Better in their words…

Source: LITERAL CHAOS ☙ Wednesday, September 6, 2023 ☙ C&C NEWS

WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY

🔥 An alert reader commenting yesterday posted a link proving I completely missed the boat on the new Pirola variant. I did question the official explanation, that the name was based on a random asteroid plus the combination of Greek letters “pi” and “rho,” which makes as much sense as deploying an experimental new shot to the entire world. The name seems pretty popular though, it has been all over the headlines this week.

For example, from yesterday’s Irish Times:

Whew! That was fast. Looks like we may have dodged the Apocalypse again. For now. Till the next new variant.

But anyway, it turned out I was wrong; there is another different slang meaning for the moniker Pirola, and it’s a doozy. According to Wiktionary.com, “Pirola” describes nothing less than the old baloney pony:

Of the several standard definitions, in addition to the asteroid, ‘Pirola’ is also the name of a type of flower. And it makes perfect sense. You have to see it to believe it:

Ahem. Behold Nature in all its glory. Or something. Anyway, if your pirola looks like that one, seek immediate treatment. It might be monkeypox. Maybe they have a vaccine that can help.

🔥 In yet another National Disgrace, President Robert L. Peters still has not visited the devastated Burning Man mud encampment.

Horrifying footage has slowly emerged from the disaster zone. (Warning, video of crazy hippies.)

https://twitter.com/xdcharts/status/1698663518109901170

Worse, yesterday brought even more bad news. What should have been a fun nine-day frolic in the desert toppled into the depths of despair, as Burning Man and its sadly sobered-up partiers ignited into literal chaos:

Somehow, the ending of Joseph Conrad’s novelette “Heart of Darkness” (later, the anti-war movie Apocalypse Now) seems appropriate to describe the literal torture the suffering victims of the orgiastic fun festival have endured:

Anything approaching the change that came over his features I have never seen before, and hope never to see again. He cried in a whisper at some image, at some vision—he cried out twice, a cry that was no more than a breath: “‘The horror! The horror!”

Indeed. The horror.

💉 In related disaster news, the Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed yesterday by courageous Johns Hopkins covid doc Marty Makary, headlined “Biden Waves Through Another Covid Booster.” The sub-headline asked, “He’s certain that it ‘works,’ but there’s no data. Is this how we approve drugs now?”

After disgustedly pointing out the last round of boosters was approved after only a “study” of eight mice, Dr. Makary noted this time there is even less safety and efficacy data. That obvious point was already nice to see in print somewhere, but then Makary dropped a hammer on jab risks, citing a study showing serious adverse events in 1 in 556 doses:

Advocates of the new Covid boosters point out that the annual flu shot gets approved without a randomized trial. But flu shots use a traditional vaccine platform that has withstood the test of time, and Covid vaccines have higher complication rates. The latter have a rate of serious adverse events as high as 1 in 556 doses, according to a study published last year in the journal Vaccine. They have also been found to cause myocarditis in young people at a rate six to 28 times the incidence after infection, according to a 2022 JAMA Cardiology study.

Needless to say, the risk of serious complications from catching covid is nowhere near 1 in 556 infections. What on Earth kind of risk/reward analysis are these experts calculating? I realize math isn’t their strong suit, but still.

I was especially pleased to see Dr. Makary work the word “mockery” into his conclusion:

The novel Covid booster shot may be warranted for some high-risk patients. But pushing it hard for young and old alike without human-outcomes data makes a mockery of the scientific method and our regulatory process.

But … Dr. Makary: It’s Science! Shut up!

The drip of truthful jab information is becoming a steady trickle. This must be what happens after the government’s money hose gets turned off.

Honestly, who is taking boosters at this point?

💉 A new pre-print study published yesterday, titled “Forensic Analysis of the 38 Subject Deaths in the 6-Month Interim Report of the Pfizer/BioNTech BNT162b2 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trial.” It had thirteen authors.

The first six deaths from Pfizer’s trial. Notice any pattern?

The authors described their new study as being the first analysis of the original data from the main Pfizer vaccine clinical trial (44,000 participants) to be conducted by a group unaffiliated with Pfizer. Their analysis was enabled by the court-ordered release of Pfizer’s internal test data, which the FDA infamously tried to suppress for 75 years.

What they found, unsurprisingly, and what was missed by federal regulators and the vaccine approval committee, was a significantly-higher rate of death in the vaccine group compared to the placebo:

Our analysis revealed inconsistencies between the subject data listed in the 6-Month Interim Report and publications authored by Pfizer trial site administrators. Most importantly, we found evidence of an over 3.7-fold increase in number of deaths due to cardiovascular events in BNT162b2 vaccinated subjects compared to Placebo controls. This significant adverse event signal was not reported by Pfizer.

The authors reviewed each of the 38 deaths, and found Pfizer hijinx all over. Here’s one example (edited for brevity):

Subject 11621327 was found dead shortly after receiving Dose 1 of the Pfizer vaccine on September 10th. His body was found at home (with lividity) on the 13th of September when the police performed a welfare check. “According to the medical examiner, the probable cause of death was progression of atherosclerotic disease.” The cause of death listed in the 6-Month Interim Report is “Arteriosclerosis”… autopsy results were not provided or available. Based only on the medical documentation in the CRF, there is no basis for ascribing the subject’s death to advanced atherosclerosis or concluding that the death was unrelated to the vaccine… It is likely that the subject died within a day or two of vaccination. This was a clear indication that his death could have been related to the Pfizer vaccine and this should not have been ruled out without a more rigorous investigation. In our opinion, this diagnosis was premature and an egregious misjudgment of the evidence at hand.

