Note: This post is part of a collection of articles, speculative essays, links to podcasts and videos and other media around the subject:
Did Covid-19 Escape from a Lab?
It’s a hobby of mine to watch this subject as well as the culture and meta-space around the subject. Posts here are not an endorsement beyond finding them interesting. Almost certainly some of these articles and ideas will be false or proven false over time.
by by Jonathan Latham, PhD and Allison Wilson, PhD
“The hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 evolved in the Mojiang miner’s lungs potentially resolves many scientific questions about the origin of the pandemic. But it raises others having to do with why this information has not come to light hitherto. The most obvious of these concern the actions of the Shi lab at the WIV.”
Saint Roch or Rocco is an old school Catholic saint invoked especially against plague times. It’s a wonder he hasn’t grown in popularity recently or popped up as an analyst on CNN after Fauci is interviewed.
Saint Roch. Stained glass window. Combloux. France.
Lil Rock as he would be known today is also the patron saint of dogs, invalids, the falsely accused and bachelors. How long can a Netflix documentary or mini-series be away?
Moreover, most people, assuming they had not altogether abandoned religious observances, or did not continue them naively with a thoroughly immoral way of living, had replaced normal religious practice by more or less extravagant superstitions. Thus they were readier to wear prophylactic medals of St. Roch than go to Mass.
It’s likely 100 million people will have voted before November 3rd and 150 million will vote in total. But we have to wait till Election night to see any results.
What are the top questions for Election Night as we watch actual results start to come in?
When will Donald Trump declare victory via Twitter or in a speech?
Prediction: Trump will declare victory by 10pm EST via twitter
At what point in the night will a major corporate media outlet declare that we are in the middle of a major Constitutional crisis over the transition of power and use the word ‘We can now report that there is a coup underway tonight in America’ – the media outlet has to be CNN, FOX, MSNBC, NYTimes, WaPo or similar major publication by a news presenter like Anderson Cooper or a journalist – not an explicit opinion writer or someone like Rachel Maddow. Has to be a statement, not a question.
Prediction: CNN and MSNBC news presenters will use the word Coup in a serious fashion as a statement of fact by midnight EST.
If there is an election night blowout and the Blue Wave is real how many times will we hear the phrase ‘Our four year national nightmare appears to be coming to an end’?
Prediction: More times than even Google Trends can keep up with. The Algo will be broken.
Will there be a major problem in Florida with counting the votes?
Prediction: No. Another state or states will pop-up and surprise us.
100,000 Covid19 infections or more on Election Day?
Prediction: Yes
How much cannabis will be consumed by Joe Rogan and guests on his election night special?
Prediction: Beaucoup!
Smoke’em if you got’em – it will be a very long night.
The losing Presidential candidate since the 2000 race has gotten on average 224.6 Electoral Votes and 47.56% of the vote.
The biggest loser was McCain in 2008 who received just 45.7% of the vote and a mere 173 electoral votes. A true blowout – the only candidate to lose with under 200 electoral votes and under 47% of the vote.
Regardless of who wins its an almost certainty that Biden/Harris will win the popular vote as the Democrats did in 2000 and 2016.
If you assume the polls are accurate Trump will do worse then a loser like McCain on vote % but not necessarily on electoral college votes.
Again assume the polls are accurate – does Trump get less than 45% of the vote and more than 200 electoral votes or less?
Only time and 79 days of hell after November 3rd will tell.
Yesterday on October 27th Joe Rogan announced an amazing election night special: Joe Rogan, Kyle Kulinski, comedian Tim Dillon with a special appearance by…Alex Jones!
Massive Questions
I have so many questions after watching this episode and the election night show announcement. I honestly wasn’t going to stay up to watch as I expect the coverage to be horrible and for the legacy media outlets to do everything they can make this election close and spread its coverage and relevance for 79 days of hell between Nov. 3rd and the Inaugeration.
The big question – after a hilarious and entertaining 3 hour show with Jones and Dillon which has attracted 3.7 million views on youtube so far – will it be cancelled or altered in someway?
How big will the blowback be for yesterday’s episode with Jones?
