patrick.net

you’ve wrapped your identity, your career, and your grand plans up in your claims and if you believe them strongly enough you will reject evidence that would threaten your worldview and the rejection can get pretty intense. it can rise to the point of outright hallucination. you NEED this belief to remain whole. ...

they will grab anything no matter how absurd and counterfactual to preserve their cherished mantras.

“it’s not a recession.”

“vaccines were never supposed to stop the spread.”

“that wasn’t real socialism.”

this state of existence is somewhat desperate. it would be pitiable were it not so pernicious. ...




this is precisely why these “leaders” gravitate to doomsday ideologies like “millions will die from covid unless we grasp dictatorial control” and “we must take over the global economy and make everyone give up their cars and eat bugs or we all die in fiery cataclysm or watery grave in 10 years”?

they need these high stakes to justify such oppressive action. to act the utter oppressor, you must be saving humanity from itself and from vast, imminent harm. whether the members of the society themselves want to do this or not is literally of no moment. consent does not factor into “ends justify means.” only outcomes and crises averted.

it’s how they wake up every morning and really, truly believe that anyone who disagrees with them is the enemy and that they are on the side of goodness and light. ...

it also means they cannot hear you. you cannot reason with them or talk them down. these are zealots convinced they serve the collective. talk of “rights” or attempts to contradict “the science” go nowhere. you just get branded as one of the benighted to be silenced, censored, or trodden over on the road to a glorious future.

the history of such endeavors similarly cuts no ice. “we are the smarter guys and this is our time.”

their message will not change, only the manner in which they present it will.

and when that fails, they will come for you.

these are people so bent around their ideals they they can literally tell themselves that taking over the world, destroying the societal institutions of freedom, creating poverty and abject dependence upon the state, and rendering educational institutions indoctrination factories is a moral act.

Give it up for this French physicist who posted a photo of a sausage and had people believing it was a main sequence red dwarf star




It's a slice of sausage.

Eventually the man himself copped to the ruse:

In view of some comments, I feel compelled to clarify that this tweet showing an alleged snapshot of Proxima Centauri was a form of amusement. Let us learn to be wary of arguments from authority as much as of the spontaneous eloquence of certain images….

But what about the internal psychological processes at play within the United States HHS policy making group? The group which has been directly responsible for the amazingly unscientific and counterproductive decisions concerning bypassing normal bioethical, regulatory and clinical development norms to expedite genetic vaccine products (“Operation Warp Speed”), suppressing early treatment with repurposed drugs, mask and vaccine mandates, lockdowns, school closures, social devision, defamation and intentional character assassination of critics, and a wide range of massively disruptive and devastating economic policies. All have lived through these events, and have become aware of the many lies and misrepresentations (subsequently contradicted by data) which have been walked back or historically revised by Drs. Fauci, Collins, Birx, Walensky, Redfield, and even Mr. Biden. Is there a body of scholarship and academic literature which can help make sense of the group dynamics and clearly dysfunctional decision making which first characterized the “coronavirus taskforce” under Vice President Pence, and then continued in a slightly altered form through the Biden administration? ...

Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink to explain the disordered decision-making process that occurs in groups whose members work together over an extended period of time. His research into groupthink led to the wide acceptance of the power of peer pressure. According to Janis, there are several key elements to groupthink, including:

The group develops an illusion of invulnerability that causes them to be excessively optimistic about the potential outcomes of their actions.

Group members believe in the inherent accuracy of the group's beliefs or the inherent goodness of the group itself. Such an example can be seen when people make decisions based on patriotism. The group tends to develop negative or stereotyped views of people not in the group.

The group exerts pressure on people who disagree with the group's decisions.

The group creates the illusion that everyone agrees with the group by censoring dissenting beliefs. Some members of the group take it upon themselves to become “mindguards” and correct dissenting beliefs.

This process can cause a group to make risky or immoral decisions.

The group develops an illusion of invulnerability that causes them to be excessively optimistic about the potential outcomes of their actions.

