This is very important. So important that whenever I venture about in pindoland, I keep one of those paper dust masks handy in the vehicle.

Sounds shocking. Beginning of Dark Ages stuff as when rabid Christians desecrated Palmyra! But, Ron, could we please have our confidence boosted by your putting the hard word on NYU apparatchiks, named and unnamed above, to show where, if anywhere, the article is wrong- or, more likely, incomplete in ways that matter.

More and more our institutions of “higher” learning are becoming caught up in the rigamarole of political correctness and obeisance to state, corporate and foundation “authorities”. This state of affairs has been a long time in development. In 1965 after a summer of evenings mostly spent in Greenwich Village, I had become tempted to enroll in NYU as soon as my residency in the city was established. However, I decided to return to Minnesota to that state’s major land grant university which I had previously attended. Later that fall I composed a brief poem, no literary gem, but my observation came from the heart:

The University of Minnesota is a gigantic zoo
filled with ineffectual intellectuals
crippled creators, and
masturbating madmen.

55 years later the situation has not only deteriorated, it has metastasized. Our institutions of higher learning are not only pricing themselves out of the student market. They also happen to be stuffed with advanced cases of administrative bureaucracy. Collapse of the system may not be immanent, but it appears inevitable.

The snowflakes actually have no power, the cattle farmers are using them to enforce submission.

Prof. Miller teaches a course on propaganda, focusing not only on the history of modern propaganda, but—necessarily—on propaganda drives ongoing at the time. The aim is to teach students to identify such drives for what they are, think carefully about their claims, seek out whatever data and/or arguments have been blacked out or misreported to protect those claims from contradiction, and look into the interests financing and managing the propaganda, so as to figure out its purpose.

Good luck with that. Any university professor trying it in Hitler’s Germany or Bolshevik Russia would have gone sraight to a concentration camp.

The following week, NYU followed up by urging him to cancel his propaganda course next term, and, instead, teach two sections of his course on cinema.

Quite mild really, considering the desire to get rid of him. They feel constrained, but when US gets its Woke dictatorship, then he’ll be directly arrested and put out of circulation – Pour encourager les autres.

Mais dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un Amiral pour encourager les autres. Voltaire (In this country it’s good from time to time to kill an Admiral to encourage the others).

Stalin was a master of the periodic totalitarian cull (Ref. Master of the House: Stalin and his Inner Circle. by Oleg V. Khlevniuk. Yale University Press, January 1, 2009) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00SLS072Y/ref=rdr_ext_tmb

I wish I’d had Prof Miller when I attended NYU. Every professor I had was slavishly obedient to the Narrative and punished contrarians by docking their grades. I’ll sign his petition.

(not easily found on Google, though they have all appeared in reputable medical journals)

Google is a full-blown censor for TPTB. I have proved it here:

https://ungoogle.us

As far as academics go, professors will be nowhere to be found once the real fighting starts in our nation. So don’t support the guy. Let the other slobs/professors tear the skin from his bones.

Prof. Miller urged the students to read those studies, as well as others that purport to show the opposite, with due attention to the scientific reviews thereof, and possible financial links between the researchers conducting them, and such interests as Big Pharma and the Gates Foundation.

Big Pharma has no interests in promoting universal masking because they are in the business of selling medications and vaccines. Universal masking actually undermines Big Pharma interests.

Slight reduction in SARS-CoV-2 exposure viral load due to masking results in a significant reduction in transmission with widespread implementation
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.13.20193508v2.full.pdf

Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer (Jul 2020)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393808/

Facial Masking for Covid-19 — Potential for “Variolation” as We Await a Vaccine, The New England Journal of Medicine
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp2026913?articleTools=true

Big Pharma interest may actually be the main reason why CCD and Surgeon General initially were negative about masking. Interestingly the CDC director who as we know lost all credibility in Spring now (September) claims that

“CDC director Robert Redfield said face masks may be more effective than a vaccine in preventing individual coronavirus infections”
https://www.businessinsider.com/cdc-director-masks-better-than-vaccines-at-stopping-coronavirus-2020-9

It satisfying when a sinner sees the light.

Bolsheviks in Russia and Communist in Spain and Americans and British air forces by bombing German, French and Japanese cities destroyed and desecrated more Christian churches in the first half of the 20th century than what your “rabid Christians” did in the late years of Roman Empire.

Miller could build the next run of his Propaganda course around this very event.

I think you mean the C21st when rabid Muslims desecrated Palmyra – with American help of course.
The same thing happened earlier in the C21st with the Bamian Buddhas in Afghanistan. This was done by the Taliban, whose rise the Americans had facilitated.
I think we’re seeing a pattern here, I’m sure you will agree.

As regards those rabid Christians in Palmyra, they didn’t exist. Palmyra’s destruction happened before Rome’s conversion.

In 273 Palmyra rebelled under the leadership of Septimius Apsaios,[275] declaring Antiochus (a relative of Zenobia) as Augustus.[283] Aurelian marched against Palmyra, razing it to the ground and seizing the most valuable monuments to decorate his Temple of Sol.[280][284] Palmyrene buildings were smashed, residents massacred and the Temple of Bel pillaged.[280]

Palmyra was reduced to a village and it largely disappeared from historical records of that period.[285]

I find your comment completely incomprehensible. The rabid Christians (cf. Catherine Nixey’s “The Darkening Age” ) weren’t destroying Christian churches at all!

Also, if you were trying to make a legitimate comparison you would have to take the population increase into account, my estimate being roughly 15 times greater in the 20th century than in the 3rd or 4th.

What’s the word coming to?

I did have in mind that ISIS also targeted Palmyra (which has been rebuilt several times if I have the right city in mind) but my remark was based on Catherine Nixey’s splendid book “The Darkening Age” as I remembered it.

This guy is a professor of bullshitology. His basket weaving degrees aren’t worth spit because they are all based on opinions and not much else. To support him would be to support the system that created him. No thanks.

We are witnessing the inmates taking over the asylum. We have so many faux professions that their numbers and adherents think they should run the world while having shit for brains.

What’s needed is a return to a real science based society, not a bunch of liberal arts types harping about their feelings and using their faux knowledge to dictate policy. The force of gov’t is behind these frauds and is using them to push through their reset agenda. Once accomplished, the likely result is in your face totalitarianism with the useful idiots being discarded.

I made no mention of Christian churches. You wanted to make a fatuous point without checking the facts. As I have demonstrated, there was no desecration of Palmyra by “rabid Christians”. It did not happen. If you were honest, you would admit that you were wrong.

However, very recently Palmyra has been wantonly laid waste – desecrated, if you will – by rabid Muslims.
During the Syrian Civil War in 2015, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) destroyed large parts of the ancient city, which was recaptured by the Syrian Army on 2 March 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmyra
ISIL and ISIS were supported and part funded by the United States.

We are already in a Dark Age and the perpetrators are certainly not “rabid Christians”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Crispin_Miller

Leftist Jewish Professor of Media Studies starts veering off course. He becomes a 9/11 truther and questions the effectiveness of vaccines, amongst other things. I think the academic authorities have wanted rid of him for years. This business is merely a pretext. There will be no dancing Israelis on this campus!
He will be sacked and a confidential financial settlement reached regarding loss of tenure.
Move along, nothing to see here.

Does Professor (((Mark Crispin Miller))) support the free speech rights of the dissident Right? Would he support other professors encouraging students to read books on Holocaust revisionism? Would he support professors encouraging students to read the works of Robert Faurisson, Kevin McDonald, or Andrew Joyce? Does Professor Miller support Kevin McDonald? I highly doubt. Until Mr. Miller comes out and explicitly supports the rights of the dissident Right, I won’t support his so-called free speech rights or his conception of “academic freedom.”

I gave up on Miller a long time ago. Can’t recall what issue he was studiously dodging – probably 9/11. Glad to see he’s finally done enough to get in hot water with the (((Liberals that Be))). Time for him to have his students look at the “Climate Change” and “Holocaust” info etc. ad nauseum. At least he’s found his way to Mr. Unz’s site.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the future as these institutions become even more Khmer Rouge like in imposing their distorted world views on their students. If it leads the more intelligent to avoid these places and pursue either technical education or business school we might be better off. Too many liberal arts majors running around with no real, discernable skills. They waste hundreds of thousands on pointless degrees, then become barely trainable in whatever job they end up with. Can a society survive when its elites kneel in front of an obvious lie? I hope there are some real puppet masters behind the scenes who know that all this political correctness, blm, bolshevik nonsense is just nonsense. Because if they actually believe this stuff, we all better learn mandarin.

“Dark Age” stuff? like “Christians desecrating Palmyra”? Is that supposed to be satire? It sounds more like Bolshevik Jews desecrating Russia, or Islamic hordes desecrating Italy, Spain, and Greece. What about the secular Jews (of Frankfurt School fame) and other Jewish groups (such as feminists, like Naomi Wolfe and Betty Friedan, or pornographers, Hollywood pedos, and sex traffickers, people like Mike Moz, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein) who have desecrated America? Your choice of analogies says a lot about you politically

The snowflakes actually have no power, the cattle farmers are using them to enforce submission.

You win the most penetrating comment prize for this thread. Congrats!

However, very recently Palmyra has been wantonly laid waste – desecrated, if you will – by rabid Muslims.

“Muslims” have had centuries to do whatever they wanted to with Palmyra and nothing happened. Same for the idols/statues in Afghanistan.

Those made for media goons, created and run by spook agencies of so-called powers, are not muslims.

Mask protocols have nothing to do with containing Covid-19. A mask is a speech and language inhibitor. It destroys communication between people. It’s a barrier to forming relationships and organizations. The mask keeps society in an arrested state.

Wearing masks on such a large scale is completely abnormal. It breeds suspicion and fear. Increases compliance. Its turns the masses into manageable objects.

Terrible uncertainty has been fomented within the people. Propaganda is increasingly effective in such an environment.

The American people are a bunch of cowards. They wear a mask while walking down the street alone. Driving alone. I had a jogger run by me. His mask was down but the moment he was to pass me he lifted the mask over his face. As if passing me in that brief second would transmit a virus. Even that he assumed I was a potential carrier is an example of the cowardly fear within many Americans.

