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Best of the Web: What if the largest experiment on human beings in history is a failure?

The Garden of Earthly Delights Hieronymous Bosch hell
The Garden of Earthly Delights, Hieronymous Bosch
A seasoned stock analyst colleague texted me a link today, and when I clicked it open, I could hardly believe what I was reading. What a headline. "Indiana life insurance CEO says deaths are up 40% among people ages 18-64". This headline is a nuclear truth bomb masquerading as an insurance agent's dry manila envelope full of actuarial tables.

People frequently write to Jill and myself. People we have never met. They call, they arrive at the farm by appointment or unannounced, they fill our email in boxes with their inquiries. They all want something; time, attention, an interview. Many want to tell us about their fear, illness, nightmares, or (what often seems like) outright paranoid conspiracies. And then, over time, these fears and "conspiracies" keep getting confirmed. As Jan Jekielek (a senior editor with The Epoch Times) recently said to me, it is getting harder and harder to tell which ones are mere conspiracy theories and which are true reality.

Comment: Anti-Empire puts some visuals to the horror:
OneAmerica is a $100 billion insurance company that has had its headquarters in Indianapolis since 1877. The company has approximately 2,400 employees and sells life insurance, including group life insurance to employers in the state.

Davison said the increase in deaths represents "huge, huge numbers," and that's it's not elderly people who are dying, but "primarily working-age people 18 to 64" who are the employees of companies that have group life insurance plans through OneAmerica.

"And what we saw just in third quarter, we're seeing it continue into fourth quarter, is that death rates are up 40% over what they were pre-pandemic," he said.

"Just to give you an idea of how bad that is, a three-sigma or a one-in-200-year catastrophe would be 10% increase over pre-pandemic," he said. "So 40% is just unheard of."
excess mortality all causes
© OneAmerica Insurance
mortality z-score age group
© OneAmerica Insurance
He said at the same time, the company is seeing an "uptick" in disability claims, saying at first it was short-term disability claims, and now the increase is in long-term disability claims.

"For OneAmerica, we expect the costs of this are going to be well over $100 million, and this is our smallest business. So it's having a huge impact on that," he said.

At the same news conference where Davison spoke, Brian Tabor, the president of the Indiana Hospital Association, said that hospitals across the state are being flooded with patients "with many different conditions," saying "unfortunately, the average Hoosiers' health has declined during the pandemic."

In a follow-up call, he said he did not have a breakdown showing why so many people in the state are being hospitalized - for what conditions or ailments. But he said the extraordinarily high death rate quoted by Davison matched what hospitals in the state are seeing.

"What it confirmed for me is it bore out what we're seeing on the front end,..." he said.

The number of hospitalizations in the state is now higher than before the COVID-19 vaccine was introduced a year ago, and in fact is higher than it's been in the past five years, Dr. Lindsay Weaver, Indiana's chief medical officer, said at a news conference with Gov. Eric Holcomb on Wednesday.

Just 8.9% of ICU beds are available at hospitals in the state, a low for the year, and lower than at any time during the pandemic. But the majority of ICU beds are not taken up by COVID-19 patients - just 37% are, while 54% of the ICU beds are being occupied by people with other illnesses or conditions.



Attention

Best of the Web: What is "mass formation psychosis?"

As of 1:46 p.m. EST on Saturday, a relatively new term of art, "Mass Formation Psychosis," trended in second place on Twitter, a position it continued to hold for more than 90 minutes as of this writing.
twitter trend mass formation psychosis
The phrase came to prominence in some circles in recent months after Belgian psychologist and statistician Dr. Mattias Desmet proffered a theory for what he sees as a global behavioral phenomenon stemming from the coronavirus pandemic declared in March 2020.

In Desmet's words:
Four things need to exist or need to be in place if you want a large scale mass phenomenon to emerge. The first thing is that there needs to be a lot of socially isolated people, people who experience a lack of social bonds. The second one is that there needs to be a lot of people who experience a lack of sense-making in life. And the third and the fourth conditions are that there needs to be a lot of free-floating anxiety and a lot of free-floating psychological discontent. So: meaning, anxiety, and discontent that is not connected to a specific representation. So it needs to be in the mind without the people being able to connect it to something. If you have these four things — lack of social bonds, lack of sense-making, free-floating anxiety, and free-floating psychological discontent — then society is highly at risk for the emergence of mass phenomenon.

