patrick.net

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/mandate-freedom-friday-september?r=6gdz

Governor DeSantis held a blockbuster press conference yesterday titled “Mandate Freedom,” in which he coined what may be my favorite new expression. He was talking about the possibility of new federal mask mandates, and said:

“We see all this stuff, and we see they are not following the science. They are trying to follow a narrative. They are trying to follow an agenda. Here in Florida, we did not — and we will not — allow the dystopian visions of paranoid, hypochondriacs control our health policies, let alone our state.”

https://twitter.com/DeSantisWarRoom/status/1699784459103711376

Haha! “Dystopian visions of paranoid hypochondriacs!” That’s money! I can’t wait to use that terrific line someplace.

https://jessicar.substack.com/p/optimizing-outcomes-by-thinking-the

Optimizing outcomes by thinking the best of people...

The first trap I managed to escape was trying to convince ‘narrativers’ of anything other than the narrative. Stepping away from those pointless ‘arguments’ saved me a lot of heart ache and time. My energies went to analyzing data.

The second trap I managed to escape was falling for the lures of trolls with regard to wasting my time responding to their hit pieces. ...

The third trap I am still learning how to side-step is the one that is really hard to see. I am not even sure how to define it, but I do know how to define the outcome: division. If I do fall into one of these traps, I usually end up with misgivings against someone that perhaps I have never even met. That kind of thing. It reminds me of when I found myself yelling at my screen when I still had facebook back in 2020. I had to stop myself one morning and simply ask the rational question: Why am I wasting all this energy, and ramping up my blood pressure over something I can’t even verify? Is this the purpose of these ‘messages’?

Ultimately with people, my strategy is basically to think the best until I have proof that they are crapola. And by crapola, I mean someone who really is consistently intent on hurting others. I think these people are few and far between, in reality, and that most people want to do good and perhaps even think that they are doing good even if they aren’t. ...

Thinking the best of someone creates and maintains an environment of possibility - a best potential whereby that someone has a chance to live up to this best potential. Thinking badly about someone does the opposite, and creates and maintains an environment of doubt, deprivation and non-productiveness. The former is productive and allows for the possibility of best outcome. The latter is non-productive and encourages worst outcomes and actually, potentially prevents any good from manifesting. ...

Try something new. Optimize our outcome. Even if some people are doing ‘questionable things’ ask yourself: have you walked a mile in their shoes? Will you? Are they really evil, or are they just ego (driven)? To be egotistical is not the same thing as being evil and let’s face it, none of us have any idea what we’re doing so isn’t it best to try to drop ego stuff and help each other along the way. This is hard one for us humans.

Patrick says

Optimizing outcomes by thinking the best of people...

A problem comes with parsing people who have vested interests, either by faith or politically or economically, or are just short term 'sports team' thinking types, leading them into moral relativity to defend disinformation or lies as 'justified' because winning and losing.

They may not be bad per se, but are a tad louche on the ethics side.

https://ashmedai.substack.com/p/study-neuroticism-predicts-national

Study: 'Neuroticism predicts national vaccination rates across 56 countries'
Which definitely correlates with real world experience, especially on social media

The more neurotic you are, the more likely you were to get vaccinated. So sayeth SCIENCE itself!! (Until this paper gets retracted at least.) ...

While we are only going to discuss a few highlights from this study, it is actually written in fairly comprehensible English that is accessible to laypeople for those interested in reading it in full. This study also drops some ‘truth bombs’ not often seen in academic literature. ...

Translation: The level of neuroticism for a country’s population had a statistically significant correlation to vaccination rate - the more neurotic the population, the higher the vaccination rate.

And it’s not like neurotic excesses were in short supply over the pandemic:

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/covid-juice-30-hits-the-shelves-in

All the Very Important Science People have been wrong about everything, which means that none of them can pull the plug on this farce. They’ll continue their doubtful performances, selling slightly updated versions of failed pharmaceutical products and making claims well in excess of the evidence to an ever shrinking audience of virus enthusiasts.