What is the point of all of this? Get Trump out of office? Refashion American life? Eliminate freedom and liberty? Preparation for an economic downturn? I have no clue.

I do know that Biden can never be president. He is a liar with diminishing faculties. I also know when Trump talks about how great the stock market is doing it makes me hate him more. His base doesn’t own stock. And they are struggling. But they cling to Trump because the alternative is worse.

We have reached a point of absurdity.

Covid-19… scam of century.

Most Americans are brainwashed and live in fear. Period.

Another doctor gets censored and fired for speaking the truth about Covid.

Video Link

Prof Miller is a moron. Even if mask efficiency is close to zero even in that case at least increases the awareness of public of the danger. Prof Miller should have a little bit of common sense.

And what about recommendation of sneezing into your elbow instead sneezing into the face of your friend. That is propaganda also?
People should not be a cattle!!!!!!!

This is why every professor should go to alumni events, and do extensive networking in the big donor ones. They can save your professor. The petition is meaningless.

Seen this movie several times, even testified in Federal court in one such case. I suspect that NYU is happy to see people of Miller’s age retire and draw his salary from a pension fund (many others will get this message and silently depart). He will, of course, be replaced by a diversity hire who will teach how propaganda consists of whites telling blacks that they are genetically inferior.

Who says that tenure protects intellectual freedom? As one who has spent many decades in the academy at top schools, let me assure you that they can get rid of you in many ways without seemingly violating your tenure.

Good point.

Simone Gold is HCQ kook.

https://washingtonspectator.org/anatomy-of-deceit/
On July 29, Cedars-Sinai, the backdrop for Gold’s Twitter video, issued a disavowal stating, “Simone Gold, MD, has not worked with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center or any of its offices or affiliates since 2015. For three weeks in late 2015, Dr. Gold was employed on a per diem basis by Cedars-Sinai Medical Network, a component of Cedars-Sinai. She worked during this brief time in a network urgent care clinic. Dr. Gold is not authorized to represent or speak about any information on behalf of Cedars-Sinai.”

The sharecare.com “Find a Doctor” site stated that “Dr. Simone Gold, MD, is a[n] emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles, CA. and is affiliated with Centinela Hospital Medical Center.” But on July 31, Centinela Hospital posted a statement reading: “Simone Gold, MD, is not credentialed as part of the Centinela Medical Staff, as she resigned her position here a number of years ago. Dr. Gold was never employed here as we don’t employ our physicians.”

Not to mention that it is one thing for a place of worship to be destroyed as collateral damage in aerial bombing campaigns and quite another to be deliberately destroyed by ground troops and/or civilian mobs. As far as I know, no Christian temples in Europe in either world war were deliberately destroyed by military forces of either side unless there was reasonable suspicion that the structure was being utilized by the opposing forces in their war making efforts.

If this is being done to Miller in relation to masks — which, in addition to being ineffective and a symbol of abject slavery, have been proven to trap carbon dioxide and incubate various bacteria — just think what they’d do in relation to the NY Post’s recent revelations about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the Bidens taking kickbacks of tens of millions of dollars from China, Ukraine, etc. Now compound that with an almost complete blackout of the Biden story in all the mainstream media except Fox, and the disappearing of it on Facebook and Twitter.

Brings to mind the Monty Python skit about the Norwegian Blue Parrot — “It’s not dead, it’s . . . it’s sleeping . . .” — ‘That’s not a crackpipe in Hunter’s mouth, it’s a (fill in the blank)”.

I can hardly wait for Deep Fakes and AI memory holes to go prime time . . .

Your mask is nothing but a gag secured to your face by the rich and powerful. Sadists love public displays of obedience. Even better if you fight a little first.

Does anyone think the rich are gagged when they’re snorting lines off a hooker’s ass on a billion dollar yacht?

The rich never had it so easy, they aren’t even worried.

Tucker Carlson’s show from 2 days ago shows the CDC contradicting themselves again when they wrote to Tucker saying “at no time has CDC guidance suggested that masks were intended to protect the wearers” in response to Tucker’s show from the previous day. Tucker then shows the CDC Director Robert Redfield speaking in September where he says a face mask might be better protection against the virus than taking a vaccine. Tucker doesn’t say it but calling the CDC a “discredited organization” could have come out of his mouth next. See time 19:15 to 20:30

Video Link
I wonder if something could be done to make the Twitter complainer’s life as miserable as she is making the professor’s life. Citing any “expert” does not mean that so called “expert” is correct. I would go so far as to say they are wrong constantly.

Islam is a religion which has expanded largely through conquest and forcible conversion. Once conquered, the conquerors mostly reused the buildings ( eg Hagia Sophia converted to a mosque ) or left them as ruins ( Palmyra ).
This was the case until the formation of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia in the C18th. After a slow start, it is now everywhere in the Sunni Muslim world and is the basis of Islamism. This is what I meant by rabid Muslims. It is a tabula rasa religion: everything that does not conform to its extreme views must be erased. It is behind the mass destruction of early Islamic buildings in Saudi Arabia.

Wahhabism is the dominant and official faith of Saudi Arabia and the reigning Saud family, the founders of the state. The father of the Wahhabist movement was Muhammad ibn ’Abd al-Wahhab (1703-92), who preached the return of Islam to its earliest origins. It was he who attacked the popular practices of worshiping saints and making pilgrimages to tombs and monuments in their memory, advocating the destruction of sacred sites as symbols of idolatry. These aspects of Wahhabist ideology (merged now with Salafism) lay at the root of the Taliban’s destruction of the Kabul Museum and the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan in 2001, among many other cases, not only in the Middle East.

Same here in Ireland,

People calling for full lockdown again with 30 ‘covid’ cases in ICU in the entire country (5 million),

Time the populace got properly bum fucked, no other way to wake them up,

I have an idea for a cartoon, based on what I believe is called the ‘rape rack’ in pig farming,

A line of people, forcibly bent over, being violently, anally raped, with their masks on of course, by a politician/doctor/vaccine pusher etc, you get my drift,

And these people point at somebody strolling along without a mask and they scream –

Its all his/her fault.

Now to the guy who is now being silenced –

I’m with RoatanBill on this one,

That’s the society the extreme left wanted, off to the gulag with him, in time his accuser will join him, she just doesn’t know it yet,

There is some scrap a brewing, so reminiscent of the recent past, that you wonder is there a fatal flaw in humans that is just blind to reality, that that is how the bulk of the people can get through their lives.

screw academic freedom. the time for such bs is past. I don’t give a rat’s butt about this dumb teacher or any of the other useless sh*tbird teachurs running a’round loose on these so-called campuss’.

Wahabism is British Islam Anno 1930-ish

Israel’s Medieval Twindom

“we don’t employ our physicians.”

This is common in hospitals. Doctors work there as private contractors “on call” and bill the patients. There is no doubt that she is an experienced medical doctor, so why must she be censored? Why call her a “kook” just because she disagrees with the official narrative? She provides links to several studies.

I’m afraid I don’t understand your point. Propaganda may not be a science is the vein of maths or physics, but it is very much a real thing. And nothing anti-science in the study of it – skepticism is certainly part of the scientific method.

Vot Tak I have asked the congress to make it against the law for you to ever again publish to this list. The royal mounted police and the under water basket weaving society have both been advised to be on the look out to suppress your post, if ever again, you should attempt same. We the suppressors, have asked the powers to be; please cancel both the political rallies and presidential debates so our highly trained propaganda speakers can deliver our carefully designed messages to the gullible masses; everyone should be made aware of your informative posts and your unauthorized use of paper dust masks in public. The Upper Panda society and the pink panty party(PPP) have petitioned the world government, at its home office, on crater 6 on the dark side of the moon, to deny your claim to speak, post, write, think, breath, wear masks, or jester in public. The petitioners want an order to prevent you from informing anyone how they might avoid infection. Expressing unauthorized ideas, or making people read your life saving instructions may frustrate the Covid 19 infection committees effort to achieve lock down.

You must learn that paper dust mask, might save enough people from infection, that lock down would become unnecessary.

What’s needed is a return to a real science based society, not a bunch of liberal arts types harping about their feelings and using their faux knowledge to dictate policy.

Noooooooooooooooooo…..

A “science-based society” was the endeavor of Marx, Freud, Skinner, and Brutalism. It can never succeed because science is only the expression of our rationality in our relationship with the physical world. And that’s where it stops.

There is no scientific argument against genocide, for example. If anything, science would support genocide on survival-of-the-fittest grounds. In a science based society, there is no reason not to kill you and harvest your organs.

Science can’t produce beauty, or formulate the laws of love.

There will never be a pill that makes life worth living.

The problem with today’s liberal arts programs isn’t the liberal arts, it’s the liberal arts faculties, largely a pack of timid and obsequious sycophants who excel only in demonstrating that they have the right political views.

We need real liberal arts programs now more than ever.

Propaganda is real enough and it’s people like this professor that help it along.

Propaganda is the art of lying and convincing some dupe the lie is the truth. A healthy society wouldn’t give professors of this nonsense the ability to survive by getting rid of the bogus degrees and their research funding.

TPTsB use these people to create the propaganda that’s fed to the gullible. The bulk of the university system outside of the STEM fields is almost nothing but propaganda because they have no facts verifiable empirically, just statistical correlations that they then turn into facts by consensus of the disciplines priests to be fed as facts to the next generation of drones they give degree to.

Degrees should be handed out based upon repeatable empirical evidence that what the discipline says is true. No one should be able to get a degree in the bullshitology fields of economics, sociology, psychiatry, political science, etc because they are all just the opinions of popes and bishops of their respective fields.

Look around. Economic policies are ruining the worlds economies. Political science types (politicians) are enforcing totalitarianism. Psychologists are telling us there are multiple genders. Psychiatrists are at root largely responsible for all the mass shooting via their drug cocktails. etc, etc, etc. The people with bullshitology degrees are ruining the world.

Spot on sir…

Spoken like a true recipient of one of the bullshitology degrees.