Comment: This phenomenon of manipulated social hysteria, has been described previously by Andrew Lobaczewski, in his landmark book, Political Ponerology.See also:


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: How The Vanguard Group is building an empire

The vanguard group logo sign
© Bloomberg
Along with BlackRock and State Street, Vanguard is considered one of the "Big Three" index fund managers that dominate corporate America, and ultimately the world. "If historical trends continue, a handful of giant institutional investors will one day hold voting control of virtually every large U.S. corporation," said Jack Bogle in November 2018.

Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal shortly before his death in January 2019 in which he warned:
"Most observers expect that the share of corporate ownership by index funds will continue to grow over the next decade. It seems only a matter of time until index mutual funds cross the 50% mark. If that were to happen, the "Big Three" might own 30% or more of the U.S. stock market — effective control. I do not believe that such concentration would serve the national interest."
By November 2020, the "Big Three" managed US$15 trillion in combined assets, equivalent to more than three-quarters the size of the US economy and combined, they were the largest owner in 88% of the S&P 500 companies. By January 2021, the "Big Three" had almost US$18 trillion in assets under management.

Being the largest owner of a publicly traded company doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want, but it does give you enormous power.

Comment:


Bomb

Best of the Web: Coercing consumers into making 'green energy choices', the British government risks blowing itself up

energy crisis uk
Yup
Blackouts bring down governments. The Conservative administration of Ted Heath paid such a price at the ballot box in 1974 when it had failed to keep the lights on, having mishandled (to put it mildly) the coal industry. Now gas, rather than coal, is the dominant fuel in heating our homes. While a shortage of the stuff is not so critical as to lead to people freezing through lack of available energy, the effect on domestic bills could have a similar effect, at least among the poorest.

The soaring open-market price for gas combined with a consumer price cap imposed by Theresa May's administration (as pledged in her 2017 election manifesto) has caused the collapse of numerous suppliers. If the entire industry is not to be rendered bankrupt, the cap will have to be lifted to a level that would at least double the average household's gas bill.

That is a recipe for mass discontent. But, extraordinarily, it represents success in terms of the government's energy strategy. While natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels, it is still a hydrocarbon and therefore set for gradual elimination under the government's "world-leading" commitment to reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.

Comment: The full extent of their hubris is gauged when you realize they're intentionally destroying the economy, something they're betting that we plebs won't survive but which they will.


Snowflake Cold

Best of the Web: Tahoe sets new December snowfall record with nearly 18 feet of powder - the most in 142 years

Deep snow from recent storms have partially buried the Donner Lake West End neighborhood just west of Truckee, as seen on Dec. 30, 2021.
Deep snow from recent storms have partially buried the Donner Lake West End neighborhood just west of Truckee, as seen on Dec. 30, 2021.
This story has been updated to correct the snow lab's elevation.

Almost 18 feet of snow fell in North Tahoe during December, more than any other December in the past 142 years.

Located at Donner Pass, U.C. Berkeley's Central Sierra Snow Lab reported a whopping 214 inches of snow through the month.

On Dec. 27, the lab recorded 193.7 inches of snow, breaking the previous record of 179 inches set in 1970. An additional 20-plus inches fell between Dec. 27 and 31, cementing 2021 in the history books for the snowiest December on record.


Bad Guys

Flashback Best of the Web: Former top level Facebook executive claims "150 men rule the world" & everyone else is a 'puppet'

washington puppet strings
Here's the thing, there's about 150 people that rule the world. Anyone that wants to go into politics they're all f*cken puppets, okay? There are 150 — and they're all men — that run the world. Period. Fullstop. They control most of the important assets — they control the money flows. And these are not the tech entrepreneurs. Now, they are going to get rolled over, over the next 5-10 years by the people that are really underneath pulling the strings.

— Chamath Palihapitiya, Nov 10, 2017, Stanford Graduate School of Business
Some of you may remember Chamath Palihapitiya from his warning that social media was "ripping apart the social fabric of how society works," which received generous attention in the media and went viral as a result. What most people completely missed, and what no single major media outlet reported — at least to the best of my knowledge — was when he explained that "150 men rule the world" and they are "going to roll over" the tech entrepreneurs in the coming years.

Comment: See also:


Stock Down

Best of the Web: As three more studies show NEGATIVE vaccine effectiveness, when will health authorities face up to what the data is telling us?

vaccine efficacy graph covid
The last two weeks have brought three new studies finding negative efficacy for two vaccine doses, meaning the vaccinated are more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated. These are study findings, not raw data, so have been adjusted for various biases and confounders, making it harder to dismiss them as anomalous or skewed.

