“Big Pharma thought they would be best off if Cackling Kamala became our president:”

This is pretty weak. According to your source they gave $5.7 million to Harris. Compare to an election they really cared about, 2016 California Proposition 61 which they raised $109 to defeat. See here and here .

“I was just getting back some of the money I had given them in the past.”

Yes, all that money you were “entitled” to, right? As in, available to spend on any trip to the hospital whatsoever, no matter how stupid the reasons. We got it. And I’m sure Uncle Sam didn’t contribute anything at all to those payments — they were all courtesy of your bootstraps, and even the part that you paid for yourself didn’t come at all from that slab of porkfat you call your salary, correct?

Yeah, keep telling yourself that. “But honey, the shoes were 20% off!” That’s about as convincing as the one about how “Big Pharma can’t be raking it in because if Harris had been elected, they might have raked in even more!”

“Russia’s birth rate is lower than at any time during the USSR”

Fertility figures seem very variable – this site gives 1.8 for Russia which would certainly cheer Vlad up.

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/RUS/russia/fertility-rate

Well, that comment is not aging particularly well, though the following may be what J Johnson was referring to. I’m guessing that in your case, the 1.8 is the publicly-available “official” figure, right?

Russia has moved to classify key demographic statistics following a dramatic collapse in its birth rate, which has plunged to levels not seen since the late 18th or early 19th century, according to a leading Russian demographer.

In its monthly report published on May 16, Rosstat omitted figures for births and deaths for the most recent reporting period…

Of the five demographic tables previously published by Rosstat, only one remained in the latest report. It provided data on births, deaths, marriages and divorces only as a cumulative total from the beginning of the year, he said.

“In fact, since March 2025, there have been almost no publicly available demographic statistics in Russia,” Raksha wrote.

“The level of demographic panic within the government has reached epic proportions,” he continued.

In March, Raksha said Russia might be seeing its lowest birth rates since the late 1700s.

I wouldn’t worry. Once Canada is under out belt, I’m sure he’ll extend a similar offer to Governor Putin.

“would certainly cheer Vlad up…”

Frankly, Volya doesn’t seem all that cheerful these days. Here he is rolling his eyes and guffawing and sighing and sneering in response to a heaping of grandiose praise by Slovakia’s Fico, who refers to Putin as a “strategic partner”.

“Big Pharma thought they would be best off if Cackling Kamala became our president:”

They may have been right about that, but just because they were expecting to rake it in even more if Kamala were personally endorsing fat-removal injections the way Trump hawks Teslas doesn’t mean they won’t still be raking it in.

Same thing applies when I have to — yet again — explain to you that even though your job might well be costing us even more porkfat if you retired, it is still a big slab of porkfat, especially since it subsidized a needless hospital stay and other such “entitlements”. Just not as big a slab as it hypothetically could be.

Hope that’s clear.

“the Gettysburg analogy more relies on taking excessive losses in what turned out to be an overreaching offensive”

You know, now that I think of it, the better analogy to made here concerns the just-a-flu bros’ stance on COVID. As in al those ER and hospital stays (and one-way trips to the morgue) by all those wetting themselves over needles or something equally silly represent the excessive losses that, in the end, turned out not to have dinged Big Pharma at all. Since even with Trump in the White House, somehow they just keep raking it in. Talk about overreaching.

Weird how that analogy somehow escaped you.

“What? I should let other people insult me with impunity? F**k that.”

What part of “IT IS BETTER TO IGNORE HIM” (taken from a comment that you yourself posted) confuses you, exactly?

And are you still pretending you don’t even bother reading what I post? You have some magical powers of clairvoyance that, without the use of your eyeballs or wavelengths in the visible spectrum, can sense all throughout the ether any comments directed at any unspecified just-a-flu bro wailing about the ouchy needles, knowing that whenever anything like that appears, it must of course be an insult directed at you? Hmm.

