Ed Yong, who’s penned dozens of hysterical articles on Covid for The Atlantic including such gems as COVID-19 Long-Haulers Are Fighting for Their Future, Even Health-Care Workers With Long COVID Are Being Dismissed, How Did This Many Deaths Become Normal? and The Final Pandemic Betrayal, is hot on the scene of the new Monkeypox outbreak.

Eric Feigl-Ding is also all over this.

Epidemiologists Jennifer Nuzzo and Bill Hanage are on the scene—but still no word from them as to whether they see anything strange about the first-ever global Monkeypox outbreak occurring in mid-May 2022, a year after they acted as advisers on an international biosecurity simulation of a global Monkeypox outbreak occurring in mid-May 2022.

The US Government is hot on the scene with an order of 13 million Monkeypox vaccine doses from Bavarian Nordic.

The WHO is on the scene.

The global Monkeypox outbreak—occurring on the exact timeline predicted by a biosecurity simulation of a global Monkeypox outbreak a year prior—bears a striking resemblance to the outbreak of COVID-19 just months after Event 201, a simulation of a coronavirus pandemic almost exactly like COVID-19.

Event 201 was hosted in October 2019—just two months before the coronavirus was first revealed in Wuhan—by the Gates Foundation, the World Economic Forum, Bloomberg, and Johns Hopkins. As with the Event 201, the participants at the Monkeypox simulation have thus far been stone silent as to their having participated in a pandemic simulation the facts of which happened to come true in real life just months later.

One person who was present at both Event 201 and the Monkeypox simulation is George Fu Gao, director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control. At event 201, Gao specifically raised the point of countering “misinformation” during a “hypothetical” coronavirus pandemic.

Here’s Gao at Event 201 right next to our very own Avril Haines, Director of National Intelligence—technically the highest-level intelligence official in the United States. Look at these cuties. Doesn’t that make you feel all warm and fuzzy? Phew. Making Kim Philby jealous.

That said, I won’t sit here and debate wild conspiracy theories that there might be anything unusual about a global pandemic occurring just months after a simulation of a global pandemic of exactly that kind, followed shortly after by the first-ever global outbreak of an even-more-obscure virus just months after a simulation of an outbreak of exactly that kind.

If you want to be a good American and make a six-figure salary—or be friends with people who make six-figure salaries—then do as your government tells you: Sit down, shut up, stay home, save lives, take your shots, show your papers, and muzzle your kids. (read more)

The report, written by a committee appointed in 2019 by Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow, found that "slavery thrived in New England from its beginnings," including at Harvard. Many who read the report will find it "disturbing and even shocking," Bacow said in a statement.

The university's president said the fund would go toward the recommendations in the report, which include efforts to improve educational opportunities for marginalized students and partnering with historically Black colleges and universities. It also recommended memorials, research opportunities and curricula that honor enslaved people and acknowledge the university's ties to slavery.

The report found that between the university's founding in 1636 and 1783, Harvard faculty, staff and leaders enslaved more than 70 people, many of whom worked and lived on campus.

"Slavery – of Indigenous and of African people – was an integral part of life in Massachusetts and at Harvard during the colonial era," according to the study's findings.

The university "had extensive financial ties to and profited from slavery in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries," the report said.

Some donors had ties to slave trade through plantations in the South and Caribbean islands and through textile manufacturing operations in the North that were supplied by cotton grown by enslaved people.

In the first half of the 19th century, five men who made their fortunes from slavery made up more than one-third of the money donated or pledged to Harvard by private individuals.

"These donors helped the university build a national reputation, hire faculty, support students, grow its collections, expand its physical footprint and develop its infrastructure," the report said.

Harvard also memorializes benefactors with ties to slavery today through statues, buildings and professorships, the report found.

Several Harvard intellectuals, including presidents and prominent professors, promoted "race science" and eugenics from the mid-19th century into the 20th century, according to the report. Some conducted abusive and intrusive research that was used to justify slavery and racist ideologies.

The report also acknowledged that Harvard's museum collections include the remains of thousands of people of Indigenous and African descent who may have been enslaved.

In a statement, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, the committee's chair and a professor of constitutional law and history, urged students, faculty and staff to read the report as a means of "examining our past as well as our present."

"We cannot dismantle what we do not understand, and we cannot understand the contemporary injustice we face unless we reckon honestly with our history," said Brown-Nagin, who is also dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard.

While the report expands on previous research on the ties between one of the nation's most prestigious universities and slavery, Harvard has also previously acknowledged some of these connections.

In 2016, Drew Gilpin Faust, the university's president at the time, publicly acknowledged that Harvard was "directly complicit in America’s system of racial bondage" and "indirectly involved through extensive financial and other ties," according to Tuesday's report. Faust also created a committee to investigate the university's connections to slavery.

Bacow said the  report's findings serve as "guideposts" in efforts to "properly reckon with our past." He said he will appoint a committee to implement the report's recommendations and allow $100 million for these efforts.

The $100 million commitment is significant, but Harvard’s endowment grew to $53.2 billion in the 2021 fiscal year.

Many universities in recent years have started to evaluate their connections to slavery, some joining a group known as Universities Studying Slavery. The consortium, which is based at the University of Virginia, includes Harvard, and other colleges such as Brown, Georgetown, the University of Georgia and the University of North Carolina.

Brown was the first university among the Ivy League to formally acknowledge its ties to slavery, according to Tuesday's report. The university invested $10 million to support academic opportunities for K-12 students in Providence, Rhode Island. It also offered loan forgiveness opportunities for graduate students and fellowships to support slavery studies.

In 2019, Princeton pledged $27.6 million as reparations for its ties to slavery, and Georgetown announced a $400,000 reparations fund.

Recently, Johns Hopkins University revealed in 2020 that its namesake founder had enslaved at least four people. He had been thought prior to be an abolitionist. (read more)

Michael Hotchkiss, a spokesman for Princeton, said the university “generally does not comment on personnel matters.” Officials would not say when the board of trustees would come to a decision.

Dr. Katz declined an interview. But his lawyer, Samantha Harris, said she was expecting the trustees to fire him. “In our view, this is the culmination of the witch hunt that began days after Professor Katz published an article in Quillette that led people to call for his termination,” Ms. Harris said on Thursday.

Princeton’s faculty dean, Gene A. Jarrett, rejected that view. In a 10-page report, dated Nov. 30, 2021, the dean detailed reasons for dismissing Dr. Katz. Dr. Jarrett addressed what he said was Dr. Katz’s contention that there was a “direct line” from the Quillette article to being investigated for misconduct.

“I have considered Professor Katz’s claim and have determined that the current political climate of the university, whether perceived or real, is not germane to the case, nor does it play a role in my recommendation,” Dr. Jarrett wrote. That document became the basis for the president’s recommendation.

The woman in the sexual relationship did not cooperate with the original Princeton investigation. But after the Princetonian report, she filed a formal complaint that led the administration to open a new investigation, which it said was looking at new issues rather than revisiting old violations, according to the university report.

Princeton asserted that Dr. Katz had discouraged the woman from seeking mental health treatment while they were together, for fear of disclosing their relationship; that he had pressured her not to cooperate with the investigation in 2018; and that he had hindered that investigation by not being totally honest and forthcoming, according to the report.

Dr. Katz’s wife, Solveig Gold, said he had lost many friends over the controversy. “Nobody wants to be seen in his presence, in his company, in his friendship,” she said.

Ms. Gold, 27, who is finishing her Ph.D. in classics at the University of Cambridge, graduated from Princeton in 2017. She said that she had been his student, but that there was no romantic relationship between them at the time. They married in July 2021.

Ms. Gold said her husband had several job offers. “The canceled have a way of looking out for each other,” she said. “But none of them is the job that he has loved doing his whole life.”

Some of Dr. Katz’s colleagues are treating his Quillette article as a lesson. It has been included on a university website, “To Be Known and Heard,” that tackles Princeton and systemic racism. The site includes a historical outline of free speech controversies, starting with minstrelsy and ending with quotes from his article.

The timeline states, “Throughout its history, Princeton has grappled with what crosses the ‘line’ between free speech and freedom of expression, and racist statements and actions.” (read more)

Joshua T. Katz, a distinguished Classics professor at Princeton, published a brave essay on Quillette the other day, criticizing a lengthy list of demands by woke Princeton professors. He said there are some things he agrees with. On the other hand:

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

Prof. Katz responded to the list’s demand that Princeton apologize to members of the “Black Justice League.” Writes Katz:

The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands. Recently I watched an “Instagram Live” of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly.

Well, they’ve been dragging out Prof. Katz’s immiseration for over a year now. Incredibly, the university uses him as an example of racism on an official Princeton website dedicated to educating incoming students about the history of racism at Princeton. I repeat: this is an official university website. Here are the Katz parts:

Moreover, as part of the same freshman orientation program, Princeton has produced this video, in which woke professors talk about — what else? — racism. At the 38:38 mark, Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, as a Classics student, was mentored by Joshua Katz, but who has now turned on him, says that he’s in favor of free speech, but only to advance “social justice” and “antiracist social justice.” He says faculty help students with this, not to help them “assimilate,” and think well of Princeton, but “to provide them with the tools to tear down this place and make it a better one.”

I wrote about Padilla Peralta earlier this year, following a profile on his radical scholarly activism in The New York Times. From the Times piece:

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

My comment on this from that post:

If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re not seeing it for what it is. These scholars believe that the Classics field should exist only for the sake of its own destruction! It is completely perverse. My kids attend a school where everybody studies Latin, and there’s a lot of reading in the Greeks and the Romans. If any of my children fell in love with the Classics and wanted to study them, I would have to discourage them from going into the field, which is committing suicide.

The woke barbarians are already inside the gates. The only people who are going to save Classics are those who can find ways to keep the tradition alive like monastics in Dark Age monasteries.

This guy, Padilla Peralta, and his colleagues are the tormentors of Joshua Katz, and the radical ideologues valorized by Princeton University’s leadership. The university wants incoming freshmen to adopt these radicals’ views on the university, and on education. It is unconscionable, and it is profoundly decadent.

Imagine being Joshua Katz, returning to semester this fall to a campus whose freshman class has been instructed by the university to regard you as a racist. What an evil place Princeton is becoming.

Katz makes an appearance in Anne Applebaum’s new essay in The Atlantic, which is about what happens to people when they are cancelled. It’s a very good piece, full of horrible details taken from real life cases. It is impossible for any fair-minded, reasonable person to read it and think that wokeness and cancel culture are minor phenomena. Applebaum doesn’t mention “soft totalitarianism” in her essay, but this is exactly the kind of thing at the center of my book Live Not By Lies. 

