I can prove or disprove nothing here – just passing along an odd event. Last July a friend sent me (and others) a link to this article by Sol Luckman called More Truth Pills to Cure the Germ Theory Blind Spot at the website Snooze 2 Awaken. It is a remarkable article and a good resource to have on hand. I was most impressed by this Facebook post repeated therein from Dr. Andy Kaufman:
Notice to all who are trying to debunk my assertion that viruses have not been proven to cause disease:
The burden of proof that viruses cause disease is on those who propose that theory. There is no burden of proof for me to defend my criticism of that theory. This is known as Hitchen’s Razor, which states, “What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.”
Thus, if you would like to debunk me then provide the proof that viruses, especially the current one, have been purified and isolated from only sick individuals and when inserted in a healthy host cause the same disease. (Please don’t send the papers I have already shown not to provide this proof in my presentation on Koch’s Postulates, found at: https://youtu.be/fvcEIarencM)
I was unaware of Hitcher’s Razor, but I loved that guy and miss his intelligence and acerbic wit. MM claimed at some point that he was probably, like Chomsky, a gatekeeper, but still, you can’t let gems of wisdom like that go unnoticed.
Indeed, all of us have noticed that those who are bought in to the Covid-19 scare are in a state of fear, and are in that state due to beliefs, not evidence. I had a dental appointment a while back, and as part of the routine here in Colorado, if not nationally, was the demand that I sign a long statement asserting the “facts” surrounding the disease, that it is infectious for fourteen days, flies through the air (with a cape?) as part of our oral discharges as we breathe, cough and sneeze, and has symptoms that could be anything and everything, including a mild fever. I signed under protest and complained to the dentist that I should not be forced to publicly agree to statements that are false or misleading. That is fascism.
Maybe you think I am overreacting, but remember that in Orwell’s 1984 people were required to publicly believe that 2+2=5. That’s false, and people knew it was false, but it could not be disputed in public. That’s fascism.
I was at Costco a couple of days ago, and noticed they were setting up food carts and preparing to give out samples again. Hallelujah! Only later did I notice a sign on each stand that said we were only allowed to take the sample with us to eat outside the store. On what basis? Like 14 days, like face masks and six feet, on no basis. They make this shit up. All of it is done to convince the public that there is a dangerous virus and that people in white lab coats know what the fuck they are doing. Pardon my bluntness, but I am sick of these creeps and their autocratic scientific nonsense. It’s behavioral conditioning, nothing more. Some other game is afoot. There is no virus, never was, not even during cold and flu season, which ended months ago.
I ramble. My original question here was why was the Luckman article in my SPAM basket? There is nothing offensive in it, say, for instance, like my language above. Luckman is not a pirate. I wondered, maybe creeping paranoia, if McAfee has a list of forbidden topics, disputation of Covid-19 among them. Of course, that’s easily set aside, as so much has gotten through to me, but still, this item is an anomaly, and it made me wonder about “virus” protection in general. I don’t use McAfee, but it came with this new computer so I let it ride. I have used a free antivirus program (Norton) offered by Centurylink, and now realize that I have had blind faith in Norton and McAfee and all the others. I have overseen their scans on computers and checked out the results, and never seen anything dangerous destroyed. Just little bugs and trackers. The real invasion in our computer, the real virus, is Microsoft, who cares as much for our privacy as Bill Gates does for African children.
Mr. Paranoia Central here has often wondered if companies like Norton and McAfee create the viruses they protect us from. It would be a nice business model.
Which reminds me – all PCs come with a program called One Drive. As a computer klutz I knew nothing about it but got an email from Microsoft telling me I was out of storage there and needed to pay them money to buy more. I didn’t know how to remove it (novice) and so called them to find that out. The person on the other end wanted to know why I was removing it and I said that I did not want Microsoft spying on me. She said that Microsoft would never violate my privacy. They would never let anyone see my data. I said you just backed up my data on your computers without my permission. You just violated my privacy.
Anyway, I got rid of One Drive, and have a neat little hard drive sitting below that I use to store stuff I don’t want to lose in a crash. As if I am protected from Microsoft. As if.
My computer was once taken over by advertisements appearing at the bottom and interfering with everything. Whatever virus program I was using could do nothing to stop it, could not even detect it. It was rather infuriating that people would arbitrarily use my computer as their platform. What to do? In the end, I purchased a program called Malwarebytes, and installed it. It did a scan, and the problem disappeared.* Based on that evidence, I continue to use Malwarebytes, not McAfee or Norton. Windows Defender is on my computer and is looked down upon by Norton and McAfee, but in my view it is as useless as the others, and may well be blocking my access to useful websites and spamming important emails, as with Luckman above.
