Hopefully, in this new year, we will get a full and complete picture, and a very detailed and true accounting of the actual effectiveness, side effects, and associated mortality rates— worldwide—of the various vaccines for COVID and all it’s variants.
These mortality statistics compared with these same kinds of statistics from, say, the past 10 years prior to COVID.
P.S.—Realistically, though, given all of the deception and gaslighting that has surrounded this issue, is it likely that we will ever get such an accounting?
Or, is it more likely that this issue will join the mountain of other issues—these last few years—which we have never gotten the full story on, nor ever will?
Happy New Year to Neo and all her visitors and commenters– To go with Neo’s fireworks visual, here is the fourth movement of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed for George II in 1749 to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. The movement is called La Réjouissance (“The Rejoicing”):
With heartfelt wishes for Neo and everyone here to have reasons to rejoice in 2023.
Wishing a Happy and Healthy New year to Neo and all!
A very Happy New Year and Best Wishes for health and success in the coming months, and a big Thank You to Neo, for your diligent even-handedness and insights, and another Thank You to all the great contributors of content here, in the comments.
Back to my ham, cornbread, black-eyed peas, and mustard greens!
Mmmm, cornbread! (Aggie’s plate)
Thanks, Neo. Happy New Year!
@Snow: I would like to see that accounting too, unfortunately too many of us are more concerned with our day to day lives to be pushing for such an examination. Too bad because exposing the Covid scam perpetrated by the government and health policy officials would be most effective on making sure it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.
Happy New Year to Neo and all of the special people who participate in her forum and make it my primary go-to site.
2023–As the old fisherman (actually me) often says, “Sometimes optimistic; always hopeful.”.
@ Snow on Pine > “Realistically, though, given all of the deception and gaslighting that has surrounded this issue, is it likely that we will ever get such an accounting?”
J. E. Dyer has a recent post on gaslighting deluxe, especially with regard to the attacks on the electric substations, but also about Democrats & Biden Inc. in general.
The goal of censorship is never just to silence speech. It’s to prevent competition for someone’s preferred speech, which is to be favored, fostered, enshrined, proclaimed and insisted to be valid and true, regardless of evidence. The latter, which routinely devolves into a series of “Big Lies” as the competition for ideas or empirical reporting is driven out, is the profile of gaslighting.
The two always go together. The more you censor, the more latitude you have to gaslight. The purpose of a campaign of political censorship is gaslighting.
What’s been interesting to me, if we can call it merely “interesting,” is the extent to which we’re starting to see communication through the media, purporting to be from government agencies, that offers no proof whatsoever that it’s based on actual evidence or independently verifiable events or observations.
Along with this phenomenon, we’re seeing “lies of omission” by which the media, again purporting to speak for government agencies, present seeming conclusions about certain topics that don’t comport with the basic evidence cited. The media give us word salads that leave an unmistakable impression, but it’s a misleading impression because there’s no basis for believing or agreeing to it.
In some cases, government is indeed engaged in the same kind of communication. It’s not just the media pumping up some ambiguous (or even anonymous) statements from government agencies.
But it’s telling in either case, because it typically avoids clear assertions about individually verifiable facts, and instead deals in generalities that might bolster a particular interpretation of such facts – if there were any facts.
Here’s a recent example. Most readers are aware of the shooting that took out a power station in North Carolina last week.
Her analysis of how the rhetorical tricks of the narrative-makers are fashioned is superb.
And scary.
As Neo, among others, has observed – the Leftists can write a story in which every verifiable statement is true, but the narrative as a whole is false, false, false.
Or very suspect, at the least.
Both Dyer and John Hayward had recent posts about the hazards of illegal immigration facilitated by the federal government, and a lot of states, as active agents of importation.
(Teaser grafs. Entire essays recommended.)