I’m not going to quote the parts of her essay that I agree with; I fully endorse most of it, and am glad Applebaum is speaking out. But I do take issue with a couple of things. For example:

America remains a safe distance from Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Neither our secretive university committees nor the social-media mobs are backed by authoritarian regimes threatening violence. Despite the right-wing rhetoric that says otherwise, these procedures are not being driven by a “unified left” (there is no “unified left”), or by a unified movement of any kind, let alone by the government. It’s true that some of the university sexual-harassment cases have been shaped by Department of Education Title IX regulations that are shockingly vague, and that can be interpreted in draconian ways. But the administrators who carry out these investigations and disciplinary procedures, whether they work at universities or in the HR departments of magazines, are not doing so because they fear the Gulag. Many pursue them because they believe they are making their institutions better—they are creating a more harmonious workplace, advancing the causes of racial or sexual equality, keeping students safe. Some want to protect their institution’s reputation. Invariably, some want to protect their own reputation. At least two of the people I interviewed believe that they were punished because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position.

Well, yeah, this is not “hard totalitarianism,” but rather soft totalitarianism. It is still totalitarianism! And of course the persecutors are doing it because they believe they are improving their institutions by removing wicked people from their midst. Doesn’t Applebaum grasp that the Soviet persecutors — the true believers, not the cynics — believed they were doing the same thing? And yes, one distinct aspect of this soft totalitarianism is that it does not depend on the state to work its evil. It depends on radicalism in power within non-governmental institutions. If you are a victim of these monsters, you might be grateful that you have merely been professionally destroyed and shorn of all your friends, and not also sent to the gulag, but it’s not going to mean much to you that your tormentors weren’t agents of the state, but rather private citizens.

Moreover, I reject Applebaum’s claim that these procedures are not driven by a “unified left.” I don’t know where she gets that phrase — I mean, I don’t know where the “right-wing rhetoric” comes from — but it is, in fact, driven by a left unified not via a formal organization or system, but by the widespread agreement that pursuing “antiracism” and “social justice” are so vital that extremism in the pursuit of these goals is no vice.

Applebaum goes on:

Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative.

Oh, come on! It is certainly true that many prominent victims — academics and those in media fields — have been liberals, that could easily be explained by the fact that those are the most woke professions, and tend to be overwhelmingly liberal in the first place. Second, these are the worlds that intellectuals inhabit. Is Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum going to hear about the conservative company middle manager fired because of an accusation related to his political or social conservatism? Heck, I’m a conservative myself, and unless somebody tells me about it, I’m not likely to hear about it. I could have easily been fired back in 2008 (or thereabouts) when I was falsely accused by a minority colleague of creating a “hostile work environment” because I called a terrorist mob “savages.” I withdrew the published comment to avoid the destruction of my career — I had young children to raise — but I was prepared to fight the absurd allegation. What changed my mind was the certainty that the HR department at my employer would have cashiered a conservative white male employee without a second thought, given the identity of the accuser. You would have heard about it had that happened, because I had, and do have, access to the public square. But how many people don’t? How many people do get dismissed in these cases, and choose not to go public because they’ve been traumatized enough, and don’t want to make it even harder to get employment?

My point is that I get the feeling that Applebaum is trying too hard to exonerate the left — including readers of The Atlantic, and editors there too (remember what Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg did to Kevin D. Williamson?) from responsibility for the totalitarian dystopia they created and sustain. But if she wants to blame cowardly liberal Republican types who run woke capitalist corporations, I’m with her. And yes, there are instances of conservative cancel culture. These are awful, and I condemn them. But they are absolutely dwarfed by the behemoth that the left has created. When I hear about these deplorable examples, I’m reminded of the black-humor quip, “True, Hitler hated the Jews, but you have to remember, the Jews hated Hitler too.”

In any case, I do suggest you read the Applebaum essay, which is important. This was the part that infuriated me the most:

Here is the first thing that happens once you have been accused of breaking a social code, when you find yourself at the center of a social-media storm because of something you said or purportedly said. The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic. “I have in my department dozens of colleagues—I think I have spoken to zero of them in the past year,” one academic told me. “One of my colleagues I had lunch with at least once a week for more than a decade—he just refused to speak to me anymore, without asking questions.” Another reckoned that, of the 20-odd members in his department, “there are two, one of whom has no power and another of whom is about to retire, who will now speak to me.”

A journalist told me that after he was summarily fired, his acquaintances sorted themselves into three groups. First, the “heroes,” very small in number, who “insist on due process before damaging another person’s life and who stick by their friends.” Second, the “villains,” who think you should “immediately lose your livelihood as soon as the allegation is made.” Some old friends, or people he thought were old friends, even joined the public attack. But the majority were in a third category: “good but useless. They don’t necessarily think the worst of you, and they would like you to get due process, but, you know, they haven’t looked into it. They have reasons to think charitably of you, maybe, but they’re too busy to help. Or they have too much to lose.” One friend told him that she would happily write a defense of him, but she had a book proposal in the works. “I said, ‘Thank you for your candor.’ ”

I can easily imagine what Dante would have done to these people who abandon old friends, falsely accused, to save their own backsides. Revolting creatures. I bet the past year has taught Prof. Joshua Katz a lot about who his friends really are, and what human nature truly is. (read more)

This letter begins with the following blunt sentence: “Anti-Blackness is foundational to America.” One important difference between the two documents might wrongly be dismissed as merely cosmetic. In 1776 there were “united States” but there was not yet the “United States”; in these past two months, by contrast, at a time when we are increasingly un-united, “black” has become “Black” while “white” remains “white.”