How much internal pressure will Spotify, Youtube and other platforms from their own woke workers to cancel or block the show? Is it possible that Twitter will block posts linking to the show on election night? Will Facebook pull the show from its algo to minimize its spread?
How much pressure will be placed on Kyle Kulinski and other possible guests from the left/liberal side of the tribes to boycott or cancel their appearance with Rogan on election night and going forward?
Will the viewing numbers break Youtube and Spotify? Will the network crash and will they rival the corporate press?
Perhaps the most important question – How much cannabis and alcohol will be consumed on the show?
Some people claim ‘cancel culture’ doesn’t exist or only hurts people of privilege who can bounce right back.
It’s important to remember that the beheading in a school parking lot is the ultimate end game of cancel culture. Cancel culture can and does have an armed wing.
In the last month I’ve heard a number of non-Trump supporting podcasters of various stripes claim the 2020 presidential election is either a toss up or Trump will almost certainly win.
Dave Smith from Part of the Problem podcast, Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying and Bridget Phetasy are three that come to mind. I’m sure there are others, let me know in the comments. Most are from the anti-Trump IDW/redpill’d wing of the pundit class. I also run across it quiet commonly in similarly shaded reddit forums and other nooks and crannies of social media. I may not be fair to Phetasy – last I heard her was a month ago – or forever in politcs and maybe she’s changed her tune.
Again, its important to note and re-iterate most the people are fairly anti- Trump and none of the ones I’m thinking of are Trumpkin True Believers. It’s also fair to categorize these people as perhaps interesting thinkers on a number of topics but a bit past their skis when it comes to electoral analysis – this isn’t their field of expertise and they have a lot of time to fill and socks to sell on their youtube channels and podcasts. Just saying ‘the polls are probably right, Trump is toast’ don’t keep audiences coming back for more.
Hello out there!
As of this post, Trump is getting shellac’d in the polls at the national and state level – to my mind he has almost no chance of winning, we live in strange times but lets not get too carried away ok?
Their version of why Trump will probably win goes along two basic lines that converge:
Polling: The polling is off like it was in 2016 – sure the national polls show Biden/Harris with a lead and they’ll probably win the national vote but Trump will win the electoral college – the shithole battleground states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvannia and Ohio are toss ups. The polling isn’t good. Trump will surge in the last few weeks. People don’t answer their phones anymore so only the weirdos are responding to polls and the pollsters aren’t reaching the right voters. Basically these pundits don’t buy that polling firms have corrected for their mistakes in 2016.
Why is the polling off in the battleground states?
Shy Trump voters: Because of the polarization and tribalism of politics there are a lot of Trump voters that simply aren’t even telling themselves, let alone a pollster that they’ll be voting for old man Trump. They fear getting fired at work, marginalized from their family and not invited to their friends BBQ if they say MAGA. But when they go in that booth or lick that envelope they are going to vote to give Trump a second term. The biggest proof they bring up is that they are getting tons of e-mails, many of them from Democrats and liberals who have been red pilled or are so sickened and scared by BLM, the riots, Critical Race Theory in their workplace, etc. that they are doing the unthinkable and voting Republican and worse yet, voting for Trump.
I call B.S.
We’ll know very soon who is right but I will honestly say if Trump pulls off a win I will be more shocked than I was in 2016. I predict a Blue Wave as well. Democrats take the Senate and keep and expand the House. Taking the Senate is still pretty tough, if the Republicans hold on I wouldn’t be shocked but if The Donald holds onto the White House I will truly be flabbergasted.
Polling has improved since 2016 and there is more of it in the battleground states.
The equities markets are increasingly pricing in a Biden bluewave. You may or may not like these folks but they have lots of ‘skin in the game’ to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars and they have access to massive amounts of information and experts. Even Trump supporting market players like Leon Cooperman are changing their tune.
Trump barely won in 2016. He ran a great campaign, he was the outsider, there was a enormous enthusism gap between him and Hilary and he just had the momentum. And yet he won by the skin of his teeth – a few hundred thousand votes. This time around Biden is running a much better campaign, he is viewed more favorably and this time Trump is the incumbent and there is a real feeling that he’s really screwed up the response to Covid.