So clue us in, Adam Smith, what part of that sample-size-of-one study was NOT a gotcha? Let’s recap:

• It was given a warm round of approval by four of our most eager truthers. Shouldn’t that alone have rung a few alarm bells for everyone right then and there?

Thanks: Almost Missouri, Mike Tre, Adam Smith, Mark G., Achmed E. Newman

• As the first link in my reply noted, the steaming pile was printed in a “journal” suspected of predatory publishing, alongside a slew “research” about the Indian gig economy, the goings on at Tata industries, mutual fund growth in India, mergers and acquisitions in India, and stuff like that (I guess the Indian connection explains why Markie G got all excited). The fact that a purported article on COVID was published alongside articles in a journal like that doesn’t seem at least a little shady? Does an article on COVID in a real medical journal, say the Lancet, get sandwiched between articles on how well mergers are proceeding in Uttar Pradesh? Why do you think the researchers chose to publish there?

• J Ross’s prefaced the link to the article with a claim that a COVID shot can threaten you for 10-15 years, but the only sample these researchers had to work with (and again, that’s ALL they had to work with), involved someone who had died a year and a half after the vaccine. That’s already a long stretch, but come on, extrapolating a 1.5 year result — based on one single event — by a factor of ten doesn’t sound sketchy to you? And again, the only connection between jab and death was the phrase “POTENTIALLY played a role”, as in flying monkeys could potentially emerge from Adam Smith’s posterior and burn down Ron Unz’s servers with lava and hellfire so as to prevent J Ross and others from passing around yet another comment offering masturbation tips. As if they weren’t creepy enough. I KID YOU NOT. Will it happen, you desperately ask? O sweet heavenly light shining down from the firmament, can it PLEASE happen, FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY? Alas, the best we can say is that POTENTIALLY it might.

• When I pulled the lid off this cesspool of laughably idiotic research, not one person responded — that is to say, it got one reply from Markie G, but that was only to try and redirect the conversation towards Rand Paul or whatever, like he usually does when he’s made out to be an ass, which is often. Eventually the rest of the low-lifes who run defense for you piled on, including Mr. Anon and res.

None of that smells fishy at all to you? None of that seems in any way like a gotcha or a takedown of our local branch of the COVIDiot PR committee? You think another meme is gonna even the score on that?

Man, what a burn that was. Hurts almost as much as a needle, eh?

“Trump’s Vaccine Can’t Be Trusted if a vaccine comes out before the election…”

[Date of the 2020 elections:] November 3, 2020.

[Date the first vaccines came out:] Since Dec. 11, 2020, the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 Vaccine has been available under EUA in individuals 16 years of age and older,…

Date of the FDA press release titled “FDA Approves First COVID-19 Vaccine”: August 23, 2021

Again, I’m starting to see why you became an anti-vaxxer. Gotta be those calendar skills. And I guess you’re gonna try and tell me that’s not a gotcha either, am I right? ‘Tis but a scratch, you say?

“Someone ask our resident gatekeeper which guy he/she/it thinks it is in this scene:”

If, when I catch you clowns trying to scare us with studies based on a sample size of one, the best you can do is what Markie G and the rest of the posse did, which is to desperately atempt change the subject to Kursk or Rand Paul or whatever, then there’s your answer.

And do you really think Jenneric American Icky would be haranguing Markie G to stop engaging with me if he thought I were the one bleeding out? Give me a break — you’d be burying him with medals if that were the case. So yet again, there’s your answer. Is he begging people to stop engaging with any of your other resident bogeymen? No again. So do the math.

Normally, I wouldn’t have to explain something that obvious, but for you, I know I’ll need to make an exception.

“You bleat on about muh sample size of one,…”

AND YOU WOULDN’T? You’re admitting to us that you’d just let something like that slide? That says a lot about you, that you wouldn’t immediately raise a stink over something that collossally stupid. Are you people just trying to make yourselves look dumb? Because that has already happened — you don’t need to try and make ridiculing you any easier.