Irving Janis developed the concept of groupthink to explain the disordered decision-making process that occurs in groups whose members work together over an extended period of time. His research into groupthink led to the wide acceptance of the power of peer pressure. According to Janis, there are several key elements to groupthink, including:

Peter McCullough, MD MPH
@P_McCulloughMD
Aug 7
96% of doctors took them and then later on they learned about the risks of neurological damage, blood clots, myocarditis. So they feel since they took the risk, their patients should bear that risk too. Its a form of fear-driven disordered thinking. Patients should probe them.

96% of doctors took them and then later on they learned about the risks of neurological damage, blood clots, myocarditis. So they feel since they took the risk, their patients should bear that risk too. Its a form of fear-driven disordered thinking. Patients should probe them.

AT&T phone reps are required to be vaccinated even though they work from home
I talked to an AT&T phone rep who has been working from home since March 2020. AT&T requires all such workers who work exclusively at home (and are never in the office) to be fully vaccinated.

If you are an AT&T phone rep who has been working from home since the start of the pandemic, AT&T requires you to be fully vaccinated to continue your employment (religious or medical exemptions are available).

Also, the union sided with the company in requiring vaccination for employees who work 100% at home.

The only possible explanation for such a requirement is that AT&T believes that the virus can be transmitted over the phone lines.

I would love to see that data on that one.

social contagion: is "long covid" often just "long parent"?
monkey see, monkey do, monkey pretend to be ill too!

want so see what social contagion looks like?

it looks like this:

Twitter avatar for @ShamezLadhani
Shamez Ladhani
@ShamezLadhani
1/ Our new preprint on Long Covid & Kids:

TOPLINE: Teenagers who had parents with long covid were significantly more likely to report long covid symptoms at 6 months after a positive OR negative SARS-CoV-2 PCR-test (CLoCK study)

Surprised?…




is "long covid" mostly a mental disease? ...

“long covid” is showing a stunning number of the markers of psychosomatic disease, social contagion, and of munchausen by proxy behavior whereby caregivers impose illnesses and maladies upon children to gain attention and approval by caring for them.

Gregory Poland, MD, director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group in Rochester, Minnesota, remains a steadfast vaccination advocate -- even though he developed tinnitus soon after receiving his second dose of COVID vaccine.

A little more than a year ago, Poland was driving back from the hospital after receiving his second shot when he nearly veered out of his lane.

"It was like someone suddenly blew a dog whistle in my ear," Poland told MedPage Today. "It has been pretty much unrelenting."

Since then, Poland said he has been experiencing what he describes as life-altering tinnitus, or ringing in the ear. It occurs in both ears, but is worse in the left than in the right.

He remains steadfast that opting to receive his booster -- after which his tinnitus briefly disappeared but then returned at a slightly higher pitch that made it just a bit less bothersome -- was the right move. After all, it would be "way too ironic" for a prominent vaccinologist to die of COVID, he said. He also worried about the possibility of contracting COVID and spreading it to his patients.

Yet Poland realizes his life may never be the same, and that many others may be grappling with the same reality. He continues to receive emails from other individuals across the country and around the world who say they have also developed tinnitus after COVID vaccination.

Poland believes there may be tens of thousands of people affected in the U.S. and potentially millions worldwide. He feels strongly that more research should be done to determine what caused these symptoms and what can be done to help people desperate for relief.

"What has been heartbreaking about this, as a seasoned physician, are the emails I get from people that, this has affected their life so badly, they have told me they are going to take their own life," Poland said.

Troubling Symptoms

Poland said of his own symptoms that he "can only begin to estimate the number of times I just want to scream because I can't get rid of the noise or how many hours of sleep I've lost," he said. The noise he hears is "particularly loud at night when there are no masking sounds."

WTF? Asshole doctor injured by the death jab, so he takes another death jab anyway.

The Purge: Biden Admin vax mandates were used to suppress dissent, produce ideological conformity
Nothing scientific about it.

Jordan Schachtel
42 min ago
There was never anything scientific about it.

The “Fauci ouchie” has become weaponized by governments to act as a litmus test for compliance and conformity, and the FBI’s developing role in the process serves as the perfect example for how the purge is being conducted throughout the American government.

It’s about screening out the pesky free thinkers and when they can’t be fired or expelled because of what remains of our civil rights laws, keeping them out of the office or campus and limiting their influence on their peers.