I am friends with many people who signed the Princeton letter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzying array of changes, and I support their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embarrassed for them. To judge from conversations with friends and all too much online scouting, there are two camps: those cheering them on and those who wouldn’t dream of being associated with such a document. No one is in the middle. If you haven’t yet read it, do so now. Be warned: it is long.

A Princeton faculty letter calls for eliminating academic freedom via a committee that would review all publications for racist thought (racist defined by the committee). It was issued on….July 4th. https://t.co/VeU9LICqbR

— Zaid Jilani (@ZaidJilani) July 6, 2020

There are four reasons why colleagues might have signed the letter.

(1) They believe in every word. I suppose this is true for a few, including, presumably, those members of the faculty who were the initial drafters.

(2) They signed without reading it. I would not ordinarily believe this, but I am aware of a similar petition, not at Princeton, that people were asked to sign—and did so!—before knowing what they were putting their name to.

(3) They felt peer pressure to sign. This is entirely believable.

(4) They agree with some of the demands and felt it was good to act as “allies” and bring up the numbers even though they do not assent to everything themselves.

I imagine that the majority fall into this last category. Indeed, plenty of ideas in the letter are ones I support. It is reasonable to “[g]ive new assistant professors summer move-in allowances on July 1” and to “make [admissions] fee waivers transparent, easy to use, and well-advertised.” “Accord[ing] greater importance to service as part of annual salary reviews” and “[i]mplement[ing] transparent annual reporting of demographic data on hiring, promotion, tenuring, and retention” seem unobjectionable. And I will cheerfully join the push for a “substantial expansion” of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which encourages underrepresented minorities to enter PhD programs and strive to join the professoriate.

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

“Establish a core distribution requirement focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus.” There would be wisdom in this time of disunity in suggesting (not, in my view, requiring) that students take courses in American history and constitutionalism, both of which almost inevitably consider slavery and race, but that is not the same thing. Not incidentally, if you believe anti-blackness to be foundational, it is not a stretch to imagine that you will teach the 1619 Project as dogma.

“Commit fully to anti-racist campus iconography, beginning with the removal of the John Witherspoon statue.” Since I don’t care for this statue or its placement in front of the building in which I have my office, I would not be sad if it were moved away—but emphatically not because of Witherspoon, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who was a major figure in Princeton and American history with a complex relationship to slavery. There is no reason for me to say more: Innumerable sensible people have commented on the impossibility that anyone can pass the Purity Test. Someone who passes today will not pass tomorrow.

“Acknowledge, credit, and incentivize anti-racist student activism. Such acknowledgment should, at a minimum, take the form of reparative action, beginning with a formal public University apology to the members of the Black Justice League and their allies.” The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands. Recently I watched an “Instagram Live” of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly.

“Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty… Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the [usual] set of rules and procedures.” This scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous. Let me be clear: Racist slurs and clear and documentable bias against someone because of skin color are reprehensible and should lead to disciplinary action, for which there is already a process. But is there anyone who doesn’t believe that this committee would be a star chamber with a low bar for cancellation, punishment, suspension, even dismissal?

A couple of weeks before the Faculty Letter, other missives to the Princeton administration were promulgated, most significantly two intemperately worded lists of demands signed by hundreds of present and former undergraduates and graduate students. The immediate consequence was the widely publicized removal of the name Woodrow Wilson from the School of Public and International Affairs and the first of the university’s six residential colleges (now blandly renamed “First College”). I mention these letters because the Faculty Letter states twice—first in connection with graduate-level requests and then again with reference to undergraduates—“We offer these recommendations in full support of theirs.” One of the demands of Princeton Graduate Students United is that public safety be defunded since (to quote the “X-Campus Statement against State Terror and Call for Termination of University-Police Ties” that was started at the University of Minnesota) “[p]olice, and their proxies, private security companies, have no place on university campuses.” I defy any of my colleagues to argue persuasively that defunding campus police is a good idea, even at idyllic Princeton. I defy anyone who signed that letter, directly or indirectly, to send his or her children to a college or university without campus security. Fantasizing that you can do without the police is the height of arrogant privilege.

Independence of thought is considered the hallmark of academia, but everyone deserves it. In the United States, thank heavens, freedom to think for oneself is still a right, not a privilege. To my colleagues who signed the Faculty Letter: If you signed it independently and thoughtfully, good for you. I hereby solemnly publish and declare my own declaration. (read more)

A simple survey of my readers provided some extremely compelling evidence that 1) the US government has killed over 500,000 previously healthy Americans and 2) that the vaccine actually caused the deaths.

It took me around 30 minutes to create the survey and 11 hours to wait for highly statistically significant results.

I was able to accomplish something in less than 12 hours that the CDC has been unable to accomplish in 18 months: prove causality. We see both dose dependency and enormous changes in ACM deaths pre- vs. post-vaccine. We satisfy all five Bradford-Hill criteria applicable to vaccines.