An “egregious misjudgment” is one way of putting it.

After noting the unusually low overall number of deaths in the overall trial, which itself raises suspicion, and the very high (5%) number of “discontinued” patients, the authors dropped the biggest bomb: the Pfizer trial data does notshow that any lives were saved by the “safe and effective” jabs:

To state that  vaccine saved lives, Pfizer should have shown a reduction in all-cause mortality due to a decrease in COVID-19 mortality in the vaccinated arm of the trial. Figure 1 does not support any such claim for Weeks 1 – 20 and, in fact, speaks against this conclusion in the weeks following Week 20 in which the Placebo cumulative plot is distinctly below that of the BNT162b2 vaccinated.

In other words, fewer people should have died in the injection group than in the placebo group, but the exact opposite happened. How the vaccine committee missed this is anybody’s guess. Well, we have some pretty good guesses.

Here’s the link to the study.

😷 The good news is, it’s still so rare that every school imposing masks makes national news. From Fox News, yesterday:

Rosemary Hills Elementary School sits in swanky Montgomery County, a Washington D.C. suburb. And that’s probably all you needed to know.

🔥 Last week, the AP ran a nauseating story headlined, “College students are still struggling with basic math. Professors blame the pandemic.”

It’s not just a small problem. “This is a huge issue,” said Maria Emelianenko, chair of George Mason’s math department. “We’re talking about college-level pre-calculus and calculus classes, and students cannot even add one-half and one-third.”

In another breathtaking example, a college math professor revealed her students couldn’t even subtract eight from negative six:

For Jessica Babcock, a Temple University math professor, the magnitude of the problem hit home last year as she graded quizzes in her intermediate algebra class, the lowest option for STEM majors. The quiz, a softball at the start of the fall semester, asked students to subtract eight from negative six.

“I graded a whole bunch of papers in a row. No two papers had the same answer, and none of them were correct,” she said. “It was a striking moment of, like, wow — this is significant and deep.”

No two papers had the same answer! That’s a lot of guessing. Now, I’m just a lawyer, not a mathematician, but I’d hope to be able to handle that problem.

What have we done? Or more accurately, what have the experts done?

Unsurprisingly, the article and its quoted professors fairly blamed pandemic lockdowns and “remote” instruction. This is yet more evidence of the intellectual devastation wreaked on an entire generation of kids by school closures.

School closures, by the way, that did not “slow the curve” in any way or even save grandma. Well. Teachers did okay. And, haha, K-12 teachers won’t have to deal with the fallout, either, since fixing it is on college professors now.

The experts, who were so sure that schools must be closed, wrongly, are now baffled by how to fix the problems they created. These streaks of genius come and go. The AP’s article described a myriad of remedial efforts, from summer school to tutoring to changing the way college algebra is taught, none of which show much promise so far.

Thanks, experts!

🔥 In case you were wondering about exactly who in San Fransisco is in favor of the city’s controlled demolition, last week a group of totally-sane citizens led by San Fransisco’s most liberal Supervisor Dean Preston held a rally at City Hall in favor of looser drug enforcement.

By “totally sane,” I mean completely deluded and demonized.

Among other notable accomplishments, after his election to the board, Supervisor Preston passed legislation making it illegal to evict tenants during the pandemic. Here’s one example of an earnest, non-ironic sign from the rally:

So far, these barely-functioning people are somehow winning in California’s most iconic city. This photo illustrates San Fransisco’s current status:

It looks a whole lot like there’s no drug enforcement. Yet the protestors and Supervisor Preston called for looser drug enforcement. How is that even possible? Do they want the city to install fentanyl vending machines or something?

🔥 The Hill ran an uplifting story yesterday headlined, “Oklahoma follows Florida in allowing PragerU in schools.”

It is about time for Dennis Prager’s excellent YouTube-based educational series to enter the mainstream. The series of short videos explain civics, economics, politics, and topical issues like climate change from a traditional, commonsense point of view.

The Hill reported that Oklahoma announced yesterday it is adding materials from the conservative education platform PragerU to its public school curriculum, following a similar decision by Florida earlier this summer.

In July, Florida approved PragerU videos as “supplemental curriculum,” meaning the videos are not required, but teachers may use them in the classroom.

The article added Texas is also looking at adopting PragerU’s kids platform but has received pushback from educators and has not yet announced an official decision. Let’s go, Texans!

In case you aren’t familiar with the great work PragerU is doing, one recent example was titled, “Embrace your Masculinity”:

🔥 Florida Congressman and Freedom Caucus leader Matt Gaetz tweeted a cryptic but very suggestive apology yesterday. Maybe we’re about to see some more fireworks in the House of Representatives?

There’s a lot of work to be done. Let’s go, Matt!

🔥 Welcome to Orlando, Florida’s tourist capital! Don’t worry, this is just ordinary life in the Sunshine State.

And, Florida man doesn’t just catch the alligators. He rides them. Video at the link.

https://twitter.com/vlemx4u/status/1697831523288781066

Don’t be discouraged from a Florida visit. You don’t have to ride the alligator.

Have a wonderful Wednesday! C&C will be back tomorrow morning with another delicious mug of news and information.

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