“like it is some sort of gotcha”

LIKE IT ISN’T? Are you for real? You don’t think extrapolating out to 10-15 years based ON A SAMPLE SIZE OF ONE SINGLE PATIENT qualifies as a gotcha? How much stupider would it have to be? I mean, I used to wonder how stupid a person has to be to become an anti-vaxxer in the first place, but now I’m kinda starting to get it. As stupid as what you just said.

And the reason I clicked on the link (i.e. before I even knew that it was based on ONE SINGLE SAMPLE), was because it was preceded by the claim that a COVID shot could put you at risk for 10-15 years. Given that COVID has only been around for 5 years, I was curious how they would know something like that. That’s the only reason I would even bother clicking on anything J Ross spews out.

And lo and behold, as it turns out, the article was able to build on that oh-so-impressive sample-size-of-one by tossing in a bunch of conjecture and weasel words — as in the vaccine might have “POTENTIALLY played a role” in a myocarditis event that took place OVER A YEAR AND A HALF AFTER THE SHOT. None of that smells like a gotcha to you? Seriously?

And even if it were true that a COVID shot might threaten you for a decade or more, the relevant criterion is of course how that compares to what a full-blown case of COVID will do to you without any vaccination. In every other study where such comparisons were made — with respect to early death, a myocarditis event, long COVID, etc. — the vaccine’s effects turned out to be small in comparison to what you’d get from the disease itself while unvaccinated. THAT’S THE WHOLE REASON WHY THE VACCINE WAS RECOMMENDED. The only exception is that having a massive full-blown case of COVID might provide longer-lasting protection, though. if that’s the worry one could just do what the doctors do and get the annual boosters.

Now, with that in mind, take a closer look at that sample size of 65K that you want to think somehow redeems the sample-size-of-one gotcha and find me where they compare those side effects to some comparable study of what 65K COVID cases would entail. It’s not there, you say? OK, then. In that case, it’s not the gotcha you were hoping for, is it? Weird how little details like that just slide on by you.

“This seems like an opportune time to revisit the #HAisaLIAR thread.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/my-movie-review-of-conclave/#comment-7038577”

Oh, it’s ALWAYS an opportune time for res to desperately try and make HAisaliar happen, especially if it diverts attention from some other boneheaded blunder the truthers or the Putin stooges have made.

And you think you’re the one occuppying space in my brain? Seems to me I’m the one renting a room or two in your head for free. Ol’ res has got a whole thread on my alleged lying, but has yet to do anything about that sample-size-of-one debacle (except, as I noted, engaging in pathetic and pointless efforts to distract attention from it).

“the Gettysburg analogy more relies on taking excessive losses in what turned out to be an overreaching offensive”

It was over in about 3 days and that a month later, Lee was trying to resign. Whereas the deadline to clear the Ukrainians from Kursk was October 1 and as of the end of April, even Putin has recently admitted it’s still a work in progress. Meanwhile, much to Markie’s chagrin, Pokrovsk is still standing, so in the sense that Kursk was primarily useful as a way to divert Russian forces from places like that (in addition to. giving Russians a black eye), it arguably served its purpose well.

As such, the more appropriate analogies are the countless other occasions when Markie G, or Macgregor, or Simplicius or other so-called Russian experts assured us that the Russians were finally taking the gloves off, and in another two weeks it would all be over. They are about as believable at this point as Trump’s claim that “Putin really wants peace”, or the one about how he was going to be able to stop the war in 24 hours (actually not just one since he repeated the claim more than 50 times).

But I get it — anything to distract attention away from that embarrassing sample-size-of-one nonsense, not to mention the fear of ouchy-hurtie needles. Come on, you sad little weenies, just pretend it’s one of those fat-melting injections all the ladies are raving about, for crying out loud! I saw an ad for one of those the other day saying they were better than the rest because they caused LESS nausea. Not “no nausea” — that’s still just a hypothesis. Just less. And the zaftig cases can’t get enough of it. Yeah, the more I think about it, