US history 101 for non-boomers. Okay so most people that aren't boomers have no functional memory of the early 70's. This is critically important right now. There is this idea that the US "won" the cold war & the soviet union collapsed. This isn't actually true. Both the Soviet Union & what is really important for this history lesson is, the US collapsed. Actually they collapsed before the Soviet Union. In the early 70's lots of really important things happened for the US. They basically defaulted on their gold debt. This was why the US

I recently watched a good documentary about “toxic tofu” in Indonesia. It explains something bigger than tofu. I'm going to try to capture it in a thread here.

Western countries ship plastic waste overseas.
It’s so abundant that tofu makers burn it as fuel to cook food. A staple food. Cooked with trash that makes it highly contaminated & toxic. It replaced a traditional method that used natural fuels, but those fuels cost a little more money. Poverty & western policy forces bad choices.

So I reposted this a few days ago, because I wanted to see how many people understand the gravity of what's unfolding in front of our eyes. I've waited for a few days I've read the comments, I read the quote tweets. I'm going to say that we are probably 10 years or less

https://twitter.com/accuweather/status/1999275509037912158

from the kind of panic situations that most people have only read about in fiction or watched in movies & really that's not even adequate.

science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Okay, so we are far enough into this now that I think I can say that we've managed to not spread this in our house. How did we do it? We followed the science. Most modern global studies that I reviewed show that influenza spreads like this ...

https://twitter.com/DcrInYYC/status/1998984950654333203

%50-%80 by aerosols, %20 - %30 by large droplets & %5-%10 via surface contamination. Here's how I attacked each of those:
1) I ran CR Boxes & HEPA filters in each room. (aerosol reduction)
2) I increased the outdoor ventilation in my home.(aerosol reduction)

So lots of people are watching the increasingly bizarre things happening in the US & wondering what is going on? Have they all lost their minds? No. They have not & this is far more chilling than that. What they are doing is called epistemic destabilization & it's a core feature of how totalitarian regimes maintain control. It's highly effective & has been used to keep populations under boot for decades successfully. It keeps people from knowing what’s real, what’s important, and what’s actually happening. When people can’t tell real

I see lots of posts from people that are like "I see all these papers that show population harms from COVID infections, but I'm not seeing it in my daily life". Yep that's a real thing. It's basically a product of selection bias. It's a blind spot in the way we perceive the world The exact same thing can be observed in other events. Things like smoking, diabetes, lead exposure, etc. This is called naive empiricism & it's why many of those things took decades to become accepted. Ask yourself, were you aware of the harms of smoking before being actually

In survival there is a concept that is commonly talked about that refers to a point past return. Where even though you may not perceive the depth of the danger you are in, it is actually your last change to meaningfully do something about it. This happens in all sorts of situations. Things like hypothermia. The time you NEED to do something about it isn't when you are huddled up in a ball deeply shivering, you are already impaired at that point. Your chances of surviving have already been substantially reduced. You needed to do something long

It's totally wild to me that there has been a fairytale sold that a virus that killed tens of millions of people in the span of a few year, more than any virus in recent history, has magically become nothing more than a mild cold. This fairytale is counter to literally ALL AVAILABLE EVIDENCE. Everything. There isn't a single study that has looked at it that can support this fairytale & yet document after document from some of the most responsible agencies on earth basically invoke the Sleeping Beauty defense. Amazing.

This is unreal. If people aren't acknowledging the role that normalizing & lying about the harms of SARS2 played in the rise of anti COVID vaccination movements & how that leads to this then there is a problem. Anti-Vaxer's openly capitalized on the

ctvnews.ca/health/article… harms of SARS2 infections that were not acknowledged well enough to claim it was vaccines causing it. I saw it play out real time. The idea that infection is the cure came straight from "hybrid immunity" claims. Sad day for Canada.

We aren't "supposed" to live with respiratory viruses. As a matter of fact there is reasonable evidence that before contact with Europeans, first nations in north America did not live with anything close to the level of respiratory viruses that we do today. We know this because most respiratory viruses originated as zoonoses from domesticated animals. Mostly birds, pigs, cows & camels. We didn't just domesticate animals, their viruses domesticated us. Populations that were isolate from groups that lived with domesticated animals did not

A lot of the same incompetents who actively encouraged people to infect themselves with a virus that no one fully understood, because of almost homicidally insane ideas like “synchronized immunity”, are still pretending they weren’t dangerously wrong. They ignore the massive harm they helped create and now spend their time poking at the people who were far more correct than they ever were.