This weekend, the Empire State Building bragged about lighting itself up in blue and cyan, in respectful observance of the Branch Covidian holiday season that begins with “New Booster Day.”

The building was mercilessly mocked in the comments, which I will link for your amusement.



https://twitter.com/EmpireStateBldg/status/1703182364497625350

Twitter is suppressing the replies when I go to view it. You get a few, and then a string of ads and irrelevant comments.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/why-smart-people-do-stupid-things

During the lockdowns I was absolutely gobsmacked by how thoroughly so many of my friends fell for the psyop and succumbed to the mass psychosis.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, most of them are quite convinced that carbon dioxide is a pressing threat to the survival of the human species, one which photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, and lithium-ion batteries will save us from; that race is a social construct; that the pay gap between men and women is real; and that a woman is whoever uses she/her pronouns.

Still, in this case, it all just seemed too obvious to me that the entire thing was a put-up job, a hysterical collective nervous breakdown cultivated by an unholy alliance of politicians greedy for power and pharmaceutical behemoths greedy for cash. I mean, we had the Diamond Princess results in March of 2020.

These aren’t stupid people, by any means. I’m talking PhD scientists, computer programmers, engineers. In terms of raw cognitive grunt this is a group with serious horsepower. So despite the fact that they’d largely swallowed every other mandatory absurdity in the prevailing culture, I retained a naive expectation that they’d eventually come to their senses and realize that COVID’s dangers were exaggerated.

No such luck. Most of them still haven’t comes to their senses. Even several months ago masks remained a common sight in professional settings, and of course, the majoity dutifully, even enthusiastically, lined up for their untested gene therapy injections. Which, as so many predicted before the rollout, have done absolutely nothing to protect anyone from the Coof of Doom, and have generally proved to be far more trouble than they’re worth what with all the myocarditis. Many of them got sick from the shots. That didn’t stop them from getting more. ...

“Smart people do this thing, so if you want to be smart you should do it too!” is in practice a highly effective argument for manipulating the behaviour of people who identify as smart. ...

The propaganda in favour of vaccination has been absolutely relentless for a couple of decades, now. The party line has been that any skepticism at all towards not just vaccination as a concept, but even the product safety of any specific vaccine, is a marker for anti-science obscurantism. ...

“Vaccine hesistancy” will get you branded a kook, in other words, and laughed at for being stupid. Smart people don’t like getting laughed at for being stupid. It is extremely important to them that they be thought of as smart people by other smart people, because being smart is central to their identities. ...

Notably, it is precisely the opposite ends of those traits which are strongly selected for in our academic institutions, probably more intensely than they select for intellect: low Openness, high Conscientiousness, high Agreeability, and high Neuroticism are all strongly preferred. That combination of traits tends to produce an intellectual community that values conformity far more than it values truth. When the majority of the world’s intelligent people are acculturated into a system that prioritizes obedience over veracity, looking at what the smart fraction do might not be a great guide to actually smart behaviour. In fact, it may be the precise opposite.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/no-masks-please-were-rational

Unfazed by data, scientific research, or common sense, the maskaholics are back. In response to an uptick in Covid cases, they’ve begun reinstating mask mandates. So far, it’s just a few places—a college in Atlanta, a Hollywood studio, two hospitals in Syracuse—but the mainstream media and their favorite “experts” are working hard to scare the rest of us into masking up yet again.

Never mind that at least 97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both. Never mind that actual experts—the ones who studied the scientific literature before 2020 and drew up plans for a pandemic—advised against masking the public. Never mind that their advice has been further bolstered during the pandemic by randomized clinical trials and rigorous observational studies failing to find an effect of masks and mask mandates. Scientific evidence cannot overcome the maskaholics’ faith.

