No More COVID Boosters for Me. Here’s Why.

I have now seen enough to regret that that I had two COVID vaccines and a booster. I accepted these jabs because I trusted the public health authorities. I will not accept any more boosters. I am not alone. In the past six months, I have spoken to at least six friends who vote Democrat--all but one of them told me that they will not accept any more boosters and that they are concerned about risks associated with the vaccines.

I follow about ten well credentialed doctors online, including Dr. Aseem Malhotra, Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Peter McCoullough, who raise these concerns and many others. I've seen highly disturbing evidence that many smart doctors have been shut out of the conversation for three years (and they continue to be kept out of the conversation on legacy news outlets). We did not have a real or meaningful national conversation on the risks of these vaccines compared to the risks of COVID regarding many age groups. I saw the Great Barrington Declaration disparaged for mere political reasons, not medical. Our public health authorities told us that the vaccines were extremely safe, but now I'm not convinced of that.

Our public health authorities told us many things with the utmost confidence that have now been proven untrue. And although this is anecdotal, I've seen far too many videos of young healthy people collapsing, many of them dying. Over the past several years, I saw many numbers regarding the COVID risk of death that failed to break out the numbers of those who were obese, elderly and with comorbidities, failing to separate those from those of us who are healthy or young. I found out that many hospitals were conflating death with COVID with death from COVID, thereby inflating COVID death numbers.

Prior to vaccination, I was in very good health prior to getting vaccinated, very unlikely to die of COVID, even unvaccinated. I had an adverse reaction after my 2nd vaccination and it continues to affect me (inflamed toes). I know that I was also at some risk of harm from COVID, but as I write this, I believe we have been manipulated and lied to in many ways and that I have no meaningful way to be assured whether I was at more risk of harm from the vaccine than from the disease. Maybe someday we will know for sure.

The historically wretched track record of Big Pharma for lying to us in order to make $ multiplies my concern and frustration. Everyone will have their own opinion on this topic. I'm not suggesting to anyone else what they should do, but no more boosters for me.

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Bonus Concerns: See Steve Kirsch' "Pfizer's secret guide for how to make a vaccine "safe and effective," including these three tips:

Here’s Pfizer’s secret playbook for how to make a “safe and effective” vaccine:

Require full liability protection

Contracts require that the government isn’t allowed to reveal any adverse safety information without Pfizer’s express consent

Get the US government to agree that there will not be any ICD10 codes for:

Death of a fully vaxxed person from COVID Death from the COVID vaccine Injury from the COVID vaccine
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See also, this brand new article in the Australian Spectator: "Breaking the silence: do mRNA vaccine harms outweigh benefits?". An excerpt:

The evidence comes from the original double-blind, randomised control trials, that led to the approval of both Pfizer and Moderna by regulators worldwide. Malhotra explains, ‘In a reanalysis of the original trials with the Wuhan strain, eminent scientists essentially found you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event – for example hospitalisation, disability, or a life-changing event – than you were to be hospitalised with Covid. That means, in essence, the mRNA vaccine should likely never, ever have been approved for anybody in the first place.’

Continue ReadingNo More COVID Boosters for Me. Here’s Why.

Jonathan Haidt’s Recently Expressed Doom and Gloom

Excerpt from The Australian --

"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"

Why would Jonathan Haidt be so full of doom and Gloom. Maybe because of the dozens of cases of Woke malfeasance in the science departments of universities, as described by Lawrence Krauss:

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt’s Recently Expressed Doom and Gloom

Greg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

I just spotted this review of The Revolt of the Masses by Greg Lukianoff." Greg's review has convinced me to order my own copy of The Revolt of the Masses.

Excerpts:

“The Revolt of the Public” explains that the shifts in media technologies that we believe accelerated American political polarization and played havoc with young people’s mental health were actually part of a much larger global transformation that Gurri calls “The Fifth Wave.” Essentially, the empowerment of vast multitudes of people to communicate directly with the world and with each other has genuinely transformed society. Unfortunately, in its current state, this media revolution has only been able to tear things down; institutions, ideas, and yes, even people (a.k.a. cancel culture). This idea is what Gurri calls “negation.”