It’s really time to cut the crap on all this. The Biden administration is literally lying about everything that’s happening and everything it’s doing with respect to border security, and the finger of guilt pointed by the uninvolved at the average American people who just want their border secured and their law enforced is equally a lie. The finger-pointers don’t bother to actually know what they’re talking about.
I’ve always been a friend of legal immigration, and while I don’t necessarily think there’s any call for admitting 8 million people to the U.S. in the space of four years, I’m by no means opposed to immigration. America is enriched by bringing in immigrants of all kinds – legally. But for national security, we need a secure border, and for the continuation of a healthy civic life we need our laws enforced.
We have neither condition in place right now, and that’s exactly what the Biden administration and the media are lying about. That’s unsustainable. It can only produce destructive and debilitating tendencies that, if left unchecked, will drive our nation to ruin.
Many people have said in the last few days that they hope 2023 will be more peaceful than the last few years. I don’t think it will be. We can’t be ruled by lies and expect peace. There will be a reckoning, and our level of control of it may not be that favorable.
But a reckoning is better than lies and festering situations. And I pray for all of us that we will have peace in our hearts and homes even when storm clouds gather.
Nothing will stop the Democrats’ planned invasion across the southern border. They’ve been working on it for too long. The final defeat of the American middle class is at hand. The people threw away their last chance to do something about it at the ballot box.
That horde of illegal aliens will become irresistible pressure for the last few trillions of irresponsible government spending needed to break the system. You will not be allowed to vote against the titanic costs mass migration imposes on you. Big spending will get much bigger.
Crime in the streets, downward pressure on wages, more “jobs Americans just won’t do” – all part of the plan. The Left will reap many political and financial benefits from the border wave, long before the big push to let the illegals vote.
Both sides of the aisle in Washington want this migration wave. The few who have qualms about it have mostly been bought off or intimidated into meek acceptance. The needs of the American people are not even part of the discussion. Mentioning that would be unthinkable.
Erasing borders means erasing citizenship, which means dissolving the last vestigial bonds of duty and responsibility the political elite might feel toward their nominal constituents. We’ll all be “citizens of the world,” which means we don’t get to vote on anything important.
This post by Doc Zero / Hayward could also be read as an explanation for why the Left gaslights instead of presenting factual observations and rational arguments: there aren’t any of those that work in their favor.
The atheist conceit of a grand battle between the forces of sweet reason and benighted religious ignorance is so hilariously wrong-headed. The past few decades have demonstrated that pseudo-science is among the most militant, power-hungry, censorious, and zealous of faiths.
People who worship SCIENCE! are so easily tricked with appeals to authority. Their folly tends to be highly destructive, perhaps because they reflexively reject healthy wisdom they see as tainted with religious faith. They double down on failure instead of admitting error.
The Left’s highly effective formula for demoralizing and wrecking healthy societies was developed by reversing everything that makes them healthy – and most of those healthy notions of marriage and family are embraced, endorsed, and sanctified by religions.
If you’re hostile to everything “tainted” by religion – so you presume that all traditions and faith-based morality must be corrupt and wrong – you will easily be recruited into a crusade to tear down healthy society, especially if the crusaders pretend to be scientists.
In the course of dismissing religion as foolish superstition and rejecting all of its traditions and teachings, so many people became vulnerable to aggressive and malevolent secular authorities. Their lives are ordered by politicians who claim to speak for scientific consensus.
…
Of course, it doesn’t help that every pseudo-scientific mistake and wrongheaded “consensus” embraced by secular politicians quickly accumulates a tidal wave of money behind it, so there is immense pressure to keep funding and enforcing failure, rather than admitting error.
You end up where we are today: a mega-state of total incompetence and stupidity, run by the biggest gang of idiots ever assembled, but they’re all convinced they are geniuses who rule with the blessing of scientific consensus – and they’ll burn any heretic who says different.
…
Perhaps most importantly for preserving healthy societies, there is an essential link between the concept of divinity and protecting individual freedom by limiting the power of the State, as America’s founding documents so beautifully explain.