The results in 2016 and 2020 will be quiet simple to explain – in 2016 Trump ran a very smart, disciplined campaign, was the outsider which matched the public mood at the time was ran against a very disliked and incompetent opponent. The reason he’ll lose in 2020 is he blew the response to Covid.
No reason to delve into conspiracy theories or blame social media – Trump is seen by many people, including many of his own base from 2016 as having made a hash of the federal response to the pandemic and it will cost him re-election. Period.
I have no doubt that there are shy Trump voters out there and that many people have been red pilled that were former Democrats or liberals. But 150 million or so people are going to vote this year – you would need millions of these shy/ newly red pilled voters to turn out and to turn out in the right states. If you changed your political stripes this year and you live in a North Korea style one party state like California, who cares – 1 million California voters could swallow bottles of red pills and show up at the polls and with red faces and mischevious grins pull the switch for Trump and it would change exactly nothing.
There are two very outside and at this point almost non-plausible scenarios Trump pulls off a win.
If mass social unrest breaks out in a major way in the next 10 days in cities across the US on par with what we saw this summer which causes 8-10% of those who haven’t yet voted to change their intentions.
If the vote is close in enough battleground states and Trump’s army of lawyers wins key decisions to throw the electoral college up in the air. This is more plausible but also unlikely to chnage the results. And if it did, the civil unrest described above would almost certainly happen.
No. I expect lots of dumb tweets and statements from Trump on his way out. The media will make it closer than it looks and will run scare stories about the courts for weeks after the election that maybe just maybe Trump will hole up in an attic in the Whitehouse but Trump will leave and a peaceful, rather boring transition will take place.
First off – I loved Chasing Ice the first documentary made by Jeff Orlowski. One of the few documentaries I have watched twice. After watching it I gave the CD copy I had to a family for use in their local school in Guatemala. It was truly an Ice Opening experience (see what I did there). So I was excited to watch the trailer for Jeff’s new documentary The Social Dilemma.
The Social Dilemma flows great – its entertaining, well thought out and produced, has a clear point of view and executes it wonderfully. Its almost as if Netflix put it through an algorithm to optimize it for its choosen audience.
But the premise of the film is both shopworn and troubling.
Wildly popular new media is destroying our society. This new technology is duping people and changing society for the worst. People are so dumb they don’t even realize they are being manipulated. Of course I refer to television.
Satan’s Triangle – Intellectuals Right and Left and Mad Men on top.
On the Right television was attacked for any number of pet causes – Elvis swiveling his hips on Ed Sullivan would cause your teenage daughter to fuck some greaser down the street on the first date. If that didn’t happen she’d soon be a card carrying member of the Communist Party because of all the commies in Hollywood inserting subliminal Red messages into episodes of Gunsmoke.
On the Left television was the new opiate for masses. Instead of working to overthrow capitalism people would come from their hum drum 9 to 5s at the factory and space out to I Dream of Jeannie. This is how the Establishment would preserve order – keep people dumb, numb and unquestioning.
T.V., it
Satellite links
Our United States of Unconsciousness
Apathetic therapeutic and extremely addictive
The methadone metronome pumping out
150 channels 24 hours a day
— Television, the Drug of a Nation
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
The top of Satan’s triangle
But it wasn’t just attacks from the Left and Right that made people wring their hands and give credence to their fears about television. Television executives and the flim flam men (Mad Men) of their day feed this narrative as well. Thinking very highly of themselves the people producing all this television bought this narrative as well – ‘Due to the latest in behavorial sciences and knowing what people watch and what they like if we want them to buy Palmolive and Budweiser they’ll buy it. Viewers are the product and the schmucks don’t even know it.’
We are told this Platonic lie all over again in The Social Dilemma. This time the boogieman threatening, at a minimum, societal collapse is social media (multiple elites literally call Facebook an existential threat to continued human existence on the planet with a straight, well groomed face) Facebook and Twitter in particular. The wrong people are now being elected to office, Instagram made being young and going through puberty super tough, workaholic CEOs are bad fathers because of algorithms, Burma was a nice place before Facebook and lots of data is being collected on us plebs and used against us.