I get it, history is going to remember them as the reckless buffoons they are.

It's not for some reason, it's for a very specific reason. That reason is that they have a fairytale belief that they do not live as part of a society and shouldn't be required to do what is in the best interests of the greater whole. Their brains have been rotted by movies

https://twitter.com/HelloStephano/status/1987150551176602034

lack of basic education & a fundamental misunderstanding of what it is to live in a society and the social contracts that come along with that.

I'm sure the millions that are suffering long term complications of SARS2 infections will be relieved to know that it simply isn't possible because coronaviruses just don't do that. That's not their pathophysiology. 🫠😵‍💫 Oh and by the way if you can't precisely explain the pathophysiology of this virus that has never circulated in humans before in less than a few years (something that normally takes decades), then I'm sorry none of that's real because you know, you're self-reporting it. 🫠😵‍💫

So this kind of framing may seem like an acknowledgement of risk, but it's actually propaganda designed to mollify & placate people. This is a known propaganda technique. It's called appeasement propaganda. The idea is to give people something familiar so they don't "over react" & do something crazy like trying to avoid infections. 🙃🫠 There are key differences between influenza and covid even if some of the mechanisms of cardiovascular risk are the same. The risk profile is

Soooooo I'm pretty convinced that China is going to take a real run at removing the USD as the reserve currency of the world & I think it has a real chance. These last BRICS+ conferences have explained the reasoning behind the massive uptake in gold. They are going to try to replace the USD with a gold backed currency with distributed holdings to remove the threat that the US created when it just told everyone to pound salt in the 70's. I'm also pretty convinced they have a really good chance at success. It's looking like this year or early next

Climate change deniers, SARS2 minimizers, Anti-vaxers, tobacco companies, etc all use the same techniques. They are AMAZINGLY effective. It was laid out pretty clearly in Merchants of Doubt. Here is the step by step. 1) Identify a target with high social or practical stakes

Choose a topic where public opinion matters (e.g., climate policy, vaccines, pandemic measures). The bigger the perceived consequences, the more leverage the tactic has.

Pretty good thread, that captures most of what is going on. It misses out one thing, inoculum level. There are actual modeling formulas to help describe this, but they aren't very public friendly. I've made various stabs at coming up with a public friendly formula.

https://twitter.com/1goodtern/status/1962783319243792655

I think the best I've done so far looks like this:

Infection Risk = (Exposure × Inoculum Level × Variant Escape) ÷ Immune Protection

Where:
Exposure = how often and how intensely someone encounters the virus (crowds, ventilation, masks, etc.).

My parents & in-laws have all passed away, but it wasn't long ago. I spent a solid year trying to prevent my mother from prematurely dying from COVID. That year allowed her to spend another Christmas with her grandkids. It allowed her to share some birthdays. It allowed her to form memories in my kids. Memories that will have to last them a lifetime now. That year was really important.

The fact that I have to sign petitions & fight for basic disease control in environments that she would have been forced to visit. Environments where she should

Hmmm so public health has spent at least 20 years deliberately lying about the mode of transmission of many reparatory diseases. This lie is/was so prevalent that the vast majority of people never questioned it, even when there were actual inquiries held that proved it during previous pandemics. That very same public health when faced with another pandemic chose to once again lie about the mode of transmission & most media doctors & scientists propagated that lie because they were too feckless to even bother reading the previous inquiry.

Not sure why studies like this don't freak other people out as much as they do me ....

nature.com/articles/s4159… Maybe it's because I've witnessed the ravages of dementia first hand. Seen people morph with my own eyes.

If you can rationalize that millions dying & millions more being disabled is meaningless in the larger picture of whatever reality you have constructed, then truly nothing matters, so stop pretending it does. I bet people don't realize that the 1918 pandemic for a LOOOOONG time was called the forgotten pandemic for EXACTLY the same reasons. There's a reason books were written about it almost 100 years after it was done asking why no one talked about it & nothing was learned.