You don’t have to believe in God to understand and embrace the concept of an authority greater than the State, which is absolutely necessary to accept that State power must have limits. The pyramid of power must be topped by either a question mark, or a very sharp point.
Accepting the importance of inalienable or God-given rights – given to us not by the indulgence of the State and its masters, but descending from an authority unreachably higher than theirs – is another healthy act of humility. Take that away, and cruel arrogance fills the void.
Religions have certainly done some awful things over the ages, but that usually happens when they lose THEIR vital humility and fuse with the State. For the most part, they care about individual people and human life more than callous pseudo-scientific “progressives.”
…
It takes humility to admit you might be wrong, to let others dissent and disobey, to accept that everyone has rights and responsibilities, to see how human laws and customs must adapt to a natural world we didn’t create and do not control. Humility is faith’s gift to reason. /end
@ Tom Grey > “I just found out that Lorenzo of Oz (Warby) has some fine ideas on both his own and Helen Dale’s substack:”
The first essay published by Dale dovetails nicely with the articles I’ve already cited by J.E. Dyer and John “Doc Zero” Hayward, especially this observation:
Our normative capacity makes us able to cooperate to such an extent that we can create enormously complex societies. It also creates a potential source of evolutionary advantage within our social groups: by “gaming” other people’s expectations, including expectations based on norms, to our own advantage.
That our normative capacity levers off our emotional architecture means that being emotionally disordered can lead — to use an old expression—to moral insanity. Highly manipulative personalities can seek to use norms that others expect folk to be committed to, but are not, to their own advantage.
This is why so many societies evolved various character tests to select against such personalities and such behaviours.
What has also been selected for are certain types of self-deception: using ostentatious commitment to norms to our own advantage. Including as a cover for aggression against others. Particularly relational aggression: attacking and undermining a target person’s connections with others.
The advantage of being self-deceptive in these ways is that if we are convinced what we are doing is righteous, the cognitive load on us is much lower and our persuasiveness (and so the effectiveness of our relational aggression) is likely to be much higher.
A section of Hayward’s essay on reason and religion that I didn’t quote previously also resonates with Lorenzo’s arguments.
In the course of dismissing religion as foolish superstition and rejecting all of its traditions and teachings, so many people became vulnerable to aggressive and malevolent secular authorities. Their lives are ordered by politicians who claim to speak for scientific consensus.
Categorically rejecting ideas is not logical or “scientific.” The basic error of scientism is rejecting the possibility that it might be wrong about some deep aspects of the universe, of existence itself. This is an arrogance that cascades into other forms of closed-mindedness.
… It is also unnecessary to share any religious faith to see the wisdom and compassion in religious teachings, or to understand that they get a lot of things right about how to encourage a healthy society – which makes sense, because healthy societies tend to spread their faith.
In other words, you can see how traditions would develop over time that encourage populations to grow in healthy ways and become prosperous – with some hideous mistakes along the way. Traditions have a vested interest in spreading themselves and attracting new adherents.
Perhaps most importantly for preserving healthy societies, there is an essential link between the concept of divinity and protecting individual freedom by limiting the power of the State, as America’s founding documents so beautifully explain.
You don’t have to believe in God to understand and embrace the concept of an authority greater than the State, which is absolutely necessary to accept that State power must have limits. The pyramid of power must be topped by either a question mark, or a very sharp point.
Expectations are if-then predictions. As there is no information from the future (information is caused, and causation runs forward in time, not backward) we rely on expectations to act.
The more we have shared expectations, including about each other, the more reliably we can cooperate. So, we evolved ways of generating robustly congruent expectations about each other.
Norms are if-then rules. A shared set of if-then rules followed within a group makes it easier to act according to a common set of if-then predictions. The more robust the shared norms, the more reliably we can cooperate.
… Another way to make commitment to norms more robust is to embed them in a religious framework. Something with divine (so elevated) authority that creates a sense of the sacred (so that which cannot be traded-off).