Your assertion is outright propaganda. Engineering and real science produces the bounty in the world. The Humanities and Social Sciences useless eaters are the parasites that live off the productive STEM population.

So I hope the doctors who operate on you take off their masks and sneeze.

Mark Crispin Miller looks quite Jewish, must be an insider fight. Him being inside convention, being proud of convention, basking in the advantages, the persona needs a close-up look. What does he have as a plan? Being interesting to a fringe audience enough for ego and spectacled appearances without reneging on his privileges? Indeed the persona needs a stark look upside his broader profile.

The solution might be to throw out the bathwater and the child (NYU administrations et al.). The biases should be on the institute level. Give the man his own salon, and some minimum wage sponsoring, so he can be outright, outspoken. Real intellectuals should abdicate the “Chomsky” pattern: privilege and dissident allures make for poor credibility.

Again we do not know a sliver of this, as another commentator noted above, a recipe for being taken by the nose. Most of these critters are either on their way in, as much as on their way out just bickering between one another, they take the outside world for granted as long as their cocoon is intact.

IIRC “text critique” was developed by American YKW in the 1920s as a tool for deconstructing “fascist” propaganda; it worked like a charm, unfortunately the method did a much more thorough job on their own so it was canned around 1940.
Not before Marcuse´s “repressive tolerance” rationalization of differential treatment took hold a generation later was it dug up again.
My impression is the good prof. took a mildly (but not … TOO) controversial subject for the little ones to sharpen their teeth on – that´s fairly SOP.

– That said, this is getting ridiculous (a sign of the times). The naysayers´argument amounts to fundamental abrogation of quarantine powers (utter idiocy).
If spreading is a 1A Right, how can it NOT be my right to kill anyone approaching me without a mask in self-defense?
Either way this is the behind-next-to-last hill I´m willing to plant my
tattered flag on 😛

Julia Jackson says she wants to abolish Capitalism, and yet she does not want Professor Miller to have free speech to show how Big Pharma, which is as BIG as capitalism gets, may be rigging the system for its own corrupt profits.

That is the stupidity of the WOKE. They serve the most evil Globalist Capitalists.

Unless you are elderly and have several co-morbidities, the COVID-19 virus is only about as dangerous as the various influenza viruses that strike every year. Therefore, if face diapers should be mandatory because of COVID-19, then they should be mandatory forever because of the flu. However, those of us who are sane will not be wearing face diapers for the rest of our lives. You may if you wish, but you will have trouble if you try to make the rest of us do it unless you live in a liberal cockroach–ruled cesspool, such as New York City, where idiots and hysterics are an overwhelming majority.

I’m not afraid of this little cold virus; if you are, it’s your problem.

Mark Crispin Miller has always been controversial. He claims the Republicans stole the 2000 and 2004 elections, the latter by rigging voting machines. However, there is no way that bunch of feckless dorks known as the Republican Party would do something so bold as steal a presidential election. Republicans love losing to Demoncrats, just like John McCain and Mitt Romney lost to Obama. When they lose to Demoncraps, Republicans feel like dogs that are pleasing their masters.

NYU is a private university. They can do what they please as long as they are not breaking any laws. Academic freedom is freedom for the school to allow varying opinions if they so choose. But they may use their ownership of the university to decide who they may hire and who they may fire while adhering to the terms of contract with an employee. This professor is heroically standing by his principles, but the cost may be his employment.

If you want academic freedom to thrive then separate the state from the schools. With so many universities state funded, and so many private universities receiving state favors and grants with the usual strings attached, academic freedom is in this day and age practically non-existent.

From past dealings with you, I do know you have a fairly warped sense of humour. You also like to be obscurantist, which can annoy us proles on occasion.
OK, I’ll look up the lady’s book, as recommended by you.

Engineering and real science produces the bounty in the world.

Yes, you need farmers to grow the food you eat. But why do you eat?

The scientific answer is you eat, absorb nutrients, shit, eat, absorb nutrients, shit, all so you can fuck, reproduce, then die. Like any of the farmer’s barnyard animals.

The Humanities and Social Sciences useless eaters are the parasites that live off the productive STEM population.

I didn’t include “Social Sciences”. I’m defending the humanities.

So tell me, Mr. Productivity. Why are you productive? Why all the effort to produce “the bounty in the world”?

Ignoramus. There should be a Moron button to be used on the likes of you. I won’t waste anymore of my precious breath on you.

Yes, it IS a splendid book and entirely trustworthy because she, uh, something…

https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2019/09/21/catherine-nixey-the-darkening-age-is-back-and-annoying-scholars-in-five-languages/

https://www.roger-pearse.com/weblog/2017/10/21/hunting-the-wild-misquotation-again-the-perils-for-the-author-of-not-verifying-your-quotations/

Hey “Oz” are you a Jew?

If yes when you Jews will kneel and ask forgiveness for the Crime of all time your predecessors commit?

I eat to enjoy the food and drink and to sustain life. Pretty simple and obvious.

The humanities aren’t worth spit as professions. They aren’t profession, but are hobbies. As hobbies they are fine, but trying to elevate them to some sort of goal to seek is ridiculous and produces the Kardashians of the world; rich useless eaters.

I’m productive because I want to build things with engineering degrees. I build to earn a living and to help society support itself in a technological world. I help produce the real tangible world you inhabit.

The fluff the humanities produces can disappear and the lights would still be on, the building would still stand and the roads would still carry traffic. Contrast that to a situation where the trades, engineers and scientists decided to mimic Atlas Shrugged. The whole world would come to a stop.

Face it, the humanities and social sciences are the cause of our problems because they’ve inculcated the population to believe in opinionated nonsense foisted as truth. I’m not saying we need to eliminate music, art, etc, just put them into the proper perspective, relatively low on the priority list and definitely in no position of authority as the critical thinking abilities of the artsy types is severely lacking.

The professor has right to say what he thinks and encourage his students to read more studies, including about masks without being punished for this.
However, these students (and we here) should employ a critical reading and thinking. Re masks and do they protect against a virus (viruses) that are much smaller than masks pores – yes, masks do protect, although not 100%. Nothing can guarantee 100% protection. The virions/viruses are smaller in size than the mask pores, true, but they do not travel by themselves, they use careers, like droplets, big and small, which are effectively stopped, although not 100%, by the mask. If majority of people wear masks in closed spaces or when in big crowds, the protection might be better than a vaccine. No need for masks in our home, car, or in the open.
The masks do not have negative health effect in most people, except in those with severe respiratory conditions. If they had, I and those like me who prefessionaly wear masks for years would have developed severe diseases and died.
As someone in the comments mentioned, the Big Pharma is against wearing the masks as protection, because it naturally will decrease the use of pharma products, be it medications or vaccines, and consequently the profit. Big Pharma power was reflected in the initial official rejection of the masks.
I wonder if the professor has some pharma affiliations.

Islam is a religion which has expanded largely through conquest and forcible conversion.

Byzantium shed first blood when it assassinated a Muslim ambassador. Persia was already knee-deep in its assistance of Islam’s enemies well before Muslims began to wage war against it. In the seventh century, these were zero-sum conflicts which, once begun, were inevitably protracted over the course of many generations.

As for forcible conversions, there were virtually none. The existence of ancient Christian and Jewish communities throughout the Muslim world is a testament to “No compulsion in religion” as mandated in The Qur’an. Hagia Sophia and other structures like it are more exceptions than the general rule.

Wahhabism and some of its permutations are quite extreme, but they are not normative Islam.

I walk a thin line with that dust mask. If the likudites (trump) retain control, I could be whisked off to guantanamo for being a commie. If likud’s fake rivals (biden) win I may get whisked off to guantanamo for being a commie. It’s really a tough choice, choosing between these pindo “political polar opposites” nowadays.

It’s all about allowing different views to be expressed.

As simple as that.

Let me draw my own conclusions and act accordingly.

No need to shove anything down my throat coz it automatically triggers laryngeal spasms.

I eat to enjoy the food and drink and to sustain life. Pretty simple and obvious.

So simple a cow could grasp it.

The humanities aren’t worth spit as professions.

And the professions are full of uneducated humans.

I taught English in China for a couple of years and almost all my students were obsessed with getting rich. So I would ask them why. And they would just stare with their mouths open. What do you mean “why?” To them “why do you want to be rich” was as obvious as “why do you want to have legs?”

If you pressed them on it they would start to give their reasons, which pretty much mirrored what you’d get from American college students: to travel, to give their kids a better life, to do what they wanted. And how do you decide what you want to do? It turned out that these kids hadn’t really thought it out. They didn’t know why they wanted to be rich nor what they would do once they became rich. See? I would laugh, you need to study philosophy so you’ll know how to live when you are rich.

But, underneath it all, there was one very powerful reason they wanted to be rich, though few would admit it–even to themselves. Like humans everywhere, they wanted to be rich so they could look down on others and prevent others from looking down on them. Could there be a motivating principle more likely to produce an empty life poorly lived?

We need farmers and engineers and doctors, but a doctor isn’t well-educated just because he went to eight years of medical school. He is well-trained, hopefully, but that’s only to be a doctor. To be a well-educated human, he needs the humanities. He knows what it means to be a doctor. But to know what it means to be a human is much more profound and, to him, much more important.

Citing any “expert” does not mean that so called “expert” is correct. I would go so far as to say they are wrong constantly.

They are most often designated as experts by MSM journalists, who have no expertise in anything, let alone in determining expertise.

Alternatively they are designated as experts by their incestuous and ass-licking colleagues.

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/holocaust-survivor-vera-sharav-covid/………….Julia Jackson is this sheep and the robot created by propaganda, unless she has her “handlers” who are teling her what to do for money.
“Adults are “going around like sheep,” just as they were during her childhood in Germany, Sharav says. “If you deny the human individual the right to think and question and assess and make decisions based on their own judgment and experience, then you are creating robots,” she says.”(Vera Sharav)

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/covid-vaccine-threatens-horseshoe-crabs/
https://www.jsonline.com/videos/news/health/2020/10/15/conservationists-thousands-sharks-could-killed-covid-vaccine/3561046001/………..where is Green Peace?????

