I urge all followers who have read my criticisms of PCR mass testing in U.K. to carefully read Mr Fordham’s carefully worded letter. Note that the innovation minister in the Lords, Lord Bethel, already admitted that the PCR system doesn’t have the equivalent of an MOT. https://t.co/zXzeDMKCBb

@DesmondSwayne Sir Desmond is right. SAGE makes mathematical predictions based on flawed models.
I chose to stick my neck out almost 4mo ago here:
https://t.co/b0rT5Lq9HI
I experienced much anxiety doing this, aware that, if I was badly wrong here, I would be destroyed as a contributor.

That said, I thought the immunology so clear that I made three, specific & testable predictions which should apply if I was right.
Please examine them, on the right, under the pie chart:

In particular, I predicted that the epidemic would not reignite in London. Obviously, we have many “cases” but I urge people to disregard these & instead to look at excess deaths, on the principle that a severe (occasionally lethal) respiratory virus would show itself this way.

Here is a chart showing the trend of deaths in London alone over recent years. A prominent peak of deaths is evident as the virus swept through in spring. Also visible the August heatwave. But there are no excess deaths now.
I submit this is a striking example of herd immunity.

I’m still waiting for SAGE or indeed anyone to provide an alternative explanation for the sharp nature of the spring excess deaths peak which doesn’t involve herd immunity or otherwise removing from the pool those vulnerable to lethal outcomes (same result). Given this sharp...

Postcard From Luxembourg: normality is restored prior to vaccination.
I’ve repeatedly said that “test, test, test” is madness, if the tests are unregulated. Why?
‘Because pandemic’, NO PCR mass testing has a declared operational false positive rate.

So we don’t know the oFPR of PCR mass testing in U.K. This is conducted in a small number of private labs, set up at pace in summer, anticipating a ‘2nd wave’ (itself a dubious prediction from the Imperial team who’ve been wrong every time before). You’d assume these “Lighthouse

...Labs are surely regulated, inspected, accredited etc. They’re doing the most impactful medical diagnostic testing which has ever happened in history. But no. None of these are true. ‘Because pandemic’. Now, I don’t know the oFPR either. But we’re paying for it. It is NOT ZERO.

However, the authorities take every positive result as a “confirmed case” (though there’s nothing confirmed). There is no open protocol you can examine & debate. None of the results are available for understanding, thinking & interpretation. Wouldn’t it be important to learn...

...how the distribution of cycle threshold for positives varies through a run of tens of thousands of samples? Or through time? Or across geography? There is no routine evaluation of the characteristics of the test, even though we know the oFPR of complex systems is subject to...

https://t.co/xvP6tVlIaE
Quite a surprise. Ferguson isn’t qualified to comment on such things. He lacks understanding of basic biological concepts, partly explaining why his predictions are often so extreme.

That said, I’ll take him as an ally. It’s clear we’re already at herd immunity. How can I be sure? London had a huge peak of excess deaths in spring. The timing of peak deaths showed clearly that the pandemic was self-limiting. Recall much debate about whether the interval...

...between lockdown & peak deaths was long enough for lockdown to have been the cause of reducing deaths? The answer was “no”. But it was close & I can understand people thinking “well, it’s close, so perhaps it was lockdown that did it?”, thereby establishing a foundational...

...myth favoured by those who genuinely believe lockdown saves lives (it clearly doesn’t).
I’ll get to London & here immunity. But those wavering about the evidence about lockdown in spring really will benefit from cogitating on this graph.

In blue are the 30 trusts with the earliest date of peak deaths in spring. In red, the 30 with the latest peak deaths. For me, this is proof that national lockdown, which began Mar 23, played no role whatsoever in turning the pandemic. You’ll see some areas had peak daily...

In a number of Sunday papers:
Scientific advisers said it was “hard to see” when the restrictions would end as new variants continued to emerge, delivering a potentially devastating blow to the travel industry. The prime minister said that after progress with vaccinations...

...”what we don’t want to see is all that work undone by the arrival of a new variant that is vaccine-busting”.
The idea is planted in people’s mind that this virus is mutating in such a way as to evade prior immunity. This is completely unfounded, certainly as regards immunity..

...gained naturally, after repelling the virus (which well around 99.9% of the population do, fewer, obviously in the very elderly & already ill, more in those younger & well). It’s important to appreciate that upon infection, the human immune system cuts up an infectious...

...agent into short pieces. Each of these short pieces of protein are presented to other cells in the immune system, like an identity parade. Our cells have a truly astonishing range of abilities to recognise different protein structures, and there will be some which recognise...

...each of the pieces of the invader. The cells which recognise a piece are instructed to multiply selectively so that, after a few days to a couple of weeks, our bodies contain large numbers of virus piece specific cells. These have a range of functions. Some make antibodies...

@scottorandojin What if the false diagnosis rate was 90%?
Don’t misunderstand me. I’m a thorough believer in the existence of this virus.

