More from @Milhouse_Van_Ho

Milhouse Van Houten

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

11 Aug

"Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out."

David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech "This is Water" is more relevant now than ever. Here it is, abbreviated, in a short film.

"That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

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Milhouse Van Houten

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

6 Aug

The push for vaccine passports and talk of a fourth wave caused by the unvaccinated does not reflect confidence in the vaccines, but rather the complete opposite. This is driven by the realization that the vaccines are not a covid-eliminating silver bullet.

Cases, hospitalizations, and deaths will inevitably increase again in the fall and decline next spring. We see this every single year with influenza and other respiratory viruses.

The unvaccinated narrative simply deflects blame to individuals. This is tribalism at its worst.

The vaccines may very well be effective at reducing the severity of symptoms, particularly in the elderly and frail, and that is great news. However, we'll still need to live with covid the way we've always lived with influenza. Coercion and segregation isn't helping anyone.

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Milhouse Van Houten

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

6 Aug

ON cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, indexed to values 1 year earlier. The black line (index = 100) is where we were 365 days ago (all values indexed to values on that date).

(Below black bar = lower than one year ago today; Above black bar = higher than one year ago today)

The number of hospitalizations linked to covid-19 in Ontario, 2020-21, relative to historical benchmark levels for influenza and pneumonia.

The number of deaths from/with covid-19 in Ontario, 2020-21.

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Milhouse Van Houten

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

18 Jul

"All around the world you can look at mask mandates and superimpose on infection rates, you cannot see that mask mandates made any effect whatsoever."

telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/07/1…

"He warned some cloth masks have gaps which are invisible to the naked eye, but are 500,000 times the size of viral Covid particles."

"A Covid viral particle is around 100 nanometres, material gaps in blue surgical masks are up to 1,000 times that size, cloth mask gaps can be 500,000 times the size."

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Milhouse Van Houten

@Milhouse_Van_Ho

16 Jul

Mortality in Canada (thread):

Here we have the total number of deaths in Canada and its regions over the past ten years.

Here we have the same chart you saw above now expressed as a rate per 100,000 people. Generally, a flatter trend in death rates would suggest that population growth may be a key factor driving growth in total deaths.

Looking at the past decade nationally, we see that it's natural for deaths in one year to exceed deaths in the previous year (blue line > 0%). Note that a year of low or negative growth is often followed by a year of much higher growth.

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