It’s no longer about presenting facts or evidence to back up beliefs and assertions or discussing various perspectives while maintaining a basic respect for all interlocutors regardless of their views on an issue.

Now it’s simply “What side are you on?” It’s like going through a military checkpoint in a country that’s in the midst of a civil war. The guy with the gun leaning in the window asking you questions isn’t interested in having a nuanced discussion about facts, he only cares about what side you are on. And if you’re not on his side or give him the impression that you might be a threat you’ll be told, if you’re lucky, to turn your car around and fuck off or, if you’re not, find yourself getting dragged out of your vehicle and shot dead by the side of the road.

Metaphorically this is where we are at in America today. Very few people are still willing to have good faith discussions and debates about contentious issues and even fewer are prepared to update their position if it doesn’t stand up to a fair challenge.

Yeah, them little virions is too small to block, but they are transported on droplets and aerosols which are fairly effectively blocked by a mask. Everybody is stupid.

I’ve hear this drivel on numerous occasions. You’re aiming at some spiritual / transcendental / mystical / etc reason for why humans exist or why we are here, or some other made up nonsense to try to impress your listener with how deep your mind functions. The more idiotic, but expressed with real feeling and theatrical abilities the better.

It doesn’t work on me because I understand the con. What you’re espousing is just made up nonsense. Anyone can come up with some deep line of bullshit if the audience is low IQ. That’s how you folks succeed – by indoctrinating the stupid and then handing them degrees to further the scam.

I live in the real physical world. I’m an atheist because I see no evidence for some god. I see plenty of evidence of the fools in prior civilizations inventing numerous gods that are frowned upon today. I see evidence of how christian doctrine has condemned those prior civilizations and their made up gods because they didn’t know the TRUE god of some mythical figure of roughly 2000 years ago. Trouble is, the bulk of the population eats this up. That’s because the bulk of the population is incredibly stupid and therefore provides your kind with a ready made suckers list.

Long story short, you need people like me to survive, but I damned well can do without your kind, and would prefer it. The non STEM people pollute the world with their nonsense.

Very left-wing guy (not Ctrl-Left as I recall, but I do remember his name from various public-radio, fair-trade coffee milieux 10-15 years ago). I hope trans-partisan alliances against safetyism can be explored before it’s too late. They don’t need to be ideologically stable, they just need to exist, in the first place…

The people with bullshitology degrees are ruining the world.

There are lots of BS-ology types in the so-called hard sciences as well. One of the consequences of modern cosmological theory, for instance, is that the Earth is put back at the center of the universe, just like in medieval times. That can perhaps be attributed to the near-total takeover of astronomy by mathematicians.

Those psychologists and psychiatrists you blame would have little effect if it were not for the politicians who put them on a pedestal and insist we defer to them as the experts. Of course the politicians were also the ones who engineered the funding systems for science (and the bureaucrats who administer them) to ensure that the science would all come out the way they want it to. The politicians also engineered the justice system (and the judges who lead it) so that no authority could make an independent policy decision without being challenged and defeated in the courts. Need I mention the politicians also engineered the educational system.

And so we get politicians like Joe Biden who run on a platform of “trusting the science.” We get the one gas, CO2, responsible for all photosynthesis, and hence all life on Earth, being declared a pollutant in the Supreme Court.

What’s ruining the world is not so much bullshitology, but good old fashioned corruption.

RoatanBill: From the tenor of your words you appear to be nothing more than a goddamn materialist. I suspect you know very little about quantum physicists and their findings that human thought can transform particles into waves and vice versa at the sub-atomic level. Perhaps you ought to read some of the works of Rupert Sheldrake.

For years, a boobtoob advertising meme echoed the words: “Better living through chemistry.” That brought us the horrors of Monsanto with their glyphosate-based “Roundup” which is destroying most biotic life outside of their “Roundup Ready”GMO seeds in corn and soybean fields throughout the fruited plain, much of which, like in Ill Noise, Iowa, southern Minnesota, Eastern Nebraska snd South Dakota, is turning into a biotic desert. There are over 10,000 different chemical compounds used in America today. Many of them end up in the food and water supply. The chemically-based Big Pharma industry and the HMO and insurance rackets are delighted with that as medical conditions caused and/or exacerbated by those agents are making all the perps very wealthy.

As Mr. Nelsen pointed out, we need some real liberal arts scholarship in our colleges and universities. In fact we need more than that. With a few exceptions among small liberal arts colleges, most of those institutions are nothing more than grant-sucking administrative bureaucracies and diploma-mills. Perhaps it is time our culture graduates from universities into well-grounded cosmoversities.

Values like beauty, love and aesthetic values have no place in Newtonian-Cartesian-Darwinian rationalist, materialist scientism. That is a dead-end street.

RB: You remind me of one of my friends. He caught the Marxist bug at university and became a Trotskyite and an atheist like yourself. He is also a rationalist-materialist at a most devout level. His mind in engirdled by ideological perspectives and various other isms such philojudaism, positivism and existentialism. He has alchemically transmuted his mind into adamantine and refuses to budge from his ismization.

As you have probably realised I was replying to utu.

I find it amusing that there are so many enthusiasts for some kind of Christianity on the presumably atheist** Ron Unz’s website. What a torrent has been unleashed from my throwaway remark prompted by Catherine Nixey’s book . (It just seemed a bit livelier than the more obvious I suppose).

I suppose the answer I may give to the inquiry about whether I am a Jew is apt. I am an Australian who grew up very very vaguely Anglican (educated at church school) but without religion from about 15. Jews? Thd full forward and full back for our 18 man Australian Rules school football team were Jewish, and maybe I knew it (one of them invited quite a lot of friends with funny names to a form dance). Australians have often done mini imitations of fashions in the much much bigger Anglophone America despite their being almost wholly inappropriate for Australia (Vietnam moratorium marches and BLM protests recently come to mind) but we are really very different and have long been much more reliably secular.

**Ron’s subtleties (which he deploys occasionally) might conceivably run to using the version “non-theist” which I suggested might apply not only to myself but to the prominent Jewish scientist I was talking to. “Oh no! ‘atheist’” he insisted. I recall Ron once writing “G-d”. What to make of that? Subtlety? Courtesy? Tact?

Trying to teach today’s students how to think and do research is casting pearls to swine.

See reply to verymuchalive

Yep, multiply populations by 20, invent gunpowder and TNT and then note that the rabid Christians of the 4th century weren’t actually destroying Christian churches as your words literally imply…..

Still, my throway remark is not wasted if it introduces others to the feisty Catherine Nixey’s provocative work (By contrast I note that there has been a good documentary on some TV channel challenging the idea that there was Dark Age for art – especially beautifully crafted jewellery and other artefacts).

I’ll agree with you. However, the politicians couldn’t force the population to defer to the fraudulent experts in economics, psychology, cosmology, etc if those fraudulent experts didn’t exist. The political class will use anything to further their goals of total control while they enjoy a totally undeserved great life.

The universities allowed rubbish like climate science, for example, to produce PhD’s when the entire field hasn’t the real knowledge base to fill a thimble. At absolute best, climate science should be able to award a bachelor of arts, awaiting further developments that one day might allow them to offer a bachelors of science.

Yes, many of the STEM fields have been infected by charlatans to varying degrees. Cosmology is my favorite to pick on with their black holes, dark matter & energy, neutron stars, Big Bang, etc. Not one of those and many other items has a basis in fact. Halton Arp, a protege of Hubble, showed that redshift is not a reliable measure of distance via his catalog of galaxies that make that abundantly clear to anyone willing to look at the evidence. He discovered that redshift is quantised. For his pioneering work he was denied telescope time and hounded out the US. Once redshift goes, all their unicorns disappear with it.

Plasma physics has a much more lucid take on how the cosmos works and their prediction for some of the missions to comets and asteroids were stunningly accurate. They use actual lab experiments to model what they see in the cosmos. Anthony Peratt, a plasma physicist at Los Alamos National Labs, has cataloged ancient rock carvings and paintings from all over the world that match plasma discharge patterns commonly seen in the lab. These ancient people had no way of communicating with each other and yet produced the same images over and over. He and others surmise that the records they left us was what they saw in the sky when the earth was less stable than it is today. See : https://youtu.be/6meaU1QcSdA

Video Link

Wait for the stick man reference.

The virions/viruses are smaller in size than the mask pores, true, but they do not travel by themselves, they use careers, like droplets, big and small, which are effectively stopped, although not 100%, by the mask.

The image of careering, careening, carrier droplets does tickle my fancy. That said, what you have done is use one theoretical construct to justify another. It’s just the old hidden non sequitur, an unobtrusive circularity, coming into play.

You can see this by noting that the WHO has recently conceded that that the Covid-19 virions may well be more propagated by aerosols than by droplets. They seem to have come to this conclusion by recognizing that the virus is commonly found in the fecal material of victims — an observation the Chinese made back in February. Masks are of course useless against aerosols.

The fecal aerosol transmission route would better explain why nursing homes are such toxic places for Covid-19 contagion. Incontinence is commonly rife in such places.

There is an expression, “Art is the master for whom Science toils.” What that is saying is that everything we do voluntarily in the physical world has as its source some motive power, some emotion, informing our desire to do it. If I smash a baseball bat on a murderous intruder’s head, I am motivated by fear. If I pile up firewood in the summer, I am motivated by a desire for comfort in the winter. Every physical action you take–even you–has an emotion at its root providing the motive force. And emotion is the provenance of Art, which is why we have love poems, and not love bricks.

You made a generalization about what kind of person I am, so I will make one about you: you are the type of guy who says things like “at first she was being reasonable, then she got all emotional” as if the two things are mutually exclusive. But of course they are not. Emotions themselves are either rational or irrational. If I fear a murderous intruder, it is a rational fear. If I fear my shadow, it is an irrational fear. Fear itself is value-neutral, as is hate and every other emotion. Our civilization’s confusion on this point has been enormously destructive. Things would have been much better if DesCartes had said “I will, therefore I am” rather than the unfocused and mushy “I think, therefore I am”. He wouldn’t have left guys like you staked out in such arid land.