To exemplify: the NHS is under severe winter pressure. Many staff are unavailable, largely due to forced isolation from testing. Also, I’m told the adaptations to the conditions make normal work almost impossible. Trying to keep apart patients in different categories must be...

...incredibly stressful. I doubt I could ever have coped. Add to this the real stream of sick people & it’s a complete nightmare. My sympathies won’t be accepted but I offer them anyway. As to “the deaths”, do you mean the reported count of “covid19 deaths”? Everyone is doing...

...their very best. But as to that count: it’s nothing to do with clinical judgement. A covid19 death is a death from any cause within 28d of a positive test. So once a person is labelled by a positive test, if they then die, they’re a covid19 death. Back to my substantive...

...question: how reliable is that labelling? It’s not a clinical diagnosis. We’re not used to this idea. Never before in medical history has someone had a disease (let alone cause of death) been defined by the result of a single year alone. Yet that’s where we are. I think that..

Oh are we talking about Sheryl Sandberg again? Well, your reminder that disabled feminists, LGBQT feminists, and feminists of color criticised her ‘lean in’ deal from day one. Don’t let anyone retcon that out of existence.

Like, a pretty narrow slice of feminists actually endorse and support corporate feminism, they’re just white, nondisabled, straight, cis, and noisy so their voices have a bigger reach.

So if your impression is that ‘feminism’ gave her a ‘free pass’ maybe you should question your overall impression of feminism rather than continuing to centre a handful of people as ‘thought leaders’ or whatever.

Critics within feminism have been doing this work for a long time and have been getting shat on it for about as long and I'm tired of seeing them erased. But what do I know — I am, after all, not a feminist.

But I WILL say, from my not-a-feminist perspective, that people who aren’t feminists who are criticising feminism should maybe understand the movement more deeply beyond a handful of high profile celebrity feminists.

1/People I know on the Right tend to be obsessed with the idea of "crimethink", taboos, and the (supposedly) oppressive, omnipresent enforcement of liberal cultural norms.

Why?

My new theory: A lot of it is guilt.

2/It's true that in some circles - the media, universities, many big corporations - liberal norms *are* enforced to some degree, and the enforcement has probably gotten stronger in recent years.

But I don't think this explains all of the Right's obsession.

3/The stereotype is that people on the Right tend to be more threat-sensitive. That would help explain the perception that liberal norm-enforcers are lurking everywhere, ready to pounce and anathematize anyone who makes a misstep.

But I don't think that's all of it either.

4/And of course, it's always fun - whether you're on the Right or the Left, or playing a video game, or whatever - to style yourself as the brave iconoclastic rebel fighting against the oppressive forces of blah blah blah.

But I don't think this is all of it, either.

5/The reason I think it's more than these things is that even *in private*, people on the Right express their "crimethink" ideas very gingerly and hesitantly.

I get the sense that they're not just afraid of external censure, but have also internalized liberal norms.

1. Most people are aware of the fail doxes posted by Jamilla Moor on @Snakeeater36 and myself. I'm going to go into the details (in layman terms) of exactly how a specific group of duhnonymous idiots came up with these fail doxes & I'll prove that they're wrong.

2. @Snakeeater36 posted this screenshot on his TL. He had exposed the page source code on tweet which included an image. Anyone can do this in Chrome by opening a tweet, clicking on the image, then right click on any open space on the screen, select "inspect", then "network".

3. In fact I did the same by pulling up a different tweet and image. You'll see the IP highlighted in yellow and the region Dallas TX. It's not my IP. It belongs to Akamai which is identified. Why is that important.......

4. Well Akamai is a Content Delivery Network also known as a CDN. A CDN, is a geographically distributed network of proxy servers (make note of the term "proxy" servers) and their data centers. More later on why this is important relative to the fail doxes.

5. CDNs allow companies like Twitter to provide better performance in uploading content, like images, by distributing the service spatially relative to end users. Rather than pushing content directly (left), Twitter uses CDN networks (right) to push/pull images from end users.

at some point we have to recognise that the financial anxiety young people are living through is not normal. monetising all your hobbies is not normal. hustle culture is not normal. glorifying precarious work is not normal. self-optimisation is not normal.

all these issues have a single root and guess what? it's the economic system we live under!! but we're too fucking exhausted to even see an alternative to capitalism because we're so broken and fatigued by it. it doesn't have to be this way, we can seek a different future.

As Mark Fisher argued, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is the end of capitalism. We've been utterly brainwashed by every part of our society to think that everything we're experiencing right now is extremely normal! But clearly, capitalism is failing us.

How about instead of “manifesting” money on TikTok, we work towards building a more equal society? Just a thought.

Incredible! People in the replies to this are like “people who hustle will be relaxing when they get wealthy”. That’s IF and not when and still, that’s not a given. The fact we don’t see having a regular full-time job as enough “hustling” or whatever is so scary to me.

Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.

Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.

Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.

Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.