We used 400 independent observers. I should note that all follow my Substack so they are correlated: all have excellent judgment, high intelligence, and immunity from mass formation effects. So they have the ability to see what is truly going on.

The survey compared the all-cause mortality (ACM) death rates just PRIOR to a vaccine dose to the ACM death rates immediately AFTER the dose. I predicted they would be dramatically higher after the dose and the effect would be dose dependent. It appears I was right. In fact, the survey projects far more deaths than I thought possible.

The number of deaths computed from the reports could be as high as 2M Americans, but the 500,000 number seems more credible, so I’m discounting the result by 4X to account for biases and confounders.

I don’t think there is any way anyone is going to be able to “explain away” these results once we redo the survey with a better set of controls (the next step).

And these results are ONLY counting the all-cause mortality increase for just the one month after each shot. We know you can die a year later from these vaccines.

We found Dose #4 caused only a 1.27X increase compared with 5.5X to 8.3X for doses 1 and 2 respectively and 2.3X for Dose #3. If this were a highly biased population, Dose 4 would have caused a larger discrepancy, but it’s approaching 1:1 as we’d expect.

The decreasing ACM increase with later shots makes sense… The vaccine eliminates anyone whose immune system is susceptible to auto-immune attacks on the spike protein. If it hasn’t killed you after 3 shots, it’s less likely to kill you on shot #4. You’re immune due to both survivor bias and the fact that your immune system has recognized the vaccine as an invader and clears it from the system quicker than on shots 1 and 2. This of course says nothing about it’s impact on effectiveness against the virus which is likely pretty minimal at this point which is a story for another day.

The higher ACM differential on Dose 2 was interesting. This may be somewhat of a poison accumulation effect. You’re basically doubling the dose over a 4 week period rather than giving your body time to recover.

Note that this factor is simply the difference between the ACM before the shot vs. after the shot. We have no idea whether the ACM goes back to baseline between shots or not. It likely does drop. We don’t know how fast. Hence, the progressively decreasing impact on ACM increases due to the jab. It could very well be that your ACM is 1.1X your baseline months or years after the shots.

When you do the math, based on these numbers, well over 500,000 people have been killed by the vaccines so far.

If the survey were more precise, I’d expect lower ACM increases, but still a final death toll north of 500,000.

The 500K excess death estimate is supported by the actual US mortality numbers as being plausible (which have a total excess death count of roughly 1M deaths since Jan 2021).

My colleagues are looking at this data and mulling over it.

We have identified a very large signal that I don’t think will go away when we redo the survey. We will need to think carefully about the next iteration of the survey and have the protocol peer reviewed to eliminate biases before we launch it. Now we know this will be time well spent.

So don’t break out the champagne just yet. But I think you’ll want to get it ready. We are getting very close. (read more)

Otherwise disaster looms! The United States will have to treat Covid like every other illness. That means using just regular massive government subsidies and not extra massive government subsidies to pay for Covid treatments. Yes, we spend only $4 trillion annually on medical care, wherever shall we find the money?

Republicans appear to have realized that it is both good politics and good policy to derail this gravy train. They are, in the immortal words of Nancy Reagan, just saying no. Not to $22.5 billion, and not to $10 billion either.

By the way, it is not even clear where the money would go. Politico reported that half of the $10 billion would be used to pay Pfizer for 20 million mRNA doses that have already been delivered. But half of $10 billion is - work with me here - $5 billion. That figure implies the doses cost $250 each, when in reality they run about $20. Political reporters hate math almost as much as asking Democrats hard questions, so that little error slipped through unnoticed.

Anyhoo, $10 billion, $22.5 billion, who cares, it’s fiat currency, we’ll just make more! Inflation is transitory, Covid vaccines are forever (or is it the other way around, I always forget?).

—

The point is that without that money, THE UNITED STATES IS GOING TO RUN OUT OF COVID SHOTS:

Among the sacrifices being weighed are limiting access to its next generation of vaccines to only the highest-risk Americans — a rationing that would have been unthinkable just a year ago…

Wait. Hol’ up.

Read that again, real slow.

Among the sacrifices being weighed are limiting access to its next generation of vaccines…

“Next generation of vaccines”?

WHAT NEXT GENERATION? THERE IS NO NEXT GENERATION. THERE IS ONLY THE CURRENT GENERATION.

WHICH BASICALLY DOES NOT WORK AGAINST THE OMICRON VARIANT.

Yes, Pfizer and Moderna are testing shots that are based on the same technology as the current jabs but cause the body to produce a spike that looks more like the Omicron spike.

However.

No one knows if those shots will actually do a better job at helping the body respond to Omicron . That uncertainty applies especially in people who have already received the original vaccines, which strongly bias the immune system to produce antibodies against the original variant. Based on both preclinical work with the Omicron shot and clinical data from shots against other variants that were tested in 2021, the odds are long.

It’s not even clear an Omicron-specific shot would truly count as a new generation of vaccines.

A next-generation shot might involve a different lipid nanoparticle (the shell that wraps the mRNA), or somewhat different modifications to the mRNA itself, or an oral formulation. Any of those may require a massive clinical trial, ideally at least as large as the 30,000 to 40,000-person pivotal trials that regulators required before approving the original shots. Pfizer and Moderna are unlikely to want to run more trials that size, which means that approval for true next-generation vaccines may get complicated -

Sorry.

