Potpourri

It's been a while since I've done a main post here, and so... it's a (long) grab bag!

As the name suggests, this will be a bit of a grab bag of topics. New format, so let me know if this appeals and I’ll try to toss these out a bit more often!

It rhymes with “ax scene”

As everyone knows, I’ve been on the vaccine trail for almost two years now. Things didn’t smell right early on, and it was around July of 2021 where the picture was becoming clearer.

The latest news, just hitting today, is the tragic-but-fortunately-survived “severe cardiac arrest” of 18-year-old super athlete Bronny James, son of LeBron James.

Look, I’m the first one to say that anecdotes != data. But sadly, the data on this sort of thing is pretty sparse, not reliably collected, and has recently become highly political and propagandized.

But at the end of the day, there’s some pretty simple facts: starting April of 2021, we’ve seen substantial excess deaths from cancer, cardiac, and cereberovascular causes, all in substantially younger populations than were impacted by Covid in 2020.

We know that, still, “natural deaths” in people 24 or younger have stayed persistently high since April of 2021:

Relatedly, the uptake for the “bivalent booster” was only about 17% in the U.S. because, quite simply, everyone with an ounce of common sense knows these things are poison at this point. And if you don’t, that’s on you.

End of the day, I’m of course glad Bronny is okay and not joining the other kids and young adults dying of these mysterious “natural causes”. Was his case due to the vaccine? Admittedly we can’t say for sure. But don’t trust anyone who dismisses such concerns.

Until someone provides a cogent analysis and explanation of non-vaccine drivers of cancer, heart, and cerebrovascular deaths, our unprecedented medical experiment has to be the top suspect. Anything else is sophistry.

Presidential Ambitions

I hesitate to wade too much into pure political punditry here, but it is worth saying a few things:

• Democrats want Trump to be the nominee. They (correctly) believe they can beat him by demonizing him to galvanize his supporters around him and make him unpalatable to independents. The indictments of him are a sickening display of this. They are playing a very dangerous game.

• As I said before: I don’t want Trump to be the nominee. He had his chance and he plays into the hands of Democrats so well, he might as well be working for them after spending 31 years as a registered Democrat.

• Along those lines, be sure to share this helpful graphic with any Trump supporters you know:

  

• On DeSantis - I like him, but he seems to be missing his chance to be authentic. He seems scripted, like a new and improved version of Mitt Romney. I think he’ll be great on policy and making meaningful shifts, but he isn’t the voice of the next generation. Frankly, his voice is too squeaky for that. Which brings us to:

• Vivek Ramaswamy - the more I hear him, the more I think he is the person we need to win. It’s a long shot, sure, but give him a listen. He’s very smart, articulate, a powerful speaker, and far bolder than DeSantis or Trump in his proposals. I’ll say more later, but he has my support in the primaries. If you get the chance, check out his recent interview on The All-In Pod:

• Everyone else on the Republican side is a sideshow. Pence, Haley, whoever else… good riddance. Establishment Republicans are done and it’s not a day too soon.

• That all said, I need to reiterate the point I made in Unapologetically Right. Even if we do get a Zombie Biden vs. Zombie Trump match-up in the General Election… I’ll vote for Trump without hesitation and a smile on my face. The fact is that the Democratic party has become a socialist death cult. Biden himself has committed several unconstitutional and, from my vantage, treasonous acts on behalf of said socialist death cult.

Let’s Talk About Socialist Death Cults

Admittedly, calling the Democratic party a Socialist Death Cult (let’s go with SDC) is a bit outside the current Overton Window. So it may shock you. So let’s substantiate this a bit.

One: not every Democratic voter is a Socialist Death Cultist. However, they are in the throes of one, whether they know it or not. The Democratic Party is controlled by its radical faction. Likely 10-20% of voters and interest, these radicals push everything from extreme gender ideology, climate alarmism, Covid alarmism, and more. The rest of the party capitulates to it largely in the name of “tolerance” which those with weaker views on the left view as a virtue and thus they rather mindlessly adopt whatever is done in the name of said “tolerance”.

Two: let’s address the “socialist” part. One of a Socialist’s favorite games to play is to try to get you to define exactly what is a socialist. I will not partake. I am labeling the left socialist because the core ethos of their party now is one that fixates on the collective good over the rights and well-being of the individual.

We see this fixation on the collective with things like Biden’s unconstitutional (and treasonous) push to de facto mandate the Covid vaccines. With support for affirmative action that trample all over individuals in the name of “the common good.” With governing and policing strategies in blue cities around this country that amount to “well, so what if a few innocent people are victims of crimes, we can’t arrest the perpetrators because we have to solve systemic racism.” And the list goes on and on and on.

But what any conservative/anyone with a half-decent grasp of history knows is that marches toward “the common good” always end in tears. Often, they end in starvation, war, and genocide. Hitler said he was acting in the interest of the common good. Stalin and Mao as well. Only when one promises some higher good for all can such atrocities as the ones committed by those three (and many others) be justified.