The Rockefeller Foundation and several other globalist nonprofit organizations are pumping millions of dollars into funding a group of behavioral scientists tasked with creating new and more convincing narratives to drive COVID-19 vaccinations.

The behavioral science project is being funded to figure out why large numbers of people around the world refuse to take the jab and to develop ways to convince them to change their minds. ...

They are operating with the intent to tailor vaccination narratives to fit different ethnic and political backgrounds.

Researchers are looking for the key to the gates of each cultural kingdom so they can convince the entire global population to take the jab.

Bougie dread

The thing that she feared the most —
more than sharks, snakes, and spiders combined —
was the mere suggestion that the mainstream narrative could not be trusted.

The arrogance

Bougiecrats would rather:

crash the global economy;
close schools for years on end; and
engage in self-inflicted genocide

than admit that they were wrong about vaccines.

The release of the reformulated shots is timed to influence the midterm elections

Here’s what’s up:

ACIP is having an “emergency meeting” September 1 and 2 to push through the reformulated boosters.

On orders from the White House, Walensky will approve immediately after the meeting concludes.

Reformulate shots will start going into bodies immediately after Labor Day (around September 6).

What do we know about the mRNA shots (well, no one knows anything about the reformulated shots because they skipped clinical trials). But what about the other shots?

They suppress the immune system for a few weeks, but then two months after the injection is what Alex Berenson calls “The Happy Valley” when antibodies are at their peak.

What’s two months after Labor Day? Election day.

Peter Marks at the FDA and Rochelle Walenksy at the CDC timed the roll out of the reformulated shots so that they would be at their maximum efficacy literally on the day of the midterm elections.

But the only way to meet that date was to skip human clinical trials altogether — which is what they did.

What else do we know about these shots? After 4 months, efficacy goes to zero and by 6 months efficacy goes negative.

The other thing that we know is that these shots accelerate the evolution of new variants. Sometimes those variants are more mild (Omicron) sometimes they are more severe (Delta) — it’s really just a roll of the dice. But with antibody dependent enhancement we know that the vaccinated are more vulnerable to infection.

So what’s going to happen is that Dems are going to artificially create the appearance of efficacy by election day, in the attempt to keep the House and Senate. But by January 2023, the bougiecrats who are dumb enough to get dose 5 in September are completely and totally f*cked. Efficacy from the shots will be less than zero. And they will be especially vulnerable to the new variants.

For the vaccinated we are likely looking at a winter of severe illness and death.

The rest of us will be fine. I doubt U.S. democracy will be able to survive this astonishing mix of cynicism and corruption from the highest ranks of government though.

Peter Marks at the FDA and Rochelle Walenksy at the CDC timed the roll out of the reformulated shots so that they would be at their maximum efficacy literally on the day of the midterm elections.

Patrick says

Peter Marks at the FDA and Rochelle Walenksy at the CDC timed the roll out of the reformulated shots so that they would be at their maximum efficacy literally on the day of the midterm elections.

I don't buy this.

Who is going to get another shot at this point? Who is going to notice the are experiencing peak efficacy for the sniffles? It's not like the unvaccinated are all going to be sick and stay home on the day of the election unless a disease is going to be released on the population for which a vaccine exists to protect them. I just doubt it.

than admit that they were wrong about vaccines.

The release of the reformulated shots is timed to influence the midterm elections

It's the malleable puppets and victims who were wrong about the vaccines.

A liberal goes to a Trump rally to see what people are like.

What do you think he discovered?

If you’re a conservative you, of course, know the answer.

But Samuel Donner, who does the “100 New Friends” video series on TikTok, didn’t know the answer, according to Fox News.

As a self-professed Los Angeles liberal, he admitted he was nervous about going to a Trump event in flyover country.

And he was pleasantly surprised. “Going in I was expecting aggression,” Donner said in a video played on “Fox and Friends” with Steve Doocy, “but I actually experienced a lot of kindness.”

Donner’s videos feature him wandering about and approaching strangers to ask, “Want to be friends?”

He decided to stretch himself by taking his gimmick to a Trump rally in Memphis.

To Donner’s surprise, the Trump rally “was much more friendly than what I was expecting,” he told Doocy.

“Growing up in L.A., you think these events are going to be like very aggressive and also I was just kind of saying that I was a liberal, but I was absolutely like baffled that people wanted to talk and would actually be friends with me when I asked — ‘Want to be friends?’ And they said ‘Yes.’”

Donner said his project seeks to find common ground among people. “At the end of the day, humans have a lot more common ground than we’re led to believe.”

2 core precepts:

everyone is the hero of their own movie. humans almost never believe they are the bad guy and will go to great lengths to avoid doing so.

devoid of demonstrable external reference, all motion is relative and my moving rapidly away from you appears no different to me that you moving rapidly way from me.




propensity to edit or misattribute evidence is directly proportional to the intensity with which people held their initial beliefs. those with lightly held convictions find them easy to change. those whose ideals and ideologies have been inextricably woven into the warp and weft of their identities find it nearly impossible. they are chained to the mast of the good ship dogmatism and will perform virtually any mental gymnastic to avoid admitting or even recognizing that they have steered it into an iceberg.

in the end, what this means is that those who begin as ideologues and build “activist identities” become more and more convinced of how right they are when exposed to evidence of being wrong and the more obviously wrong they are, the more intense the new convictions, assumptions, and delusions must be to overcome the evidence of their eyes and ears to preserve their sense of self. ...

this is how the people wrecking the world become ever more sure that they are saving it.

but here’s the fun twist: as they are propelled ever faster toward extremism in order to defend the priors that underpin their sense of self, they do not experience it as movement.

they think they are standing still.

i never trusted government a whole lot, but i did trust them to stay within certain bounds of misbehavior.

but then it overstepped them. everywhere. at once. 2020 was some sort of dinner bell to push endlessly and aggressively on all fronts in unison and 2021 made it worse.

obviously, this had been building for some time, but in 2020, it changed radically and i changed in response. i think a lot of us did. reluctantly, many of us went to battle because we simply could not abide what we were seeing.

but it’s not my identity and i never want it to be.

it’s what i am doing because it needs to be done i (and i suspect many others) would be glad to have it over and done with as well.

this is not a basis for sense of self that most pushing back crave. it’s a chore that needs doing, an augean stables that needs mucking out.

i am most assuredly more polarized than i was, but i also know this about myself. i can still see where i was and i’d like to go back albeit with some real changes to what power the state is allowed to have.

you can see it it in the “drift from position” measures. those wanting to be left alone may be driven to more active impulse by greater depredations, but the base desire is more or less the same. it’s just “this is a new way you have threatened or trespassed upon me, so i will find a way to stop it.”

but the folks succumbing to the authoritarian impulse of “rule by expert and ideologue” lack this sort of polestar. they have no idea how far or fast they have moved. ...

suddenly public health thinks it can lock you down, mask you up, jab you with experimental drugs, close the borders, close the schools, abate your rent, and ban you from social media if you disagree. many openly envy china’s ability to ignore human rights entirely to do so. the NIH publishes racist screeds.




how does one even speak to people so mazed in funhouse mirrors of other-abnegating self-regard that evidence of error becomes validation of belief and that their own wild radicalization serves as incontrovertible proof of yours? ...

these dictatorial departures from practice and reason justified with ever accelerating fabulism and accusation are not fooling the center.

each new outrage just pushes more people into the “wow, i need to defend myself from this” camp.

it galvanizes resistance.

it galvanizes action.

the path to success for those who would see their liberty regained and retained is in ignoring the extremists and embracing the “silent majority” as it is wakened by the whip hands assailing it: those who were “not political” but become so in self defense.

this is the true core and measure of a society: the reluctant warrior who never sought battle but will rise in defense of the right to self-determination and the pursuit of happiness.

that and only that is its ultimate guarantor.

direct conflict with the deeply deluded yields nothing. it only makes them more extreme and more delusional. the answer cannot lie there.

it lies instead in reaching out to the center and welcoming them to the new overton window from which the mud has been cleared so that as they peer through it, they join in the grand undertaking of peaceful but implacable rollback of the bureaucratic and technocratic state.