This theoretical argument between the companies and the regulators over an approval pathway for next-generation mRNA vaccines is a waste of everyone’s time, because - back to the original point - THERE ARE NO NEXT-GENERATION mRNA VACCINES ANYWHERE NEAR APPROVAL.

Thus we are waiting on the Omicron spike vaccine, which - again, based on what’s currently known - even the companies are going to be hard-pressed to sell as a major improvement. Assuming that Sars-Cov-2 has not mutated AGAIN by next winter and left the Omicron vaccine as out of date as the original vaccines.

—

Politico’s reporters clearly do not understand even basic virology, immunology, or vaccine development, and that’s fine. Why would they?

What’s not fine is that they appear not to have lived through the last two years - two years in which EVERY PROMISE from public-health authorities has turned out wrong, and in which the miracle mRNA shots have turned out to have a working life measured in months.

They may not understand how epically the vaccines have failed, but everyone else does, which is why even with a second booster now available for MSNBC addicts, the United States is now administering barely 300,000 doses a day.

Rationing? At this point the Biden administration will be lucky if it can find a way to dispose of the expired shots without anyone noticing (though you can be sure Politico will not go out of its way to report that).

Diesel fuel is a different story. But that’s not Politico’s problem! (read more)

By the end of 2016, an astounding 1.3 million migrants had entered the Federal Republic of Germany – a massive incursion overseen not by a leftist government, but by the nominally conservative Christian Democrats. It was also the CDU, under Merkel’s leadership, who developed the genius plan to phase out nuclear energy and close our coal-fired power plants at the same time, and who masterminded some of the harshest and most destructive Corona containment measures in all of Europe. You elect allegedly prudent, far-sighted centrist conservatives, you get mass immigration, deindustrialisation, and nationwide hygiene house arrests.

How does that happen?

I’ve tried not to make right-wing politics a focus of this blog, mostly because I’m not even sure what it means to be on the right, in a world where there’s no operative political identity beyond establishment leftism. Everyone who opposes the leftist program, whatever his specific views, will find himself bearing the right-wing label. Nor do I consider myself in any real sense a conservative. Nevertheless, the complicity of conservative politicians in enacting lunatic leftist policy prescriptions is a very deep problem, and one that characterises politics not just in Germany but across the West.

It’s also the theme of a little book from 2020 by Manfred Kleine-Hartlage called Konservativenbeschimpfung, that I’ve found myself rereading these past few days.

The title might be translated Invective against Conservatives, or merely Against Conservatives, but it’s not so much an attack as it is an explanation of conservative complicity in the leftist political program. As such it explains a great deal about our current moment, and in what follows I’ll venture to summarise some of its central ideas.

The Americans I know are fond of explaining conservative failures via the thesis of controlled opposition. The US Republican Party and also many nominally right-wing mouthpieces, so the line goes, have been co-opted either by the leftist establishment or by related special interests, and function merely as conduits to direct ideological energies towards ineffective or counter-productive ends. This thesis is not so much wrong as it is incomplete: The success of empty, transparent strategies like these itself requires explanation, as does the continued inability of many right-leaning politicians to develop a clear critique of the left or even defend the most moderate of their own positions. Instead, conservatives repeatedly embrace the principles of their opponents, while rejecting nationalists and traditionalists to their right as filthy populists, in chorus with leftist activists themselves.

The conservatives of MKH’s title include the members of mainstream parties, like Tories or the CDU, but also elements of the populist-trending opposition, such as Alternative für Deutschland or even some of the MAGA movement behind Donald Trump in America. Fundamental to conservatism in its establishment and establishment-adjacent oppositional forms are the same kinds of people, namely middle-class traditionalists – “a character-type that finds itself inherently opposed to [...] rebellion,” and which “is therefore to be found in every culture and society” (p. 22). This archetypal conservative shares a great part of his ideology with the populist right; it is only his social and cultural orientation, and his attitude towards the reigning elite, that sets him apart. “The right-dissident can be an enemy of the state; the conservative, at most, a member of the opposition” (p. 27). Above all, the conservative has the aims and instincts of a middle-class striver; he is “status-conscious” (p. 30) and eager to ingratiate himself with elites, whoever they may be.

Thus MKH detects an important asymmetry between establishment leftism and the conservatives who appear to oppose it. The conservative is an instinctive defender of traditional, organic structures, “which function precisely because of their organic nature, that is to say because nobody planned them consciously or with intent” (p. 15f). The leftist, meanwhile, is an innovator, who deploys his theories and utopian hopes against the received tradition. Like many organic things, our traditional institutions have an intuitive appeal that is nevertheless difficult to articulate and entirely foreign to leftist theory. Things like marriage and the family, religious communities, and even the human immune system, are organic solutions to ancient problems, worked out over millennia of cultural and biological evolution. Not even their most ardent defenders understand their purposes or functions fully. Conservatives are therefore rhetorically disadvantaged: “The only conclusive proof that these structures are irreplaceable comes when one has destroyed them, and realised that no replacements are in sight. But then it is too late.” The leftist critique of traditional institutions, meanwhile, undermines the functioning of traditional society. By destroying solidarity and common-feeling, these tactics come to reinforce, perversely, the leftist critique itself. As natural social and cultural structures are destroyed by leftist propaganda and social engineering, churches, schools and governments indeed come to seem – as the left has always told us – “non-existent, irrelevant, repressive, reactionary” (p. 17).

