The Post-Partisan Emporium

Thanks to St. Jimmy (Russian American) for recommending this article... Do Americans Know What a Massive Ripoff American Life Really Is? What it Means When I Say America is the World’s First Poor Rich Country umair haque I’ve recently moved to the States — shudder — for a year or two. And I’m shocked at how expensive just  life  is. For no good reason at all. When I put my economist hat on, a fact becomes clear to me. American life is a gigantic rip-off, one of the world’s biggest, and that’s why America is now effectively a country of poor people, and that makes it a nation of angry, cruel, and selfish ones, too. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start over.  American life is the biggest ripoff in the world .  Or at least one of the biggest, in the top five, certainly. Just…existing. It costs way, way more than it should. So much so that America cannot ever move forward as a society. So, trapped in a cycle, which economists call a “poverty trap,” Americans now...

EcoHealth Alliance and the Extended Viral Phenotype SARS rearranged large parts of our scientific establishment for its own advantage. eugyppius Viruses are simple replicators. They consist of only a few proteins, and their sole purpose is to multiply themselves. This simplicity has often deceived us. The last eighteen months have been a lesson in their complex, unpredictable, often clearly strategic behaviour. They are selected to interact with our habits, our cultures and our societies in ways that advantage their replication. Like all replicators, they have what Richard Dawkins would call an extended phenotype – a broader pattern of effects on their environment well beyond their specific interactions with host cells. The extended phenotype of MDV, the alphaherpesvirus behind Marek’s Disease, encompasses not only the illness it causes in chickens, but the very vaccines we have developed against it. Through the brute force of its replication, MDV called these vaccines into being. In m...

A comparison of age adjusted all-cause mortality rates in England between vaccinated and unvaccinated Norman Fenton and Martin Neil The UK Government's own data does not support the claims made for vaccine effectiveness/safety.  In a  previous post  we argued that the most reliable long-term measure of Covid-19 vaccine effectiveness/safety is the age adjusted all-cause mortality rate. If, over a reasonably prolonged period, fewer vaccinated people die, from whatever cause, including Covid-19, than unvaccinated people then we could conclude that the benefits of the vaccine outweigh the risks. We also pointed out that, to avoid the confounding effect of age, it is critical that data for each age category is available, rather than the aggregated data because, clearly, aggregated data might exaggerate vaccine mortality rates if more older people, with shorter expected mortality, are included. The UK roll out of the vaccine was executed in descending age order, from older to y...

Preprint: "The SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant is poised to acquire complete resistance to vaccines" When it escapes, vaccine-induced antibodies to legacy spike will enhance infectiousness. eugyppius A pre-print by researchers at Osaka University in Japan  studies the specifics of Delta immune-escape adaptations, and brings more ominous news: The Delta strains now circulating have obvious vaccine-escape adaptations. In some ways, these adaptations have enhanced the potential infectiousness of Delta. But this potential has not yet been realised, because the Delta spike protein has not fully escaped. When that escape does happen, antibodies against legacy spike elicited by the BioNTech/Pfizer vaccines will probably enhance Delta’s transmissibility. To understand how this can be true, we must take a closer look at spike: The pink/magenta region at the top is the ACE2 receptor binding domain, or RBD. The RBD interacts with the ACE2 protein expressed by cells in our lungs. Think of it as...

The Big Tell James Howard Kunstler The Arizona election audit climaxed Friday in the new mode of history-in-the-making: direct deposit in the memory hole‚ proving only (and conclusively) that this is the age of  Anything Goes and Nothing Matters . The corporate media played the story as a fart in a windstorm for its audience of the avidly credulous.  Nothing to see, folks, move along …. A closer review of the audit results reveals at least 57,000 ballots out-of-order in one way or another and evidence of county officials tampering with digital election records prior to the audit. These matters are now referred by the AZ Senate to the AZ Attorney General Mark Brnovich, known in the past for slow-walking difficult issues. However, Brnovich is running for the US Senate in 2022, and has sent signals that he will take criminal complaints seriously. In any case, the MAGA crowd didn’t get the hoped-for thumping victory over manifest evil that it wanted and the janky election of ...