The first is a pre-print study from Denmark, published on December 23rd, which looked at nearly all PCR-positive SARS-CoV-2 infections in Denmark from November 20th to December 12th and investigated them to see if they were likely to be the Omicron variant.

By comparing the vaccination status of those infected, the researchers found a vaccine effectiveness against the Omicron variant of minus-76.5% for Pfizer and minus-39.3% for Moderna three months after double vaccination (see chart above), meaning the double-vaccinated were considerably more likely to be infected than the unvaccinated.

They found the vaccine effectiveness against Omicron was significantly lower than against Delta, with Pfizer vaccine effectiveness at 53.8% and Moderna at 65% against Delta after three months. They reported that a third dose of Pfizer got vaccine effectiveness against Omicron back up to 54.6%, at least for a month. The full results are in the table below:

Attention

Best of the Web: Top footballers REJECT Covid jabs amidst spike in players collapsing on the pitch suffering 'mysterious' heart problems

footballer collapse pitch covid vaccine
News reports of footballers that collapsed on the pitch since the beginning of the vaccination campaign.
Premier League players are reportedly concerned that recent on-field heart problems are a possible consequence of taking the Covid-19 vaccine.

There have been a number of recent high-profile incidents involving players enduring heart problems on the field - including Christian Eriksen who collapsed due to a cardiac arrest at the European Championships and Sergio Aguero who was forced into retirement after he was diagnosed with heart arrhythmia.

The worrying spate of heart-related episodes in football has raised concerns over links with Covid and the vaccination programme to prevent it.

Comment: Check out the alarming reports of sportsmen below to get an idea of just how many incidents have been documented - bearing in mind that it doesn't even list every single incident.

See also: RNA Vaccines, Obedience and Eugenics

And check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Pandemia Today, Pandemia Tomorrow, But Not Forever


The list:



Snowflake Cold

Best of the Web: Western US states hit by record freeze and record-breaking snowfall

snow
Severe weather brings record low temperatures in Seattle and huge snowfalls in California and Nevada

Severe weather sweeping parts of the US continues to bring record-breaking cold temperatures to the Pacific north-west and heavy snow to mountains in northern California and Nevada.

Emergency warming shelters were opened throughout Oregon and western Washington as temperatures plunged into the teens (below zero in centigrade) and forecasters said an Arctic blast would last for several days.

Sunday's snow showers blew into the Pacific north-west from the Gulf of Alaska, dumping up to six in (15 cm) across the Seattle area.

The National Weather Service said Seattle's low on Sunday was -6.7C (20F), breaking a mark set in 1948. Bellingham was -12.8C, which was three degrees colder than the previous record set in 1971.


Bad Guys

Best of the Web: CDC changes 'The Science' of Covid quarantine from 10 to 5 days after critically low staff numbers threaten industries

woman desk mask
The CDC shortened its COVID-19 isolation recommendation to 5 days for asymptomatic people after some disease experts said 10 days was too long
The CDC shortened its COVID-19 isolation recommendation to 5 days for asymptomatic people after some disease experts said 10 days was too long The CDC's 10-day isolation period was excessive, experts say. The agency also reduced quarantine guidance for people exposed to COVID-19.

It was a steadfast rule for most of the pandemic: People with COVID-19 must isolate for 10 days after their symptoms start — or, if they're asymptomatic, for 10 days after their first positive COVID-19 test.


Comment: This just proves how these recommendations never were based on any real science, because once politicians realise that certain critical industries will collapse, and, more importantly, that they will be liable for the fall out, 'the science' suddenly changes.


But the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention altered that recommendation on Monday amid a steep rise in Omicron cases across the US.


Comment: Unless these tests are checking for the particular variant, we don't know whether what people have caught is Omicron or not. Considering how unreliable the tests are, we can't even be sure these 'case' numbers are accurate.


Comment: Actually, South Africa has provided ample and reliable data about Omicron, we know that it's even milder than the other variants, and because of this the country has dropped the majority of its restrictions: Sigh of relief in South Africa as Omicron variant appears to be 'super mild' mutation with Covid death rate not jumping

The Wall Street Journal reports that part of the reason for this quarantine requirement shift is because certain industries have been suffering critically low staffing numbers. As just one example, just on Christmas Eve in the US, more than 800 flights were cancelled due to staff absence, with airlines claiming that lengthy quaratine periods being partly to blame. Note that if hospitals were to suffer a similar reduction of staff, the consequences would be deadly.

Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: Pandemia Today, Pandemia Tomorrow, But Not Forever