I’m a workaholic CEO but Pinterest made me a bad father
And to lecture us about this and make the poor viewer feel outraged, confused and depressed so they click on the next ‘world turns to shit’ documentary Netflix recomends is an exclusive mono-culture club of the very rich 1% of the 1%’ers all of whom are collegues and most of them serve on the board of a ideological pressure group called Center for Humane Technology that dominates 80% of the lecture we are given.
Common People are Invisible
Where are all the common people being hurt by these technologies and making bad choices at the ballot box? They are never shown. Such is the revulsion that these 1% of 1% elites have for the poor filthy fucks living in fly over country that we are instead shown a fictionalized upper middle class family. Vince Kartheiser even makes a cameo as a wink and a nod Easter Egg to the show Mad Men – a show loved by critics and the silicon valley, coastal elite types but watched by very few actual people. Apparently before social media upper middle class American families weren’t vacuous and hollow inside and all was right with the family unit.
A personal story My Aunt and her son. Neither graduated from high school. My Aunt works as a cashier at Dollar General. My nephew has been in and out of jail and prison – most recently an 8 month stint for petty crime and drug stuff. They are the most apolitical people you will ever meet. They are the ignorant lower classes the talking heads in The Social Dilemma concern troll over and over. Last time I saw my aunt and nephew in person a little over a year ago my nephew had just gotten out of 3 month jail term. I was talking to him about what it’s like not to have a smartphone/social media for 3 months. He said something along the lines of ‘I just got a phone again and damn if you have to watch what you say and type, google and facebook know I was in lock up and keep pushing rehab ads and shit like that at me, fucking annoying as shit.’ My Aunt responded along the lines of ‘yeah Facebook knows what I’m going to do before I do, jesus…’
My point is – at this point who the fuck doesn’t know they are being targeted with ads and having their data collected? If my aunt and nephew know, everyone knows.
Why is so much shade being thrown at Facebook and Twitter by the legacy media and the cultural/economic elites since roughly 2015 but before 2015 they were mainly viewed as positive or neutral.
A few guesses: a) Economics first. This is competition for dollars and cents. At some point the New York Times, Washington Post, etc. and the journalists themselves realized their pockets were being picked by these new upstarts and since then its been one negative story after another.
b) The wrong candidates won. Go back and read coverage of Obama’s use of Facebook and social media in 2008. They loved it and praised him and his campaign for it as a masterstroke. Let’s indulge a bit in a counterfactual and say that Fernando Hadad and Hillary Clinton had both won in 2018 and 2016 respectively, both center left candidates – would we see Hadad’s ugly mug shown on the screen as proof the world is going to hell in a handbasket?
c) Class war. In 2008 Facebook was a nice gated community of 100 million (a bit more than 1% of the population, i.e. the 1%) people who mainly looked and thought like the cultural/technological elite talking heads in the Social Dilemma. Now it’s 2.6 billion people, a truly global community and now the line from the these elites and the legacy press is: all these poor lower class and black and brown people doing things and saying things we don’t like, can’t control and don’t agree with – we can’t really say we don’t like them and their opinions. Instead we say: they are so stupid and oppressed – they are being manipulated and controlled and they don’t even know it, the poor sons a bitches. We need to fix this and pronto or we are toast. Again like with television in the 20th century, this line of arguement comes from the Right and Left and the flim flam Mad Men. Sen. Ted Cruz, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Tim Kendall and their intellectual enablers in a vomit inducing polyamourous circle jerk.
I won’t even get into the shocking, irresponsible and ahistorical treatment the people of Burma get. Never mind the legacy of colonialism, extreme poverty and 40 years of a brutal military dictatorship; its all Facebooks fault.
Leave social media alone. It’s fine.* Leave the people alone, they know what they are doing. You know who that is bad for? It’s bad for the legitimacy of the Establishment. They don’t need to be coddled and protected from themselves. Or worse, manipulated in different ways to ensure ‘our four year national mightmare finally comes to an end.’ We aren’t on the verge of civil war or a Year Zero societal meltdown. And if we are, it sure as hell isn’t because of Facebook.
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*Twitter is an abomination and should be banned immediately.