It’s tempting to compare them with the villagers in Cambodia who erected scarecrows in front of their huts to ward off the coronavirus—but that’s not fair to the villagers. Their Ting Mong, as the magic scarecrows are called, at least didn’t hurt any of their neighbors. The mask mandates imposed harms on the public that were well known before Covid, which was why occupational-safety regulations limited workers’ mask usage. Dozens of studies had demonstrated “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome,” whose symptoms include an increase of carbon dioxide in the blood, difficulty breathing, dizziness, drowsiness, headache, and diminished ability to concentrate and think. It was no surprise during the pandemic when adverse effects of masks were reported in a study of health-care workers in New York City. More than 70 percent of the workers said that prolonged mask-wearing gave them headaches, and nearly a quarter blamed it for “impaired cognition.”

And the impaired cognition from wearing masks keeps the maskers from seeing how stupid masks are. This is meme-worthy:

Patrick says

97 percent of Americans have Covid antibodies in their blood as a result of infection, vaccination, or both.

Vaccination did nothing to prevent catching, carrying or spreading Covid. Immunity is strictly from previous infection.

@HeadSet There are known mechanisms whereby the vaxx makes you more likely to catch and spread Wuhan Virus, like OAS and imprinting. The the statistics seem to show that it's true - the more vaxxed you are, the more likely you are catch the virus and get seriously ill from it.

Strange thing, when I went over to visit the acquaintance in hospice at the Palo Alto VA, they gave us masks and there were signs all over saying they were required, but very few staff or visitors were wearing them.

When we were on the ward, the nurse at the window just poo pooed it, was not wearing a mask, and said to our group could wear them if we wanted to, pure tokenism, so they all went into the pockets. She had a sign in front of the window that said that masks were required.

Basically, the mask mandate has worn out its welcome, except for those who want to be Kommie slaves, want to impose that slavery on others, or who are too benighted to understand they are useless.

I also think the Cabal is only really interested this time around in using the production of the vaccines as a money laundering vehicle. Get the bales of billions from the crooked Guv to manufacture some shit in vials then buy them for distribution, then pump up the profits of the stock portfolios of the politicians. It's bribery by another name. I doubt they even care if all the vaccines wind up in the trash or in people's arms.

Patrick says

HeadSet There are known mechanisms whereby the vaxx makes you more likely to catch and spread Wuhan Virus, like OAS and imprinting. The the statistics seem to show that it's true - the more vaxxed you are, the more likely you are catch the virus and get seriously ill from it.

It could also be the more Vaxxed a person is, the more likely they are going to take the stupid test for it and report it.

Misc says

It could also be the more Vaxxed a person is, the more likely they are going to take the stupid test for it and report it.

I think the data is collected from Covid hospitalizations.

https://www.coffeeandcovid.com/p/ms-diversity-tuesday-october-3-2023

In other words, she was fine and then she suddenly and unexpectedly collapsed while being announced on the homecoming court. Despite receiving prompt emergency medical care, Bre died at the hospital the same night.

The rest of the game and the next day’s homecoming dance were canceled by the school district.

McKean was an athlete who played volleyball, softball and basketball at her school, where her father is the athletic director. No cause of death has been released, pending results of an autopsy. My money is on some kind of heart attack, what do you think?

You know, back in the old days, a tragedy like this would have caused the parents to go nuclear, testify before Congress, and form some foundation like “Justice for Bre.” But nowadays, the bereaved parents just move on, because Bre wouldn’t have wanted them to dwell on the past or something. It’s very weird.

I think the only possible explanation for the murderous indifference of her parents to the actual cause of her death is that they themselves encouraged her to inject the toxic slime. The guilt of having done that is a strong impediment to telling the truth.

https://billricejr.substack.com/p/these-are-the-most-important-articles

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/on-head-girls-genius-boys-and-the

My virtual German buddy Eugyppius has a fascinating Stack today on a paper showing smart people were more likely to take the mRNA jabs.