It is, after all, Microsoft. That company signals its virtue about our privacy while invading it at will.
*Did Malwarebytes create the invading program? Anything is possible.
Piece of Mindful 
It’s been over 100 years and counting since Science has been real. I start counting from the day in 1915 when Ph.D. Physicist Goddard said he flew a gas propelled rocket in a vacuum, a claim that has never been experimentally confirmed or published in a paper. There is no exhibit at the Smithsonian (his original backers) where you can witness in person the wonder of gas in a vacuum powering a rocket. The only proof given is in TV, Movies, the Internet and an unrelated formula involving neither gas nor a vacuum. I’m surprised Science got as far as it did given that human intelligence is essentially a parlor trick, sleight of hand. Nobody is born knowing anything. Everything is taught to us and everything we learn must be believed before it is understood. While the propensity to readily absorb indoctrination might be a genetic trait the specific “facts” a person is inculcated with are not passed down in the genes. You say that 2+2=4 is a fact but numbers themselves are a creation of man and do not exist in nature. Something various eminent mathematicians such as Hilbert and Kronecker agree with. The question is not “is it fake” (cornavirus, nuclear weapons, space race, serial killers, etc…) but who faked it and for what purpose?
On a side note, Computer Science was once the domain of outsiders, hippies, freaks and counter culture but has since the 80’s been absorbed by the corporate borg in my opinion not so much to gain it’s benefits but to stop its progress and prevent the spread of the freedom of ideas and the ability to create it used to provide. Nowadays Computer Science is about money not freedom. And John MacAfee went insane like most people who make a lot of money.
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I could have said that 2+2=4 is a human construct and that 2+2=5 violates that construct … wasn’t there a part of the book at the end where Winston, after torture, talks about how 2+2=5 really is true. I’d have to read it again.
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Mcafee worked at Nasa, promotes bitcoin, seems like he’s a spook. Not sure if he really created his famous software package or if he’s just a front person. However back in the day if you had a problem with Mcafee antivirus and called the phone # on the box, supposedly John was the one who answered the phone! I talked to him a few times in person and found him pleasant to talk to, wasn’t rushed.
He may have used drugs and been a drunky in the past, and he still drinks, but I know he acts crazy on purpose to get his name in the media spotlight as he does charge big money for appearances and speeches, which are very professional.
Even his “eat my own weiner” statement was out there yet it puts him the news to this day.
I read the MM article, Comorbities seem to be the real problem. Trump retweets about the actual death numbers from COVID were deleted.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm#Comorbidities
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oops, I wanted to add, Trump’s retweets were deleted but he made a post about Covid being a scam and only 11,000 actually died. Coming from the President of the USA, That is huge news!
Tweet can be seen here and the replies are just as intersting:
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Trump is a reality TV star, like all presidents. His grumblings about Covid being a scam are part of the propaganda script. It accomplishes many things. 1) It politicizes the issue, creating a false dichotomy of left/right, Dem/Repub, Trumper/anti-Trumper, making it virtually impossible to have an intelligent conversation about it with either side. 2) People who hate Trump (the majority of the country?) will be all the more convinced that Covid is real, because they’ve been programmed to believe he’s crazy and everything he says is nuts. 3) Trump’s followers will do what they think he is doing: Grumble about it privately, but go along with it publicly. In other words, they will obey.
Controlled opposition is as old as the hills, but it’s certainly novel to have the man playing the role of President ALSO play the role of a controlled opposition leader.
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(Well, actually it’s not. The lunatic despot is an old trope used in many other countries throughout history. Americans are used to thinking our presidents are dumb, crooked, well-meaning-but-ineffectual… But batshit crazy is new to us.