In a rightly ordered society, the conservative would find himself among the elite or its most enthusiastic supporters. There his conformist impulses would serve him well and align with his own interests. The primary source of innovation and criticism in traditionalist social structures would come from the non-conformist, anti-establishment element – in other words, precisely those people we call leftists today. The problem is that we live in an inverted order. The leftist opposition has taken charge; the conservative conformists have been driven into the opposition. The left sustains this inversion through its permanent revolution, its constant and ever-renewed assaults on the stability of society. The conservative, who remembers only his former position in the ruling class and remains fixated on returning to the halls of power, neglects populist solutions and seeks only to ingratiate himself with the leftists who hold the keys.

Neglect is too mild a word, in fact. The conservative only truly opposes the populists to his right. In denouncing right-wing populist opposition, the conservative both distances himself from the plebeian movements he considers beneath him, and hopes to ingratiate himself with the leftists in power:

Conservatives believe that by hiding their central beliefs they can gain access to elites and thereby achieve a wider public hearing. Apart from the fact that this strategy resembles an attempt to access a harem on the condition of one’s own castration (which, even if it worked, would be pointless), it fails anyway: For the witch-hunters of the opposition it is child’s play to produce proof that the conservative actually does hold these hidden opinions (and by analogy: that he still has, or at least had, contact with those people and organisations from which he had lately distanced himself). Insofar as the conservative has tabooed ... his very own political views, he tarnishes them both with the odium of the immoral and indecent. (p. 47)

This “three-fold own goal – to fail to advocate for your own position, to make yourself responsible for it nevertheless, and to vilify it on top of that” is central to a broader cultural process, via which traditionalist political positions are condemned as heresy by left- and right-wing parties alike, banished from polite company, and finally censored and even criminalised.

MKH sees this broken approach as a misbegotten attempt to appropriate the left’s Gramscian march through the institutions. “[T]o learn from one’s opponents does not mean, necessarily, that it is a good idea to copy them” (p. 51); the ideological asymmetries of left and right confound conservative hopes of reverse infiltration. To begin with, leftists got into power by playing to the sense of fairness that prevailed within the twentieth-century liberal establishment. This older guard of elites were prepared to concede access and even power to their political opponents; in their minds this largesse confirmed their own legitimacy. The left knows no such fairness; as soon as they took charge, they set about bricking up all the passages via which they came to power themselves. Today, the establishment left demands nothing so much as absolute conformity to its views, and admits mostly yes-men and careerists to its circles. There will be no equivalent institutional march for the right.

Personally, I would go even further than this, as I’m tempted to see the alleged leftist seizure of liberal democratic institutions as an illusion. What we’re really seeing, I think, is the inevitable degeneration of liberal norms and ideals, as they are replaced one after the other by leftist simulacra that present themselves as the perfected form of liberalism. Equality of outcome coming to replace equality of opportunity is only the most trite example to mention here; the phenomenon is evident across a wide array of issues, including Corona and mass containment, where the liberal ideals of public health were reworked by the leftist transmogrifier to become the overtly inhumane project of eradicating a virus.

Whereas MKH constructs the conservative primarily as an individual, the left appears in his pages as an ideology – one which holds that society is a human construct; that traditional social structures are repressive; that denies man’s biological nature; and that is ultimately hostile to western civilisation, which it seeks to replace in the future with socialist utopia. “One can either entirely reject this system of patent insanity, or not at all” (p. 69). The conservative’s belief that he can adopt some leftist principles for pragmatic purposes, or in a spirit of compromise, are therefore mistaken. The system he opposes demands absolute submission; anything less makes him an enemy regardless.

For centuries, liberal European polities fended off all manner of political opponents, and if the states themselves did not always survive, liberalism itself demonstrated remarkable stability. It was a great filter that excluded all rivals, until it found one it could not sort out. Marxism and its successor movements proliferated as the one disease that liberalism could not defeat, in much the same way that antibiotic-resistant MRSA emerges from the antiseptic environments of hospitals. It is an opposition politics uniquely suited to liberalism, for it exploits the liberal impulses for equality and freedom in favour of a quite different, and far more terrible, project. In Western countries, the leftists took aim at the traditional institutions and culture of the European middle classes. There, they still struggle to impose not a socialist utopia, but a never-ending industrial and financial serfdom.

What I remember most from my time in Marxist circles was the pervasive sentiment that the right is always winning. By “the right,” of course, we meant some variation upon Global Capital, whose agenda the political process always seemed to favour, and before whom our politicians always gave way. Later on, particularly after 2015, I found myself thinking precisely the same thing from the opposite direction – the left is always winning. By “the left,” of course, I realise that I mean not only the leftist establishment, but the selfsame managerial, bureaucratic and market forces whose interests they represent.

The leftist system is not meant to produce political stability or prosperity, and it feels a lot like it’s entering a death spiral. Getting these lunatics out of power, before they crash the entire West with no survivors, is the most urgent problem we face. Here MKH has the right idea: Respectable conservative politicians have failed above all, in neglecting those people who have suffered the most at the hands of globalisation, renewable energy, immigration, lockdowns and all the rest of it. We must defeat the leftist elite, not win them over; and to do this we must deprive them steadily of popular support, beginning among the lower classes and at the periphery, where the greatest gains are to be made, and working inwards. From the hysterical, crazed opposition men like Trump, Orbán and Salvini have inspired, you can measure the power of this approach.