. . . . Gurri shows how this manifested in the 2011 Arab Spring and how it has had ripple effects in Spain, Israel, and the American Occupy Wall Street movement. Gurri also argues that these movements generally were rich with targets: people, institutions, and ideas that needed to be torn down, but those same movements were often very hesitant to offer constructive solutions or realistic reforms. This hopeless point of view amounted to a kind of nihilism, according to Gurri—usually not the kind of nihilism of the philosophers, but a de facto nihilism in which nothing constructive is proposed to replace what needs to be torn down.

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right and the left, and to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy.

One thing that must be said about the “crisis of authority” we find ourselves in due to the overwhelming power of negation is that very often what critics have discovered is that our existing “knowledge” was truly based on some pretty thin evidence, bad assumptions, and sometimes not much more than the pieties of some elites. Understanding the crisis of authority as only being wrongfully destructive of expertise is to miss that, frankly, we are often asking far too much of expertise and experts, and oversight itself has not been all that rigorous. Negation is indeed tearing things down that needed to be torn down; unfortunately, it seems to be taking everything else with it.

Continue ReadingGreg Lukianoff Recommends Martin Gurri’s “The Revolt of the Masses”

Ibram Kendi’s Confession

I sometimes think back to 2021, when Ibram Kendi unwittingly self-destructed. The episode was described by Professor of Political Science and author Wilfred Reilly at FAIR:

On October 29, the newly minted MacArthur “genius” posted the results of a widely discussed survey project on Twitter, saying simply: “More than a third of white students lied (about their race) on their college applications.” Kendi went on to claim that about half of the students who chose dishonesty falsely identified themselves as Native American—presumably to benefit from affirmative action programs—and that “more than three-fourths” of all students who lied about their racial background were accepted to colleges they applied to. As any academic should, Kendi duly linked his source, which I also provide here.

The backlash to Kendi’s comments was immediate, and, frankly, rather predictable. As Oliver Traldi details for Quillette, and as Jerry Coyne does for the popular blog Why Evolution Is True, conservative and heterodox intellectuals pointed out that Kendi’s claim about white students seeking to benefit from affirmative action logically debunks the main thesis of his scholarly work. Founder and former editor of The Intercept Glenn Greenwald not only questioned the objective accuracy of Kendi’s data, but also noted that his argument “negates every core contention about American society on which his career is based.” Journalist Alex Griswold described Kendi as having “blown up his life’s work,” noting that Kendi would “have to delete” his tweet, which, in fact, he did.

Reilly is the author of an excellent book of topics we should be discussing regarding social justice: Taboo: 10 Facts You Can't Talk About (2020).

Continue ReadingIbram Kendi’s Confession

Taking Liberties with the National Anthem

I'm not a fan of singing the national anthem before a baseball game. Patriotism and the anthem have nothing to do with playing a sport. Absolutely nothing. The anthem wasn't even played at Major League Baseball games until 1918. There's nothing magic about the anthem. The lyrics are not compelling today and it's not even a beautiful melody. It is a great excuse for powerful people to push ordinary people around by challenging their patriotism if they resist. That's why, even since the anthem started being played in 1918, no one was able to uproot it and yank it out of baseball games to speed up the games (which desperately need speeding up). In fact, given that there were 2,430 Major League Baseball games played in 2022, assuming that it takes 2 minutes to sing the anthem and given that 65 million American fans attended attended MLB baseball games in 2022, this means that more than 5 Billion person/hours were spent listening to the National Anthem at MLB games in 2022 (5,265,000,000). The song is not a fan favorite. It doesn't stand on its own. I doubt that of those fans ever bought a recording of the national anthem, none of them sing it in the shower, and none of them seek to listen to it as a work of art.

Enter musician Jose Feliciano, who sang the national anthem for Game 5 of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Tigers. Here is Jose's unique version, which is much in keeping with his musical style. I enjoyed it.

But this version was too much for some of the fans, who booed after Jose finished singing. The Tigers even blamed him for the losing that game. Here's what Feliciano had to say about his version of the anthem:

Baseball is permeated with ritual, one of which is the singing of the national anthem, which must be played, or else. And even if one is a gifted musician, it must be song close enough to the standard version, or else. Why? Just because.

Continue ReadingTaking Liberties with the National Anthem