – and the more opportunities it has to undergo changes," the WHO says.

‘Grossly Inflated’: China Is Lying To The World About Its Population Crisis, Expert Says | The Daily Caller

Wednesday, January 4, 2023

COVID vaccine study raises questions about boosters | Sandusky Register Vaccines save lives, but multiple boosters for COVID may not help, study suggests

SANDUSKY — It turns out that COVID-19, and the efforts to fight it, still have some mysteries for scientists to puzzle over.

A new Cleveland Clinic study of vaccinations of thousands of its employees had a surprising finding: Employees with a high number of vaccine doses, including boosters, were more likely to contract COVID-19.

"The study found that the longer it has been since last exposure to the virus by infection or vaccination, the higher the risk of acquiring COVID-19. It also found that the higher the number of vaccine doses an individual previously received, the higher the risk of contracting COVID-19," according to a statement from the Cleveland Clinic summarizing the study.

The clinic said officials don't know what to make of the fact that the more-immunized employees also caught COVID-19 more often.

"It is unclear, at this time, why this was observed and how it should be interpreted, and more research is needed to either confirm or refute this finding. It's important to note that this paper has not yet been peer-reviewed," the statement said.

The study does not contradict massive evidence showing that the COVID-19 vaccination campaign saved many lives in the U.S. and abroad.

Vaccines remain "very effective" against severe disease and death, the study cites. And even critics of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's fast decision to approve the newest COVID-19 booster agree that COVID vaccinations saved many lives.


Could it be that multiple vaccinations cause people to be less careful?  

There is other evidence that the bivalent vaccine is very effective at preventing disease...


When compared with unvaccinated persons, VE of a bivalent booster dose received ≥7 days before illness onset (median = 29 days) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was 84%. Compared with persons who received ≥2 monovalent-only mRNA vaccine doses, relative VE of a bivalent booster dose was 73%. These early findings show that a bivalent booster dose provided strong protection against COVID-19–associated hospitalization in older adults and additional protection among persons with previous monovalent-only mRNA vaccination. All eligible persons, especially adults aged ≥65 years, should receive a bivalent booster dose to maximize protection against COVID-19 hospitalization this winter season. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/mm715152e2.htm?s_cid=mm715152e2_w

Why Bother Getting Married? - Jordan Peterson

Early Estimates of Bivalent mRNA Vaccine Effectiveness in Preventing COVID-19–Associated Hospitalization Among Immunocompetent Adults Aged ≥65 Years — IVY Network, 18 States, September 8–November 30, 2022 | MMWR

When compared with unvaccinated persons, VE of a bivalent booster dose received ≥7 days before illness onset (median = 29 days) against COVID-19–associated hospitalization was 84%. Compared with persons who received ≥2 monovalent-only mRNA vaccine doses, relative VE of a bivalent booster dose was 73%. These early findings show that a bivalent booster dose provided strong protection against COVID-19–associated hospitalization in older adults and additional protection among persons with previous monovalent-only mRNA vaccination. All eligible persons, especially adults aged ≥65 years, should receive a bivalent booster dose to maximize protection against COVID-19 hospitalization this winter season.