By heightening authority and narrowing and channelling the acceptable, engaging in common rituals and markings or ways of dressing that reinforce the sense of common commitment, the religious can become more reliable coordinators among themselves. This gives them a selection advantage which likely accounts for how pervasive religion is among human societies.
Our normative capacity makes us able to cooperate to such an extent that we can create enormously complex societies.
An interesting youTube using the Stanford Prison Experiment in part to explain what we have witnessed these past three years.
Understandable at 1.5 for me–so about twenty minutes.
I remain mostly optimistic–and certainly hopeful!– knowing that 50 million Americans never got injected, and 85% of those “eligible” have rejected a third shot.
We must do all we can to keep this from being injected into children.
Wow! Lots of good commentary and links above. Much of the linked commentary (from Substack) raises a question:
it appears likely that much of the social change being foisted on Americans is the result of politicians pushing policies that on their face are not in the country’s best interests. I presume they are doing so as a result of pressure from wealthy patrons, so my question is, what’s in it for those patrons?
They might feel morally superior for supporting unrestrained immigration, the relaxation of laws against drug use or shoplifting, or permissive policing against homelessness, but there comes a time when those policies impact even the very wealthy in Silicon Valley and probably even George Soros. So why are they pushing the continuation of these policies? What’s in it for them that they continue to put their money into politicians who push policies that bring in thousands of unskilled people who will be a financial drain on our population for years to come?
There are a limited number of gardeners or housekeepers they can employ, after all.
@ F > “what’s in it for those patrons?”
I’ve often wondered that myself.
Perhaps they are overly optimistic, or maybe they have an agenda so far out of normal ken that there is some advantage they see that we cannot.
And then again, maybe this is just the End of The World per John the Revelator’s Apocalypse.
Sarah Hoyt delves into some of the questions, with some suggestions of answers, in a recent 7-part series (interspersed with some very nice Christmas short stories).
Happy New Year to all!
And, Neo, special thanks for this blog.
Happy New Year Neo
And to all her readers
Maybe.
Hopefully, in this new year, we will get a full and complete picture, and a very detailed and true accounting of the actual effectiveness, side effects, and associated mortality rates— worldwide—of the various vaccines for COVID and all it’s variants.
These mortality statistics compared with these same kinds of statistics from, say, the past 10 years prior to COVID.
P.S.—Realistically, though, given all of the deception and gaslighting that has surrounded this issue, is it likely that we will ever get such an accounting?
Or, is it more likely that this issue will join the mountain of other issues—these last few years—which we have never gotten the full story on, nor ever will?
Happy New Year to Neo and all her visitors and commenters– To go with Neo’s fireworks visual, here is the fourth movement of Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks, composed for George II in 1749 to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. The movement is called La Réjouissance (“The Rejoicing”):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5ov8iBDZp4&ab_channel=MusicalConcepts
With heartfelt wishes for Neo and everyone here to have reasons to rejoice in 2023.
Wishing a Happy and Healthy New year to Neo and all!
A very Happy New Year and Best Wishes for health and success in the coming months, and a big Thank You to Neo, for your diligent even-handedness and insights, and another Thank You to all the great contributors of content here, in the comments.
Back to my ham, cornbread, black-eyed peas, and mustard greens!
Mmmm, cornbread! (Aggie’s plate)
Thanks, Neo. Happy New Year!
@Snow: I would like to see that accounting too, unfortunately too many of us are more concerned with our day to day lives to be pushing for such an examination. Too bad because exposing the Covid scam perpetrated by the government and health policy officials would be most effective on making sure it doesn’t happen again anytime soon.
Otherwise, Happy New Year to all!
Happy New Year!
Happy Happy New Year to Neo & “all the gang”.