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After the 2016 election I wrote a program to scrape data from the Board of Elections (the official source of Presidential votes nationwide) pages of every U.S. State (I found 48/50 online) and compared the voting results to the most recent U.S. census demographics and registered voters. Almost all states were reporting pure fantasy, ludicrous even. In Nevada 90% of registered voters voted. In Florida, 85%. In Texas more people voted for Trump than the total number of white registered voters, etc… This information is readily and publicly available yet nobody ever looked at it, organized it, analyzed it. They just complained online. While almost every college graduate in America owns a computer with a spreadsheet and Internet connection none of them actually use them to verify the information presented to them. Just like for 100+ years nobody has tried to recreate Goddard flying a rocket in a vacuum in his basement. This highlights for me both the complete and utter fakery in American (world) politics and the complete and utter lack of the educational system to produce actual thinkers (including the so-called smart people subject like Computer Science, which should be renamed corporate robot training )
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Great insight! I have a computer and Excel but have never undertaken such a task. I have said on occasion that if votes were really counted, perhaps Utah and Alaska would have actually gone to Trump, the rest to the Wicked Witch.
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Texas 2016 Presidential voting is case in point for the utter fantasy of American Politics. Texas registered voters are 45% white, about 70% of them Republican which mean Trump had an expectation of 30% of the vote. So why did he win the state and why is the governor always Republican? Because just saying the state is “red” on TV (CNN, Fox, PBS, etc…) is enough to make it so. Texas is basically an American Rhodesia where the 5% rule the 95%.
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Yesterday I made a rare appearance in a neighborhood chain sandwich shop and the kid in line in front of me was wearing a face mask with the NASA logo on it. I still don’t know if that was intended irony for comic effect…
The only logo on my face was the one The Logos put there. If I start sporting one I guess I will find one with the Tooth Fairy embroidered…
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“On a side note, Computer Science was once the domain of outsiders, hippies, freaks and counter culture but has since the 80’s been absorbed by the corporate borg”
I read somewhere that computers were invented by the military, and marketed to hippies in Mother Earth News magazine so intel could keep an eye on the outsiders.
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I’m talking about academic Computer Science, which was almost universally correlated with Mountain Club membership on college campuses in the 70’s along with the early adopters of D&D, the wearing of capes and making of homemade beer, etc… Computers were a way out of the rat race a chance to build your own community, future. The Electrical Engineers and Physicists all went to work for the government but not the CSI crew. The government’s computers were for performing calculations not inventing the future or using your imagination. Of course Microsoft, Apple, Google, IBM are the government so it’s all moot now.
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Most of what we argue with “proofs” is automatically false because it is isolated from the unknowable whole of existence. Fractals. We name things that aren’t things at all. All these names and numbers and man-made symbols do not amount to squat, IMO. What exists in nature is never totally knowable in the who, what, where, why, when sense of our extremely limited scope of “scientific” inquiry. Why trouble ourselves with proofs when almost no one is seeing — or even concerned one tiny bit about — the whole for what it is in its perfection and amazing grace? What’s in a name except endless folly and false trails leading to another cul-de-sac.
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I realized a while back (and it is now a certainty) that computer viruses are a racket created by Microsoft and/or other big computer and software makers.
Maybe fifteen years ago or so, there was a national TV commercial for an antivirus program. (Do anti-virus manufacturers still advertise on TV? I don’t watch it enough to know.) The commercial showed a young man and woman in their early 20s, dressed in nondescript casual clothes, sitting at computers next to each other in what appeared to be a nondescript apartment, talking about the confidential documents of a major corporation they’d just hacked into. They were discussing how unfair it was that certain executives had such higher salaries than other employees. Then, just for the hell of it, they sent the document to all the employees in the company. The point being that antivirus software would put a stop to random evildoers like these two kids.
I remember thinking at the time, Do bored twenty year old computer nerds really do that? And if so, does it happen so frequently that all business owners need to protect themselves from it?
When I have gotten a computer virus, I haven’t had my identity stolen or my bank accounts drained. The virus did nothing but fuck up my computer and force me to get it fixed and install antivirus software. I can think of no one who has a motive to infect my computer with viruses that do nothing but ruin my computer except for companies that want to sell me new computers and new antivirus software.
It’s an obvious racket. The notion of “hackers” who spread viruses because they are evil is as fictitious as Muslim cave-dwelling terrorists who blow up skyscrapers because they are evil, or an air-borne virus that attacks people who don’t wear masks because it is evil. Why did it take me so long to realize it?
The whole thing certainly adds irony to the fiction that Bill Gates is slaving away to find the cure for Covid.
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Maybe someone can help here, a tech question – WordPress does not allow photos in comments. However, at one time I knew about a site that allowed for uploading of photos, which could then be linked. Can anyone help?
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Maybe a site like flickr.com?
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I know people on Reddit use Imgur – imgur.com
Seems to work well
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