If Corona restrictions return in the fall, populist political upsets will become our only hope. (read more)

New York Post:

A Colorado mother has complained that students at her daughter’s former middle school were taught about LGBTQ-related issues — and told to keep mum about it — after hosting a Genders & Sexualities Alliance club, according to a report.

Erin Lee told The New American that her 12-year-old daughter’s teacher at Wellington Middle School in Fort Collins invited her last May to an art club, where an outside speaker told the kids that “what you hear in here, stays in here,” Fox News reported.

“She explained to my daughter that if she is not 100 percent comfortable in her female body, then she’s transgender,” Lee told the conservative magazine.

Imagine it!

“She then told the kids that parents aren’t safe, and that it’s OK to lie to them about where they are in order to attend this meeting,” she said. “She doubled down that parents aren’t safe [and] that heterosexuality and monogamy are not normal.”

The national grassroots organization Parents Defending Education identified the art teacher as Jenna Riep, saying she ran the GSA club and that the guest speaker was Kimberly Chambers, director of SPLASH Youth of Northern Colorado ( splashnoco.org ).

Chambers, a paid substitute teacher, also is a paid employee of the Larimer County Department of Health and Environment and has access to students’ information, PDE said.

The parents group obtained emails between Chambers and the art teacher in which Chambers expressed concerns about the girl’s well-being due to her mother’s objections to the club.

After the teacher said the girl hadn’t attended school since the controversy began, Chambers suggested talking with school officials “about doing a well-child check or whatever is within the policies of the school,” according to Fox News.

Lee told The New American that her daughter has been attending a private, Christian school and is “doing much better.”

The Poudre School District acknowledged the existence of the club and that conversations in it “may be confidential” but declined to address Lee’s allegations “to protect the privacy of the student and their family.”

“In PSD, we promise to create and uphold equitable, inclusive, and rigorous educational opportunities, outcomes, and experiences for all students,” the district told Fox News Digital. “As a district, we are committed to making our schools safe spaces in which all students can learn.

“Genders and Sexualities Alliances, or GSAs, were established as safe spaces for members of the LGBTQIA+ community, allies, and any individual to come together with the goals of ensuring inclusivity, safety, and support,” the statement said.

“Discussions in GSAs may be confidential given that they can sometimes be sensitive in nature (i.e. a student may be ‘out’ with specific friends but not with the community at large),” it continued.

What’s next?

So far:

• They legalized women voting
• They normalized “free sex” (it wasn’t actually free or even cheap – they paid with their souls)
• They normalized interracial sex
• They normalized divorce
• They legalized homosexuality
• They normalized homosexuality
• They legalized gay marriage
• They legalized “gay adoption” (homophile child kidnapping/trafficking)
• They normalized trannies
• They normalized literal child trannies
• They started secretly brainwashing your children to become trannies at government schools

The next obvious thing up the sleeves of these diseased degenerates is to forcibly take your children from you and sodomize them. What other next step could there be?

Unless you are stupid enough to think that this is somehow the final phase of this feminist anal agenda, then you must acknowledge: they are just going to take your kids so they can have their way with them. (read more)

Making matters even worse is a drop in available inventory of diesel fuel which is about to become a crisis for the east coast of the U.S.  Some Truck Stop operators like Love’s and Pilot are already warning their big rig customers they may not have fuel for truckers.

[…] “Love’s is monitoring the fluid situation on the East Coast, we have experienced minimal outages during low traffic hours,” Oklahoma-based Love’s Travel Stops said in an emailed statement. “The company has no plans to restrict purchases of diesel.”

[…] Earlier on Wednesday, the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration said total inventories of distillates, which is mainly diesel fuel but also heating oil, fell last week to a 17-year low of 104 million barrels, which is 23% below normal.

On the East Coast, the situation is even worse. The EIA said distillate fuel oil inventories in the so-called PADD 1 district that covers the Northeastern states fell by 1.1 million barrels last week to just 21 million barrels, the lowest ever recorded in data going back to 1990.

Love’s truck stops, with some 550 locations across 41 states, also seemed to confirm reports on social media Wednesday that said Love’s and other truck stops such as Pilot were informing their fleet operators that shortages of diesel fuel on the East Coast may happen in the coming week at some stores. (read more)

Not only is the logistics of transportation contingent upon the use of diesel fuel for tractor trailer deliveries of essential goods, the other big users of diesel fuel are also farmers.

If it wasn’t challenging enough to triple the price farmers are paying for fertilizer this year, now the costs to operate the equipment they depend on has just doubled with the increases in diesel fuel.

“Some farmers are now even reporting farm diesel prices are higher than on-road diesel, which is typically not the case. … Certain areas of the country have seen shortages already and we expect that to continue. Supplies at New York Harbor–a hub for diesel distribution–are at a 30-year low,” says Meyer. “As such, the East Coast of the U.S. has been hit especially hard, resulting in diesel prices above $6.00 per gallon in that area.  (more)

ENERGY POLICY:

♦ West Coast ports that cannot handle container off-loads due to emission regulations.

♦ Nationwide fertilizer shortages and high prices.

♦ Massive increases in gasoline and diesel fuel costs.

♦ Limited shoreline refinery capacity due to federal regulations.

♦ Stunning increases in food costs at the grocery store.