Bird flu might be coming. So won't somebody please think of… the gain-of-function researchers?!
I'm baffled by how often big newspapers advocate for actively bad stuff, even when it won't get many clicks. It takes hard work to be so consistently wrong; how/why do they do it? pic.twitter.com/zfyPOkzCwI
— Richard Ngo (@RichardMCNgo) December 24, 2024
Especiallly since it was those poor, besiegned GoF researchers who almost certainly caused Covid. Insanity.
In so many areas of life, as in that video from the 1980s I linked below, we used to have a level of freedom that people who did not live through those times quite literally cannot even imagine. When you tell them about it they deny it was real and claim it only happened in movies. That’s how far-removed we are from human flourishing now.
We’ve all descended disgustingly into slave morality and have no will it seems nor desire to transcend as we once did. We used to have so much more, be so much better. Now we click and drool and laugh at anyone who says anything else is possible.
“Slim doesn’t always mean healthy” and such claptrap is functionally equivalent to a lie, though it’s semi-true just often enough that it’s not quite a complete fabrication.
The truth of course is that being slim means someone is far more likely to be healthy and stay that way. Where the Fat Acceptance and related self-harm movements allow their nonsense to slide in is that some (a few) slim people are in fact unhealthy. Those such as anorexics, cancer patients and people with genetic defects can be svelte but on the edge of death.
This allows in the faulty logic that slim == bad. Which of course is heavily promoted by the obesity-benefting food industry in the US.
Fat Acceptance really did a number on us (with food industry financial and propaganda assistance).
Noah Smith really, really does not understand how health insurance works or that insurance is a tug-of-war between providers and insurers. He sees insurers as a blameless mediators caught between costs and providers, principally because they do not make much obvious profit. In reality, they are a source of inflationary pressure in a continual arms race between how much money required insurance drives up de facto costs, how much providers attempt to grab, and how much they are bilked and can bilk.
It’s a multi-layered fraud combined with financial conflict and beset with huge inflationary pressures, mostly caused by insurance itself.
In other words, they are all villains and none are blameless. I’d say providers and insurance companies are about 40/40 villain, with other 20% being various other health care parasites.
The entire US medical system is a scam and insurance companies are no less evil and no less crooked than any other component.
Remembering this insane COVID moment from 2020 when LA officials filled the Venice Beach skatepark with 37 tons of sand to prevent people from using it pic.twitter.com/CrPFFHcqG2
— captive dreamer (@captivedreamer7) November 28, 2024
Covidians: Lockdowns weren’t real! No one was even mildly inconvenienced by Covid restrictions anywhere in the world! It’s all lies!
Reality disagrees. Those who became mentally ill because of Covid (not the infection itself) are just angry that the political changes they wished would occur were not brought about by the pandemic. It’s sad to see.
Because it’s a cop-out for adults who are committing or want to commit bad behavior or unethical acts and not be called out for it.
Every bit of the “you won’t understand until you’re older” stuff told me to when I was a kid was bullshit. None of it was true. All lies. All was designed to manipulate me and others. And I think that’s almost always the case with this from everyone everywhere.
For sure. And, relatedly, anyone who wears a keffiyeh in public is terrorist-aligned. They are implicitly celebrating the death of Israeli innocents.
This essay isn’t as much degrowther nonsense as I thought it’d be. It still leans that way, but not to the pathological degree that the modern left tends to. You know, the version that would kill billions and cause a regression of 500+ years in societal progress.
But it’s still pretty bad. It’s not even that it gets many points wrong, exactly. It’s just all steering the wrong direction. The modern left has been so stunned and staggered by their recent losses to those that they see as their inferiors that they can’t even think.
I don’t have the energy to write a long-ass essay (or assay) myself this evening, but I will say that in the disavowal of progress and improvement for a focus on fixing things now, the modern left precludes any advancement in the future as well. This essay is, strangely, an example of what it decries: nostalgia for something that can never be and furthermore has never been. It’s a fiction based on a fiction; a dream whose dreamer is deceased.
Relatedly, the left could’ve had Elon Musk on their side. But most of them are not interested in conversions and conversation leading to solidarity. They want vengeance no different than the thug conservatives — they just couch it in squishier language. And here I use “conversion” deliberately because the left’s asseveration and beliefs are as religious in nature as any ecclesiastical evangelism ever seen on this Earth.
And now my three minutes are up and this mini-essay is at an end.
Charles Hugh Smith: Unaffordable Housing and Homeless Encampments: How Did It Get This Bad?
Charles is one of the few (maybe a few dozen?) in the country who actually understand how housing prices currently work in the United States. Basically no one in the press does. None of the real estate “analysts” except maybe one or two do. Zero real estate agents do, of course, because they know nearly nothing.
It’s insane that something so important and that is the repository of vast wealth is so poorly understood by so many. I think that is deliberate, though — if people actually comprehended how it works and why it works that way, far more of them would rebel against it and demand change.
Hence, all the propaganda is designed to lead one down the wrong epistemic path.
Trump needs you to forget he did this. Don’t pic.twitter.com/SLzhVT8YdZ
— Luke Zaleski (@ZaleskiLuke) October 21, 2024
Sure looks like a calm tour of the Capitol to me. Certainly when I go to a city to take a peek at its cultural institutions and architecture, I violently assault police officers, attempt to break down doors, and otherwise loot and pillage. Just a normal day of tourism.
This is a Fox News ratfuck designed to suppress turnout among Latino Dems. There’ll be tons of this the closer we get to the election.
Well, that was a massive lie that KN95 masks were more comfortable and easier to breathe through than regular masks. Because I was spraying pesticide, today I wore a 3M KN95 mask. It felt like an alien facehugger was attached to my face. The metal parts were extremely poky and it didn’t even seal all that well despite my best efforts. It was also much harder to breathe than even a double cloth mask. I felt like I’d run a 10K after some very mild physical activity — and I’m in good shape.
So yeah…that was another Covidian lie.
Anyone sane knew it was false already. Ozempic just provided irrefutable proof.
The problem with Covidians (other than a poor understanding of science and immunology) is that they believe the world should cater to their manias and paranoia. And the only ones that happens to reliably is billionaires like Jamie Dimon. So good luck with that.
Covidians would’ve basically ended all of civilization now in a failed attempt to forestall a fairly-mild virus. So, you know, glad we didn’t do that.
And what’s weird is that nearly all the Covidians out there politically align with Russia and believe Ukraine and Ukrainians should be genocided. I am still trying to understand that.
It was predicted by the Covidians that US would experience economic collapse and that civilization would end due to Long Covid. I still see me some civilization around here and here’s how the US economy is doing:
Whoa that’s a mega-crash! Ok, not. It was all a lie.