The study drew on 750,000 Swedish men who were tested for their intelligence as part of their mandatory military service. The findings are clear: “The smarter participants had higher uptake and they got vaccinated more quickly.”

But the study has one fascinating hole. It shows smart people were more likely to take the jab - but not that the smartest people were. As Eugyppius notes, the top group represented

The equivalent of an above-average university student – the kinds of people who work as doctors and lawyers. We hardly needed a study to tell us that the most enthusiastic vaccinees are to be found precisely in this population.

Yep.

What the study really explains, Eugyppius argues, is why near-compulsory mRNA jabs became national policy in wealthy democracies. In those countries, this smart-not-smartest group dominates politics and most businesses (if not startups).

He draws on a 1985 paper called “Intelligence and personal influence in groups” to argue that the most intelligent people cannot argue down persuasively and so have limited influence.

Instead, people who are somewhat smarter than average, with an IQ of about 120 (I’d go slightly higher, to 125-130), dominate debate. They can understand - if not formulate - somewhat complicated ideas and still argue them in ways less intelligent people can follow. The smart-not-brilliant range also contains enough people to form powerful and reinforcing social networks. The very top definitionally does not.

As Eugyppius writes:

"Ours is therefore an IQ 120 midwit society; it could not be any other way… since our midwit rulers are cognitively better endowed than probably 90% of the whole population, it’s easy for them to overlook the rare 10% of people who are smarter than they are. Accordingly, they throw all of their opponents into the same basket of intellectual deplorables…

The ideas which dominate our world are… those ideas which appeal to people whose intelligence is above average if less-than-phenomenal, and whose other personality traits optimise their institutional influence. They have the brains of upper middle-class professionals, and they’re also much more extroverted, conscientious and conformist than the broader population." [emphasis added]

I would add that though the paper was written in 1985, the increasing feminization of the media, academia, and medicine has likely accelerated this trend. I am surprised Eugyppius did not raise this issue, given his past comments about “head girls.” Maybe E is not in the mood to cause trouble today; I apparently am. ...

Many studies have shown that male intelligence is more polarized than women’s, especially in math and science. This skew seems biologically logical given that the potential Darwinian payoff for a man who is physically or intellectually exceptional is huge. DNA analysis has found Genghis Khan’s genes are present in 16 million men.

Here’s one recent paper showing sex differences in intelligence, from those notorious sexists at Duke University’s Talent Identification Program. You will not be surprised to hear that Duke’s servers no longer host the paper. Luckily, the Wayback Machine still does.



Not to put too fine a point on it, a skewed distribution at the right tail means the geniuses are mostly men. Not all. But mostly. (There. I said it.) The results are obvious in competitive open intellectual environments like chess, where men continue to dominate despite decades of efforts to recruit women.

(This distribution does not mean men are on average smarter than women; that issue is hotly debated and irrelevant to what’s happening at the right tail in any case.)

But those geniuses, male or female, are not necessarily extroverted or conscientious, and they are manifestly non-conformist. They appear increasingly isolated. Aside from chess tables and poker tournaments, their last strongholds are Silicon Valley and in hedge funds, two arenas where competition still can still be open and fierce, at least until the winners stifle it.

In academia and medicine, the head girl style increasingly dominates, producing a black hole of consensus views and narrow debate. (The elite media has its own dynamics, but it too has become more conformist and fearful of potentially unsettling views, less willing to tolerate smart, cantankerous men.

The result is a broad scientific ossification, now visible at the highest levels.



Now we come to the mRNA Covid jabs.

At first glance, they aren’t a natural choice for head girls (or boys). They’re revolutionary, not marginal. For much of 2020 reasonable people raised reasonable objections to their development. Then - in less than a week in early November 2020 - Joe Biden won. ...

Suddenly and without much debate, any debate, really, the jabs became the consensus. (Head girls don’t like illness, either. They spend a lot of time perfecting themselves and their environments. Disease has no place. So Covid particularly unsettled them.)

But the head girls didn’t know what the Pfizer and Moderna trials weren’t telling them. They didn’t know the potential deep risks of this novel biotechnology. And they didn’t know how to ask or what to ask.

They didn’t know what they didn’t know. Very quickly - within days - they didn’t want to know. To be a head girl, of either sex, is to understand deep in one’s gut that one’s job is to answer questions, not ask them. Especially when the answers aren’t clear. Questions without clear answers are the enemy.

All of which would have been fine if the jabs had worked as promised.

Only they didn’t. And - I will repeat, again - we do not know what, if any, long-term harm repeated mRNA injections cause. How could we? We started giving people mRNA at scale less than three years ago. Time is the only variable which can’t be modeled away. As Warren Buffett said about investing:

Some things just take time. You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant.

But we gave these jabs to more than one billion people on the basis of a few weeks of safety data.

Now we’re stuck. Not only do we not have answers to this ongoing experiment, the smart people - not the smartest people, but the smart people - don’t even want anyone to ask questions.

Which won’t make them go away.

I think it's likely that the greater range of male IQ (more idiots and more geniuses) is a direct result of the difference between having XX and XY chromosomes.

Females get two copies of X genes which may affect intelligence, but males get only one. So very good or very bad X genes for intelligence are blurred in women by the other X chromosome, but have their full effect in men.

And if you want to get really speculative, note that Jewish identity comes from one's mother. Rabbis may have recognized that there was something from a Jewish mother which produced geniuses, but not from a Jewish father, and so defined Jewish identity as matrilineal for that reason. Just sayin.

Patrick says

My virtual German buddy Eugyppius has a fascinating Stack today on a paper showing smart people were more likely to take the mRNA jabs.

The study drew on 750,000 Swedish men who were tested for their intelligence as part of their mandatory military service. The findings are clear: “The smarter participants had higher uptake and they got vaccinated more quickly.”

I want to point out again that an IQ test just checks the ability of people to recognize patterns, usually patterns they've seen before like Fibonacci series. It's said you can't improve your IQ - YES YOU CAN, take a few of them, you'll be a "genius" in no time.

It's a test of what people pick up in the education, maybe a test of confidence, but it's not a test of true intelligence.

I actually believe that the "dumber people" recognized their education as pointless, and the people that went through to pHD's in science blew through it. I would expect the middling people were the most likely to accept the vaccine uptake, and I'm in that group, yet at the same time, I finally figured out most of my education was bullshit.

Well, smart people try to think more efficiently, which might tend to cause trust in established authorities, and give the vax the benefit of the doubt.

It wasn't an intelligence test, but it was a gullibility test. Gullibility is not necessarily an indication of low intelligence at all times, and represents an imaginative aspect of mentation i.e. the person has the imagination to believe something can be true as a way of exploring alternative postulates. Many nominally smart people can be gullible and distracted in many ways, it may be a positive trait in some ways but as we see detrimental to fatal in others depending on conditions.

Part of it is not recognizing the face and extent of systemic evil when it is staring you down. That is so ineffable, it requires a paradigm shift in basic thinking, not necessarily intelligence.

Also there is just plain 'Spidey Sense', a tingling when some piece isn't fitting right, an odd survival instinct that some people have and other don't. My wife and her sisters, none of whom were anti vax, knew instinctively NOT to take this one. The brother who did 'died suddenly'.

I knew immediately it was a psyops because I watched the preliminary info and had the background at least analyze the information and the fakery of what they were presenting and the crisis acting, which was pretty fake on its face. Other people who SHOULD have had this expertise apparently still could not.

I laid everything out to a pretty smart friend in Santa Cruz before he was vaxxed, and he really poo pooed it, preferring to being beguiled by propaganda and said, "Well, all vaccines have some complications" and let it rest there. Now, with a son in law 'dead suddenly' at the age of 58, he sees me differently, even though I do have an education that should have swayed him.