I just found out that Lorenzo of Oz (Warby) has some fine ideas on both his own and Helen Dale’s substack:
https://helendale.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-social-leverage &
https://lorenzofromoz.substack.com/p/the-worshipping-the-future-series
(with my more-econ gang at https://arnoldkling.substack.com/p/links-to-consider-1230 )
[In Slovakia, it’s already tomorrow].
Happy New Year to Neo and all of the special people who participate in her forum and make it my primary go-to site.
2023–As the old fisherman (actually me) often says, “Sometimes optimistic; always hopeful.”.
@ Snow on Pine > “Realistically, though, given all of the deception and gaslighting that has surrounded this issue, is it likely that we will ever get such an accounting?”
J. E. Dyer has a recent post on gaslighting deluxe, especially with regard to the attacks on the electric substations, but also about Democrats & Biden Inc. in general.
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2022/12/16/toc-ready-room-16-december-2022-censorship-gas-lights-and-russia-iran-missile-drone-adventure/#comment-129782
Her analysis of how the rhetorical tricks of the narrative-makers are fashioned is superb.
And scary.
As Neo, among others, has observed – the Leftists can write a story in which every verifiable statement is true, but the narrative as a whole is false, false, false.
Or very suspect, at the least.
Both Dyer and John Hayward had recent posts about the hazards of illegal immigration facilitated by the federal government, and a lot of states, as active agents of importation.
(Teaser grafs. Entire essays recommended.)
https://theoptimisticconservative.wordpress.com/2022/12/28/toc-ready-room-28-december-2022-grab-bag-az-election-lawsuit-george-santos-illegal-migrants/
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1608093186194391040.html
This post by Doc Zero / Hayward could also be read as an explanation for why the Left gaslights instead of presenting factual observations and rational arguments: there aren’t any of those that work in their favor.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1608455922199707648.html
@ Tom Grey > “I just found out that Lorenzo of Oz (Warby) has some fine ideas on both his own and Helen Dale’s substack:”
The first essay published by Dale dovetails nicely with the articles I’ve already cited by J.E. Dyer and John “Doc Zero” Hayward, especially this observation:
A section of Hayward’s essay on reason and religion that I didn’t quote previously also resonates with Lorenzo’s arguments.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1608455922199707648.html
https://helendale.substack.com/p/social-justice-as-social-leverage
An interesting youTube using the Stanford Prison Experiment in part to explain what we have witnessed these past three years.
Understandable at 1.5 for me–so about twenty minutes.
The Veil over Society Got Removed for a Moment…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfbHMPkmvtE&t=1753s
I remain mostly optimistic–and certainly hopeful!– knowing that 50 million Americans never got injected, and 85% of those “eligible” have rejected a third shot.
We must do all we can to keep this from being injected into children.
Wow! Lots of good commentary and links above. Much of the linked commentary (from Substack) raises a question:
it appears likely that much of the social change being foisted on Americans is the result of politicians pushing policies that on their face are not in the country’s best interests. I presume they are doing so as a result of pressure from wealthy patrons, so my question is, what’s in it for those patrons?
They might feel morally superior for supporting unrestrained immigration, the relaxation of laws against drug use or shoplifting, or permissive policing against homelessness, but there comes a time when those policies impact even the very wealthy in Silicon Valley and probably even George Soros. So why are they pushing the continuation of these policies? What’s in it for them that they continue to put their money into politicians who push policies that bring in thousands of unskilled people who will be a financial drain on our population for years to come?
There are a limited number of gardeners or housekeepers they can employ, after all.
@ F > “what’s in it for those patrons?”
I’ve often wondered that myself.
Perhaps they are overly optimistic, or maybe they have an agenda so far out of normal ken that there is some advantage they see that we cannot.
And then again, maybe this is just the End of The World per John the Revelator’s Apocalypse.
Sarah Hoyt delves into some of the questions, with some suggestions of answers, in a recent 7-part series (interspersed with some very nice Christmas short stories).
https://accordingtohoyt.com/2022/12/21/everything-is-broken-riding-the-catastrophic-change-wave-part-i/