Three: the Death Cult. The core of the lefts “death cultist” ethos comes from the climate alarmism that has been bashed into their brains over the past 30 years, though it does go beyond it. Much of this is nonsense, but it seems very real to them, and is far more widespread than you might think. There are non-trivial populations of urban millennial lefties who have gone vegan to save the planet, don’t want kids to save the planet, and more.

By itself, this isn’t an issue, but because of the collectivism we covered earlier, they seek to impose such a lifestyle on the rest of us. Whether directly via mandate or indirectly via legislative and bureaucratic social engineering, they seek anti-natalist tax policies, environmental regulations that raise the price of food and energy, and more.

The death cult ultimately views humanity itself as a blight upon the pristine Mother Earth. While not cheering for our extinction, they clearly lament how humans impact the earth and want a smaller and less impactful humanity in the future. So sure, in most cases it is a “mostly peaceful” death cult, but it’s still a death cult.

Fourth, it is worth lingering on that “cult” definition. One thing that Vivek has done well to point out (as have others) is that the modern left, in largely forsaking organized religion, has filled that “god-shaped hole” with this aforementioned secular humanism. But as we’ve shown, secular humanism ends up becoming “socialist death cult” when you let the radicals have the wheels while preaching tolerance from the back seat.

So do not misunderestimate the socialist death cult. For it comes with all the fervor of a new religion where the zealots will do anything necessary to protect and further the cause.

Is AI Still Coming to Kill Us All?

Speaking of death cults, Generative AI was supposed to pose an existential threat to humans so acute that I feel like we should have already been killed by it. Turns out that is, uh, not the case. Shocker!

As I wrote about, GPT4 showed tremendous promise (and still does) as a tool. It is wildly helpful as a resource for coding questions and building self-contained modules.

But the more we get over the initial “wow” factor, the more that answers from ChatGPT tend to just reflect what I call “midwit” content. Even with web browsing, plug-ins, and code interpreting capabilities, ChatGPT tends to come up with about what you’d see from the top 10 search results and presents that data unquestioningly. With certain prompting strategies you can navigate around this and get some more interesting results, but most people won’t get to that.

What we’re left with is a perhaps profound insight about the modern world: even something with advanced reasoning capabilities and a huge knowledge repository can still be overwhelmed by the volume of data and the complexity of the modern world.

Put another way: LLMs give everyone the capability to be a midwit. That’s probably not a good thing, but those of us with interest should start trying to come up with better and better ways to separate truly original thinking from midwit babble.

Safetyism and the Climate

Speaking of midwits, there is not much a midwit loves more than safety. Safety from Covid, safety from AI, and of course safety from the climate and weather.

In speaking about safetyism as it relates to the utterly pre-emptive calls for AI regulation, John Stokes rightly termed this all the “Safety Industrial Complex”:

How To Regulate AI, If You Must

It is important to understand the market forces that have created this beast, but just know now that such industries, once created, are self-interested in perpetuating their chosen concept (in this case, safetyism) in order to further drive profit.

The Safety Industrial Complex was around long before Covid, but Covid expanded its size and scope tremendously, and now it needs something to turn to in order to sustain itself.

Cue the climate. Climate alarmism has been around, but now there’s armies of safetists without a cause looking for something to do, so it is time to kick that alarmism into overdrive!

Right on cue, Project Veritas recently uncovered this:

Link to Tweet

This was utterly predictable, of course. I believe I wrote about it earlier, but certainly called it out in 2021:

Even once people eventually get bored of Covid, the threat of authoritarianism will remain quite strong. The tools are there (lockdowns, mandates, QR-based vaccine passports, fear-based propaganda, etc). All the government needs to do is to shift the focus. The likely target: the “climate emergency”. It’s already being labeled as a public health crisis and leading to suggestions that lockdowns may be needed to save lives. And the World Economic Forum is even out there touting MasterCard’s "DO card”, which cuts off your spending as soon as you’ve used up too much CO2.

You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to put these Lego blocks together.

Ben Mumma - December 2021 in The Authoritarian Pandemic

I recently saw a bit of this coverage on CNN recently: a map of the US with scary colors (red, pink, white hot!!!), doomsday chyrons of “heat wave ‘virtually impossible’ without human causes”, and warnings to stay inside to stay safe.

I laughed, and we all should, but we also need to make sure that people aren’t persuaded by this or the myriad of other subtle messages delivered on this front. Even my wife, who isn’t particularly prone to propaganda, told me that I shouldn’t be running in this Texas heat.

She’ll deny this was influenced by propaganda via headlines, chyrons, or any other source. But propaganda is subtle and we are all susceptible to it. Narratives shared in the media permeate our subconscious and change our perspective.

Obviously, I am still running in the Texas heat. Just a couple weeks ago I knocked out a 4 miler with a temp of 106 and a heat index of 107. I’ve run 20/25 days thus far in July with an average heat index at the time of the run of 100.3 degrees. And I should be clear: this isn’t abnormal (well, perhaps it is) but it is perfectly healthy and unequivocally more people should do it.

And while 100 degree runs may be a tough sell for most, please be aware of the burgeoning Safety-Climate merger and fight unapologetically against it.