A big problem is the mass consumerization of the education industry. A few years ago I came across the website of a small state school–in South Dakota, if I remember correctly–with an announcement on its home page “INTRODUCING A NEW MAJOR THIS YEAR: CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER!”. Can’t you just see 18-year-old Johnny at the kitchen table going through colleges: hey, yeahhhh. That’s what I should be–C. E. O. And his hapless parents, who don’t know the purpose of an education is not a job, will shell out the money (or the government will). Why don’t they just cut to the chase and offer a degree in Rich.

I listen to all the Rupert Sheldrake lectures I can find. I like his theory of morphic resonance, but he’s no physicist.

That there are still things we don’t understand is precisely why I want only the absolute truth disseminated to the mostly science ignorant public. Students in a given STEM field should be taught the clear distinction between what is known fact and what is speculative theory. Then we wouldn’t have people claiming they see and even have a picture of a black hole – you know the unicorn that absorbs all radiation and radiation is required to produce the picture.

Chemistry is a well advanced science. That some conglomerate uses chemistry for our and the planet’s detriment does not in any way tarnish chemistry. It attests to the scum in gov’t and management that allows this to happen, most of which are economists and assorted MBA types with shit for brains and no morals. Better luck next time picking a target. However, I do fault the actual chemists that work for them and they should be hung.

As far as a dead end street is concerned, consider that the non STEM people have led the world for centuries, using scientific discoveries for their personal benefit as well as to their enemies detriment, those enemies being anyone not themselves which includes their own constituents. Many technologies are dual use and the mostly non STEM political class has caused 200 million deaths in the 20th century alone via democide.

The non STEM economists, the whores to the bankers and political class, have cooked up funny money with no backing that is in the process of imploding as I write.

The non STEM military that gets more and more funds showered on them are just murderers in costume with a license from the non STEM political class.

The medical cartel is a bit of a mix, some science but mostly art. You have surgeons that have a defined skill and then you have pill pushers known as general practitioners that should actually be declared employees and get paid by big pharma as their sales people and thereby offer their ‘services’ to the general public for free. The pill pushers are currently in ascendancy politically to be able to lock down the population and force everyone to wear a face diaper.

From my perspective, the world has allowed you non STEM types to fuck up the planet pretty good for centuries and I think it’s time for a change to a rational approach from the real STEM disciplines.

Now you are just being insulting. There is no logical connection between atheism and Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism or most of the other isms you mention. On the other hand Christians are often the most rabid philo-judaists ever. Children normally obtain their moral sensibilities at least initially from their parents and can accept them independently of accepting religious dogma.

More drivel. This is just naval gazing or trying to figure out how many angels fit on the head of a pin. There’s no substance to your prose. It’s just empty assertions one after the other, but arriving at a conclusion that suits your purpose.

Our civilization’s confusion on this point has been enormously destructive.

And for centuries the non STEM fields have done nothing of consequence to change any of it. In fact they reinforce it by allowing mush headed student to graduate with PhD’s in all manner of basket weaving.

I went to a hard headed engineering school but it did have economics and english departments. Those were for the people that couldn’t get through the engineering curriculum. Math is hard.

I’m immune to your shtick. Try selling it elsewhere.

Masks limit both inward and outward transmission of aerosols, too. A surgical or a homemade from layers of cotton and silk well fitting mask can prevent the outward emission of droplets to 90% and aerosol to 60%. Inward transmission 0f aerosol prevented by the same design is only about 50%. However, widespread use of masks in enclosed spaces can decrease the risk of infection and infection rate substantially and should not be dismissed just because those who tell you to use masks are lying about so many other things. Even liers once in a while can be right.

“You win the most penetrating comment prize for this thread. Congrats!”

Actually, for almost any thread with “snowflakes” being a variable replaceable by the topic de jour.

“Even if mask efficiency is close to zero even in that case at least increases the awareness of public of the danger.”

Utter nonsense! There is NO danger such as you are suggesting. Read the science, the real science. It is absolutely and unambiguously clear on this point.

“I’m not afraid of this little cold virus; if you are, it’s your problem.” – What you are afraid of or not is really irrelevant. Decisions are not to be made based on irrational fearcouldor irrational confidence. Most importantly decisions should agree with moral rules. One should be guided by the Golden Rule which usually does not convince irrational and ignorant people. So it would be better to be guided by the 1st Categorical Imperative. It is particularly apt to the masking issue. Because masks are effective if almost everybody wears them. Every defector from this rule makes it worse for everybody.

It is a miracle that in our society people such as Professor Miller still exist. It is a fact that people such as the student and the dean are typical representatives of society. The latter two are the moral dregs of a civilization that has lost its compass. They are not only despicable but also dangerous. As for Professor Miller, he is worthy of praise for standing up to corrupt order.

Not the chemistry departments. Not the business departments. Just cause English majors get their panties bunched don’t mean they’re all Social Justice Warriors.

Why are all you people on here so black-and-white false-dichotomy simple-minded?

I’m immune to your shtick. Try selling it elsewhere.

No snake-handling fundamentalist was ever more dogmatic.

You have no answer to my claim “everything we do voluntarily in the physical world has, as its source, some motive power, some emotion, informing our desire to do it” and, despite your claimed veneration of Truth, you won’t acknowledge this truth because that would dethrone your Science, and you believe in your science.

I imagine you’ve always prided yourself on how “non-emotional” you were, or how well you “control” your emotions. It’s a fatal misunderstanding of the world. You make a conscious decision to deny your own agency, placing it somewhere out there in the “real world”. Have you ever loved anyone? How did you know?

no logical connection between atheism and Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism

Their contemporaries thought they were atheists, and there is absolutely a logical connection between atheism and materialism. How could there not be?

Bravo to Miller for putting the microscope to the mask campaign.

It has been fascinating to follow the statements of Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of CIDRAP, as he has tried to present solid scientific information while, I assume, attempting to retain his job.

See his June 3 podcast transcript:

https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/special_episode_masks_6.2.20_0.pdf

The references mentioned in the podcast are here:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/sites/default/files/public/downloads/references_on_masks_6.pdf

In it he makes a very clear statement regarding the supposed efficacy of masks for block the virus, and also strongly criticizes the CDC for their sloppy documentation and recommendations.

Osterholm states:
“The recommendation was published without a single scientific paper or otherinformation provided to support that cloth masks actually provide any respiratory protection. There were seven reports or papers listed as “Recent Studies” that detailed the risk of presymptomatic or asymptomatic transmission. There was nothing about how well such masks protect against virus transmission, particularly from aerosol-related transmission. Never before in my 45 year career have I seen such a far-reaching public recommendation issued by any governmental agency without a single source of data or information to support it. This is an extremely worrisome precedent of implementing policies not based on science-based data or why they were issued without such data. ”

. . . “Fifth, many in the general public are currently using cloth masks in public to protect themselves and others. They should be made aware that these masks may provide some benefit in reducing the risk of virus transmission, but at best it can only be anticipated to be limited. Distancing remains the most important risk reduction action they can take. I understand why many would argue that some benefit is better than none, but I believe that we must approach this assumption with caution. The messaging that dominates our COVID-19 discussions right now makes it seem that if we are wearing cloth masks you’re not going to infect me and I’m not going to infect you. I worry that many people highly vulnerable to life-threatening COVID-19 will hear this messageand make decisions that they otherwise wouldn’t have made about distancing because of an unproven sense of cloth mask security. Distancing remains the most important risk reduction action we can take.”
. . .

“So, where are we at on this? I t’s terribly unfortunate that this situation has become such a divisive issue. As I said in a previous podcast, I now understand what it must’ve been like during the Civil War to be a mother or a father in a family where half of their sons fought for the North and half of their sons fought for the South; I see and feel this division today. In all my years in public health, I’ve never experienced this blowback, even with the influenza vaccine or HIV vaccine related issues. We’ve actually had people who’ve contacted funders of CIDRAP, demanding that they defund us, because of my position on cloth masking. The leadership at the University of Minnesota has received complaints about me and the position I’ve taken. I’ve had four e-mails just this past week from physician colleagues who wanted me to sign onto their
28petition to mandate that everyone wear a cloth mask in public. I see organizations that are now supporting this effort without any real understanding of the evidence for making such a recommendation. Two such organizations are major medical clinics in this country. I contacted close colleagues in both clinics and sought information on the how the decision was made to support a community-wide routine cloth mask recommendation. Both said that once CDC recommended it, they had no choice. They did not undertake a review of the mask effectiveness data themselves nor did they consider any of the other reviews that had been done on this topic as I have covered previously. And you know the basis for the CDC recommendation. ”

. . .

“I’ve even seen many prominent individuals on TV in the past week, with their mask on and not over their nose. It’s really important that if we’re going to use cloth masks, they need to be tight face fitting. And yes, I use a cloth mask in public places, even if I’m not convinced it’s going to make any real difference in protecting me. I do it because I don’t want to make other people feel uncomfortable i f they see me without one. This is the new unfortunate culture of mask shaming. P lease, this shouldn’t be about politics, this should be about public health and science. ”

Read the whole thing.

In the next podcast Osterholm told people to wear masks if mandated. That sounds like basically the same position as Miller’s: Don’t break the law on my say-so!

Most recentlyh he says on MSNBC that herd immunityis like “pixie dust.”
????? WFT?

Here is a list of all the podcasts:
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/podcasts-webinars

A good source of info on mask madness is Lockdownskeptics.org.
All of Miller’s students should be following that site.

” may be more effective”

This is not the language of science. this is the language of wishful thinking and sowing confusion.

I enjoyed Nixey”s book. Not because I knew for a fact that it was entirely accurate but because I know from observation that humans can fuck up anything, especially Christianity.

I know unhinged zealots like Julia Jackson. To them whatever the media dictates is like a religion and they will defend it with religious fervor. To anyone that wondered how the Salem witch trials happened, there’s your answer. There is no point in arguing with such people, your best method of defence is ever confronted with one is to ruthlessly use her own weapons against her to the point no one will want to associate with her or listen to her (for example, has she ever tweeted a joke related to race? if she did, perhaps it should be forwarded to the dean and every media outlet as well as prominent BLM twitter accounts). The best defence against a witchcraft accusation was always to accuse the accuser of being a witch themselves. It would be lovely if logic and sanity could prevail, but we’re already in clown world, now it’s about survival.

Hydroxychloroquine is on the WHO’s basic “medicine box” list, that is, basic medications that should be available in every health clinic worldwide.

As is chloroquine. But hydroxychloroquine is I believe a milder form of the former, with fewer side effects.

https://www.who.int/medicines/publications/essentialmedicines/18th_EML.pdf

A surgical or a homemade from layers of cotton and silk well fitting mask can prevent the outward emission of droplets to 90% and aerosol to 60%. Inward transmission 0f aerosol prevented by the same design is only about 50%.

Somehow I’m not very impressed by such stats. A 60% capture of a laboratory aerosol does not necessarily have anywhere near that much relevance to viral contagion, and the criterion for the mask to be well fitting does not necessarily reflect the real situation we are all in. Seriously we just pretend what we wear in real life is well fitting. It could well be just a cargo-cult sort of belief.

Give me a citation and I could look at it. Has the study even been replicated?

It’s quite interesting observing the birth of a new faith – Science (whatever that implies – mostly whatever the faithful want it to imply imo), from a strictly observational scientific method.

The juxtaposition of self certainty (idolatry), grandstanding, fear, offence, and self-enforced blindness of the believer, as compared to the openness, meekness, curiosity, thirst for knowledge, of someone who follows the scientific method, is just too much for me. At this point the whole failure of the synapse is not even funny any more!

That being said, Propaganda https://www.voltairenet.org/IMG/pdf/Bernays_Propaganda_in_english_.pdf by Bernays is a great, if dark read!

Logic like that should get you a diploma from Sunday School class.

This is the language of common sense.
In common sense and in science, there are four ways of protecting one from viral, bacteriological, radiation, chemical etc. agents.
1. Removal of the agent, if you can. Can we remove COVID for the time being?
2. Time – hide somewhere and wait until it goes away, i.e. lockdown. Very useful, but can used be only as a temporary measure. Already tried with COVID.
3. Distance – very useful, but difficult to practice all the time in human population.
4. Shield. Useful and can be pracriced most of the time by most of the people.

So, why such resistance? Why?
And don’t tell me that there is no danger from COVID, because for seven months people are suffering and dying before my eyes and some in my hands from COVID, while incompetent “experts”,Pharma, politicians, gurus,media, and public are playng games of profits, prestige, politics, PC, and god knows what.

“Give me a citation and I could look at it.” – Here is one:

Influenza Virus Aerosols in Human Exhaled Breath: Particle Size, Culturability, and Effect of Surgical Masks
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1003205

“We sought to determine the total number of viral RNA copies present in exhaled breath and cough aerosols, whether the RNA copies in fine particle aerosols represent infectious virus, and whether surgical facemasks reduce the amount of virus shed into aerosols by people infected with seasonal influenza viruses.”

“Overall, masks produced a 3.4 fold (95% CI 1.8 to 6.3) reduction in viral aerosol shedding. “

Reducing the viral load is the most important issue when thinking about masks. People make a mistake that there is a 0-1 step change response function to virus where it does not matter how many viruses one gets. It is not so. The viral load determine the course of disease. The response function to virus is S-shaped not a step change.

Slight reduction in SARS-CoV-2 exposure viral load due to masking results in a significant reduction in transmission with widespread implementation
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.09.13.20193508v2.full.pdf

Masks Do More Than Protect Others During COVID-19: Reducing the Inoculum of SARS-CoV-2 to Protect the Wearer (Jul 2020)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7393808/

Facial Masking for Covid-19 — Potential for “Variolation” as We Await a Vaccine, The New England Journal of Medicine
https://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJMp2026913?articleTools=true

Your objection is silly. There are many problems in science and mathematics where we do not know whether X is larger than Y but we know bounds on both X and Y or their difference: |X-Y|<∆

The question whether the universal masking might be more effective than vaccination we will be able to answer once we have a vaccine. Right know it is a moot point. The universal masking is the best thing we got.

I did know it was a reply to utu, as you said. I was trying not to bring up Christianity at all. The point I was trying to make was about the peculiarly destructive nature of Wahhabist Islam, as seen at Palmyra, Bamian, Mecca and elsewhere.
Good luck with your secular agnosticism or whatever. In an age of expanding Islam and Steve Sailer’s most important “Graph in the World”, it seems a very weak basis for defending Western Civilisation. Every civilisation needs a religious basis, otherwise it will not survive for long. Maybe Christianity has had its day. But, as the poet said, “If Christianity goes, all of our culture goes with it.” Mr Putin realises this. Very few “western” leaders seem to.

As for forcible conversions, there were virtually none.

This is untrue. Even a cursory look at the practice of devshirme in the Ottoman Empire is enough to refute this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Devshirme

And it’s still happening now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-asia-29008267

I have a a friendly acquaintance with a Cardinal whom I might call a friend in some circumstances (“I’ll like you to meet my friend Innocent [which he is not- by name at least]) who learnedly insists that we are living on the legacy….. I’m not really sure about dunking and burning of witches inquisitions, slavery, subjugation of women, though none quite matched suicide flights for the Japanese emperor. But I still see the element of truth in your “every civilisation needs a religious basis” thanks to looking at our species and its history through the lens of evolution by natural selection which most religions rejected for a long time, extending indeed to now. It stands to reason that the tribe that is capable of unifying around a fanatically internalised faith is going to be better at killing off other tribes ceteris paribus. Then, as the civis populates, the suppression of trouble makers when there is a king or priests who can make themselves the subject of unifying faith is easy to accept. So the religiosity of mankind is fortified or underpinned by the genome.

So I have spent my adult lifetime trying to work out a secular basis for the morality that can allow us to live peacefully in modern secular situations. I recall at 21 arriving at the simple starting point that morality is what you teach your children so they behave acceptably as social animals. It seemed to me significant that “morality” derived from mores – the customs of the tribe, and could be contrasted with ethics which perhaps included theorising about better rules. From that there remained the big task of achieving agreement on morality amongst very different people(s). It seemed to me that it would take a million Socrates a hundred years to do it as one acknowledged that you can’t infer an ought from an is so you have to work at getting agreements on values by getting agreement on “Yes we would ideally prefer that behaviour and that outcome” and “Yes , we agree that that outcome is best achieved by adopting this rule”. Fortunately the pro social side of human nature is fostered by material plenty and good health so it is not surprising that the world is today on the whole a more agreeable place for homo sapiens as social animal than it was 200 years ago. I think that multiracial Australia is an enviable embodiment of the reasons for that truth – as long as China continues to ensure that we remain easily prosperous and doesn’t decide to damage us too much as proxy for America.

Actually, Dr. Michael Osterholm himself in his candid June 6 podcast compared a cloth mask to a diving mask. If the latter does not fit, water gets in. Bad!!

Same goes for a cloth mask. If you can breathe and not pass out from lack of air/oxygen, basically viruses are getting in and out.

I have to wear a mask to get groceries, etc.

I wear a dumb-ass mass-produced blue thing, and after breathing into it for 15 mins I have a sore throat and my mouth feels putrid and my breath tastes terrible in my mouth—even if I just brushed my teeth before donning the dumb-ass mask.

To me that is a clear signal of contaminated air. Self-contaminated. Re-breathed air.

Smell is one of our (and other organisms’) primary tools for identifying what is clean and healthy and what is dirty or putrid and therefore unhealthy.

Seems like bad breath is now a sign of being “safe.” Ugh.

Quite simply, mask wearing does not pass the sniff test.

“This is the language of common sense.”

Actually, no. Wearing a mask is not “common sense.”

And the evidence certainly does not justify massivly invasive publlic policy.

Go back and read Osterholm’s June 6 podcast. There he states clearly that social distancing is the only measure that works to reduce transmission. He also states that mask wearing is counterproductive because it induces people to ignore the need for social distancing.

It has also been pointed out repeatedly, and this is more than “common sense” but it is also common sense, that the chance of transmission from walking past someone out of doors on a sunny breezy day is so minuscule as to be meaningless.

So, those wearing masks while driving by themselves, biking etc. are not using any sort of “common sense.” They are demonstrating a total lack of critical t hinking and common sense. They have bought into a nonsensical narrative.

PS. As soon as someone states that something is a no-brainer—basically a synonym for “common sense”—you know you are in the presences of a “no-thinker.” Chances are this individual is one who is unable to grasp a very simple but basic concept: Correlation does not equal causation.

Please repeat every five minutes until learned: *Correlation does not equal causation.*

One of the more confused replies to which I have yet to respond.

A sound liberal arts education is the primary basis for a civilized society. Outside of his specific field of electrical engineering, my niece’s husband at age 28 appears to be a cultural idiot. He is hardly alone in that deficiency amongst the science-math-engineering-technology grads.

Because our government sponsored system is all about dumbing-down the general population in the cause of continued rule by the elite; our high school graduates tend towards generalized cultural illiteracy. Unless the K-12 system is massively overhauled and brought up to European standards; the maintenance of civil society –or should I say reconstruction–a higher education must commence with a sound liberal arts background, particularly in history, civics, geography, literature and some understanding of pre-Judy-Christie Magick-Mindfuck devolution of Western cultural standards.

My statement was in part anecdotal–an observational element which is much put down by those who hold to the Newtonian-Cartesian-Darwinian school of rationalistic, materialistic faith.

Though I would agree that many Marxists hold beliefs which are essentially faith-based, most of them also happen to be atheists, often militantly so. You are, in part, correct about children absorbing the more’s and folkways of their parents. As among backwater Baptists and pineywoods Pentecostals, to say nothing of the terminally deluded “Christian” Zionists; children are brought up as true believers in the Judie-Christie Magick-Mindfuck–its all about the Old Testicles and “Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins”…all of which I regard as the purest of hogwash, with the generally subconscious intent of the maintenance of social control on behalf of elite interests.

Again, anecdotally, as a child I had accepted the handed-down religious dogma of the cultural matrix in which I was ensconced. By the age of 16 (by no means a child anymore) I was entering into a skeptical attitude towards all of that operant conditioning. So your statement about a disconnect between moral sensibilities and acceptance of religious dogma is lacking in a probability of proof as per my own individual experience–one I am confident is shared by many others.

Such an apologia for the STEM-cells. Did it ever cross your mind that most individuals in that field are not even middle-class–by classical standards? My point is that scientists, et al, are for the most part highly dependent upon governmental, foundational and institutional grants. They are EMPLOYEES–minions, in fact and not independent actors.

You excoriate those who have taken a liberal arts approach to learning (as distinguished from edjumacation) as “non STEM types.” I regard that perspective as not only an ex-cathedra pronunciamento, but stemming from a deep faith in the Newtonian-Cartesian-Darwinian FAITH.

It does delight me.however, that you have sought out the works of Sheldrake and his amalgamation and synthesis of the works of cutting-edge physicists. These indefatigable researchers have long (since Heisenberg, at least) determined that matter really does not matter when it comes to sub-atomic particles and waves being readily subjected to the observations of the researchers–the penultimately classical exposition of the ancient adage: “Mind over Matter”.

You do appear to have maintained an open mind in many respects. I do respect you for that elementary exercise of scientific methodology. Yet, you do not appear to accept the possibility that reason sans a balancing counterpoise based on intuition and inter dimensional connectivity–a no-go zone for those of the faith.

From my thoroughly grounded cosmoversality of spiritual questing; consciousness is not of the brain (a mere hard-drive, by analogy) but of the MIND, which is the essential software that connects humans living this material lifetime to all that IS. The core and essence of my mystical environment is that the whole is equal to, but greater than, the sum of its parts.

Yes, Virginia, Creator IS and as per Sheldrake, all conscious beings are somewhat that of holographic emanations of the All that is ONE and the one that is all.

Separate the wheat from the chaff

You produce a wonderful word salad, but a bit much on the flowery dressing.

If you have a cogent point, I missed it.

You must be a lot older than me. Your views strike me as ludicrously complacent and optimistic.
Your children and grandchildren, if you have any, will have to deal with the consequences. Good luck to them.

Do you frequently miss cogent points—that is plural, BTW. Does a plurality of perspectives confuse you?

While reading your prose, I wondered if you were a student of Professor Irwin Corey. I got the clear impression I was reading one of the professor’s lectures.

Optimism? Complacency? On the whole I commend, for mental health and calm objectivity, control of one’s emotions concerning things one can do nothing about.

Objectively, the biggest threats to the welfare of the junior members of my extended family who can live in Australia are climate change and the overpopulation of the planet, or, rather, the likely consequences if the direst predictions of global warming eventuate and the related, and almost certain consequences of high fertility amongst low IQ Africans, Pakistanis and some others come about. We really won’t be able to afford bleeding heart attitudes to the hordes trying to immigrate.

If you have ever watched Louis Theroux’s extraordinary programs about people in America who make even the maddest commenters on UR seem sane you may also share my view that the only hope for the modern civilisation which started in the West is that white people’s dysgenic breeding can be compensated for materially by the millions of high IQ Chinese (in particular, but also high caste Indians) whose STEM talents are still to be unleashed. I’m not confident in prescribing for npon material health because the great current contribution of talented women who have practically no children can’t go on for long.

Wizard is a Jew. The Jewish version of Christianity is similar to their version of the history of Palestine and early 20 th century German history.

For instance; the Greek artist El Greco who fled the Ottoman conquest for Spain was a notorious anti Semite?

Jews believe that in 1930 when the Italian government finally settled compensation with the Vatican for all the church property the 1866 unification government seized after unification . The Pope immediately sent those tens of millions to Hitler and his Nazi party to take over Germany and kill Jews.

It’s amazing what jews believe about the rest of the world, especially their main enemy, Christianity.

Maybe the wiz confuses Palmyra with Palermo ?

Never heard of the guy. Please enlighten me.

YouTube has some of his monologues.

I would enjoy a class on propaganda taught by Mark Crispin Miller, but given the pandemic condition we face I would be the first to advise him to tread very carefully. The subject of public policy is not academic at the moment. CDC pronouncements are not propaganda if one defines propaganda as the deliberate promulgation of lies to achieve political ends. To suggest that pronouncements from the health authority are propaganda is not true, first of all, and to teach students that such policy statements are mere propaganda is misprision of the facts. To discuss public policy is useful, but Jack and Jill are not free to pursue their own public policy and refer to the CDC agenda as propaganda.

The problem with this pandemic is it is not destructive enough so that many people do not take it seriously, especially the libertarian faction that says: give me liberty or give me death and looks at government as an intrusion on individual rights & liberties such as the right to do whatever you want whenever you want to do it and stick it to the sheeple collectivists whenever possible. Such people who whine about the sacrifice of individual liberty make the development of public pandemic policy difficult or simply impossible. This is the situation we are in thanks to the unindicted criminal president and his gang of cheats, liars & looters, who have presided over a rising tide of deaths in the US.

Professor Miller needs to be a little less academic. The freedom of inquiry is important, of course, but pandemic policy is a life & death matter, not an academic question. The question of whether mask wearing is effective public policy is not to be decided in a liberal arts class room but in the context of epidemiological science. If he is not wearing a mask in his classes and requiring students to do the same as prescribed by the CDC, he shouldn’t be teaching.

It is a fact that people such as the student and the dean are typical representatives of society. The latter two are the moral dregs of a civilization that has lost its compass.

You sound like a Russian. In Russian culture, informers, sneaks, and snitches of all stripes are considered maybe just a notch above child molesters.

Recommended: Snorkel with charcoal filter and dive mask filled with salt water.

Air tanks and dive suit can replace snorkel.

Do enjoy reading Alden if you have time on your hands. If you watch some of Louis Theroux’s** ghastly but fascinating glimpses of human curiosities in California you will understand how she fits the picture of someone with a decent enough IQ but nonetheless eccentrically deranged. I suppose many years as a parole officer could be warping.

I have to wonder if she is going Joe Biden’s way since we have interacted for quite long enough for her to know that I am not Jewish, although I have secular assimilated Jewish in-laws and find Judaism and Jewishness interesting in way that is almost unique – certainly compared with, say, gypsies or Afrikaner.

**I see from Wikipedia that the BBC’s Louis Theroux is 50 and the son of the well known American writer Paul Theroux. He was educated in England and got First Class Honours in History at Oxford. Amusingly, in a visit to a down market, extreme racist, version of Alden in a less salubrious part of California he was pressed insistently to admit to being a Jew, to which he refused to reply, though he is not.

I sued her for egregious malpractice committed back when she worked at St John’s in Santa Monica Ca. By the time I realized what she’d done she was “no longer with “ St John’s and moved in to St Joseph’s. Her insurance company settled as soon as they read the medical records and the copy of standard procedures for Drs dealing with patients dealing with my condition.

Same with the 2 Drs I saw the day before, a Hispanic intern and an Asian resident attending. They quickly settled too. I went to St John’s after the mis diagnosis at UCLA because UCLA is a teaching hospital. Non teaching hospitals are better because all their Drs are fully certified and experienced not interns and residents learning their trade in your body.

She lives in a condo in Beverly Hills. Also went to law school somewhere along the way. Doubt she’s ever worked in the same hospital more than 3 years. She’s had a great facelift since I saw her last.

As of now, about 10,000 deaths from covid average age 78 the age when people die.

About 200,000 deaths of people average age 78 died from cancer diabetes cardio vascular COPD kidney liver and other diseases combined with covid. Or allegedly combined with covid.

At one time just politicians lied. Now ever the civil service, supposedly non political and involved only in their medical professional speciality are lying. Remember the AIDS HIV hysterical lies? It’s a heterosexual disease not just for promiscuous sodomites? A lie promulgated by the government health service.

Pretty soon the only government agency I’ll believe is streets sewers water and transportation. At least the subway maps and bus signs are still reliable.

Public Health Service is a mass of fraudulent lies and falsehoods. Bet they’ve totally covered up the carbon dioxide poisonings from wearing masks and breathing your own carbon dioxide.

I remember back in March. One of the kids had a zoom English class discussing 1984. I kept waiting for the teacher to compare the world of 1984 with covid hoax but he didn’t.

They don’t have Kleenex paper towels etc in your country Cesspool a Stan? It’s rude to sneeze around others. Step away, turn your head away use Kleenex.

“Protect us from information; use censorship, firing, fining, shaming, violence, whatever it takes. Thanks in advance.” Sickening. If we’re lucky and get through this, in 30 years Julia Jackson will be the new Nancy Pelosi, complete with fridge worth more than some Latin villages.

Optimism? Complacency? On the whole I commend, for mental health and calm objectivity, control of one’s emotions concerning things one can do nothing about.

New Age Stoicism.
You’re onto something here. Who was that Australian who made a lot of money with his ” Little Book of Calm” ? “Keep Calm and Be Stoical” sounds like a bestseller to me.

You have alluded to Steve Sailer’s “Most Important Graph in The World”, which is obviously best discussed when Mr Steve next brings it up ( as he does regularly ).

Louis Theroux. As a purveyor of freak shows, he obviously knows where to find the freaks. Female bodybuilders. Male Porn Stars. Jimmy Savile. Been there, Done that, smoked the cigar.

Commenters. Obviously, there are a small number of the downright ignorant. Not too many at UR, as you generally need a certain degree of political “awareness” ( AKA intelligence ) to be aware of the site. Then you’ve got the trolls, hasbara and otherwise. Some are plainly ridiculous, like tiny duck, whom I suspect has been fabricated by Mr Steve or a relative to boost comment traffic ( which tiny always does ). Not that I don’t find it amusing.
Then there are the MacMasters ( also called Grabers) as I call them. They take on a persona for whatever purpose and they run with it. There are quite a few of them at UR. The giveaway is usually when they stop spouting slogans and write cogently instead. Just recently, I had experience of this. A commenter was spouting doggerel all over the shop, then he replied to me, thanking me for a contribution. A full paragraph. Proper spelling, grammar and syntax. Big words.
For those interested:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Gay_Girl_In_Damascus
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-13760208
Finally, there is commenting under the influence ( CUI ), which still happens, but seems to be rarer than it was.

You’ve probably gone your whole life and never have had your head examined. What is needed for the political survival of the US experiment is an effort by the American people to take back their government, but there are so many anti-government crackpots such as yourself that this becomes increasingly difficult. A pandemic is one of the historical moments when the people need to trust their government to provide protection. You know what, Alden, I hope you get so fucking sick you can’t even crawl to the bathroom. I hope you suffer, you stupid son of a bitch.

Couldn’t help but jumping in on this poster. Perhaps he was intoxicated or high on crank, duce, or opioids. NO American with two or more connective synapses “trust their government to provide protection”. That statement is ridiculous on its face.

The United $tates of America Corporation is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Rothschild Crime Clan, the Rockefeller Crime Clan and the other highest finance owners of the “Federal” Reserve Bank, an institution which enjoys total control over America’s money-supply and thence over over the mass media of misinformation, the prostiticians in the Di$trict of Corruption, virtually every major corporation and almost all of this ruptured republic’s educational institutions.

As for the personal attacks on Alden, whom I consider to be a generally thoughtful and informed poster, Jaden goes faaaar beyond the pale with his beyond ad-hominem remarks.

Thanks for these. While I don’t find them quite as compelling as you do, they are at least honest and sincere contributions to the debate. All are probably worth reading if only to take personal responsibility for the issues.

Having said that, let me start with some general comments. Only your first cite involves an experimental procedure. The second uses a mathematical model that may well assume what it wants to prove. The third and fourth are basically medical op-eds that lay out an admittedly interesting argument with supporting references. That argument, if I may paraphrase it, is that we should all emulate Covid-19 ER doctors by exposing ourselves to active cases, perhaps by throwing Covid-19 parties, but using masks to limit our viral intake and (hopefully) induce asymptomatic cases but ongoing immunity. These papers use some correlations and ecologic arguments of a type that were vigorously disparaged when they were used in support of things like hydroxychloroquine (Just pointing out the double standard).

The experimental setup of your first study collected subject exhalations using a cone shaped collector that fitted loosely about the face (back to but excluding the ears). Subjects infected with influenza were asked to breathe into the cone while masked and unmasked. Their exhalations were filtered into two sizes for analysis: those greater than 5 µm and those less than 5 µm (microns). The collection efficiency of the device had been evaluated for mannequins breathing through a projecting mouth tube but not wearing a mask, which would direct considerable exhalation toward and past the ears. Nevertheless, the authors asserted, with perhaps some justification, that “The cone served as a capture type ventilation hood allowing collection of exhaled breath with minimal fugitive emissions even when the subject was wearing a mask with resultant redirection of flow.” The unstated justification would presumably be that the flow rate of the device was considerably greater than the respiratory volume. Nothing was said about mask fit.
https://journals.plos.org/plospathogens/article?id=10.1371/journal.ppat.1003205

A more pertinent criticism might relate to their choice of 5 microns as the dividing line between droplets and aerosols. IIRC, from air pollution literature, the number of particulates in the air increases more or less exponentially as their size goes down, while their ability to penetrate deep inside the lungs also increases as their size diminishes. So here are some of the conclusions of this study:

Fine particles contained 8.8 fold more viral copies than did coarse particles. Surgical masks reduced viral copy numbers in the fine fraction by 2.8 fold and in the coarse fraction by 25 fold. Overall, masks produced a 3.4 fold reduction in viral aerosol shedding.

earlier experiments suggested that intranasal [droplet] inoculation requires quantitatively larger doses and produces qualitatively milder illness than does inoculation via aerosol [12].

These results, combined with older data suggesting that the infectious dose via aerosol is about two orders of magnitude lower than via large droplets [12], suggest an important role for aerosols in seasonal influenza transmission.

So the choice of a 5 micron dividing line might be an interesting limitation of this study, especially since it is so much larger than the 0.14 micron size of the corona virus, which is also smaller than the influenza virus they were studying here.

The viral load determine the course of disease. The response function to virus is S-shaped not a step change.

I was almost ready to concede this. But then I found the following in the abstract of an article cited in one of yours:

Influenza A virus, PR8 strain, increases in amount in the infected mouse lung at a relatively constant rate. When more than 25 M.S.50 doses of virus is inoculated, the rate of multiplication appears to be independent of the amount of virus introduced; has a value of 1,100-fold increase per day. The rate of increase in the pulmonary lesions induced by infection of the mouse lung with PR8 also appears to be relatively constant and independent of the amount of virus inoculated; has a value of 8.5-fold increase per day.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14907966/

I’m guessing Jadan is a high schooler. Maybe a new handle for astuteobserver2.

Though I would agree that many Marxists hold beliefs which are essentially faith-based, most of them also happen to be atheists

So if I give you a hypothetical Marxist LBGQ, from the first clause of your sentence, one could conclude he is probably religious, but from the second he is probably irreligious. You have said almost nothing at all.

Apart from that many bolshevik Marxists followed the Talmud, which is often interpreted as saying its adherents are their own god. Is this a theistic belief or atheistic? But perhaps this is the point you were trying to make?

Finally I took your assertions to mean all atheists are Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyist. Are you disavowing that interpretation, which is logically different from “Marxists are atheists” dogma.

So your statement about a disconnect between moral sensibilities and acceptance of religious dogma is lacking in a probability of proof as per my own individual experience

All I meant was that while a small child usually picks up dogma and sensibilities together, when he ages and matures he can distinguish between the two and evaluate them separately. There are a lot more atheists in this world than psychopaths. I am willing to bet you are not one of the latter.

Perhaps there was some confusion between us about the role of atheism in those of the Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite faiths. Most of the above are, by definition, materialist believers and also atheistic in their overall belief pattern. To conflate that reality with all atheists being of the Marxist faith, is not something I would even pretend to begin to consider. Labeling Marxist atheism as a “dogma” is a bit disingenuous, especially from a poster as perspicacious as you. That is THEIR dogma, but certainly not my point of view, as I tend to be a syncretist, quite the opposite of a dogmatist.

In essence Marxism is a religion, albeit one that is by definition disputatious as to the possibility of there being any universal phenomenon which cannot be “scientifically” proven within the parameters of our five accepted physical senses. Higher dimensional reality cannot possibly be quantified. So my statement that Marxism is faith-based simply acknowledges that their faith is fully embedded in their held beliefs in dialectical materialism.

and Thanks.

Particle size is secondary when you count viral copies. If they produces particle size distribution all the way down to 10 nm but w/o counting viruses the study would be less useful.

” When more than 25 M.S.50 doses of virus is inoculated, the rate of multiplication appears to be independent of the amount of virus introduced”. – This os the property of the S-shape curve in the saturation region. It would be more interesting to have data on response to virus in the transitional region.

What you are afraid of or not is really irrelevant. Decisions are not to be made based on irrational fearcouldor irrational confidence.

You’re going to talk about rationality? The infinitesimal mortality rates for COVID-19 are public knowledge. I’m not afraid precisely because I am rational; you are afraid because you’re a hysteric.

Most importantly decisions should agree with moral rules. One should be guided by the Golden Rule which usually does not convince irrational and ignorant people.

No one has the moral authority to make me wear a face diaper for the rest of my life, to put me under house arrest, or to prevent me from engaging in work, educational, or leisure pursuits of my choice because of a virus that poses essentially no danger to me or to the vast majority of the population. If you belong to the demographic minority for whom this virus is somewhat dangerous, you’re free to wear a face diaper or become a recluse if you think your wearing a face diaper doesn’t afford enough protection. You bring up the Golden Rule, but the implication that the entire population must have their lives severely altered and curtailed because you are either at increased (but still low) risk or are simply a hysteric is a rather self-serving interpretation of it. That interpretation makes you both ignorant and irrational. You are rather like the character Chuck in Better Call Saul if Chuck tried to get all electronic devices banned in order to ease his imaginary affliction.

Excellent comment, agree with the lot.

The humanities aren’t worth spit as professions. They aren’t profession, but are hobbies.

Americans are stupid and are intent on degrading English. They call all occupations ‘professions’, which is absurd. All professions are occupations; only a very few occupations are professions. You, Roatan Bill, know which are which. The vast majority of Americans do not. France has L’Académie française. English needs our equivalent. The English language needs to be codified so that Americans who say “Could care less”, when they mean the opposite, can be sent to reeducation camps.

Excellent comment, I agree with the lot.

Especially

The infinitesimal mortality rates for COVID-19 are public knowledge. I’m not afraid precisely because I am rational; you are afraid because you’re a hysteric.

It is destruction by mobs on a streets or mobs in planes.

Mobs in planes do a lot more damage and killed a lot more people.

Nagasaki is one example of that.

https://www.catholicculture.org/culture/library/view.cfm?id=9388

On August 9, 1945, God’s inscrutable providence allowed an atomic bomb named “Fat Man” to be dropped from a B-29 into the heavily populated city of Nagasaki. The epicenter of the blast was the Urakami district, the heart and soul of Catholicism in Japan since the sixteenth century. My purpose in this article is to share an insight into God’s purpose in allowing this horrible event, a discovery made from reading (the recent Ignatius Press reprint of) Fr. Paul Glynn’s marvelous book A Song for Nagasaki. The book is subtitled, The Story of Takashi Nagai: Scientist, Convert, and Survivor of the Atomic Bomb.1

Wearing masks on such a large scale is completely abnormal. It breeds suspicion and fear. Increases compliance. It turns the masses into manageable objects.

Well of course. That’s not a bug, as they say, it’s a feature. And it works just fine. We had an election in New Zealand recently and the dumbest government ever in NZ with the dumbest Prime Minister by far was returned with a greatly increased share of the vote. This after the lives of hundreds of thousands of people will have* been destroyed by the mad “lockdowns”.

* Future tense because lots do not realise the destruction that has been wrought on them.

Apologies for the poor construction of this comment. I think that my meaning is clear enough.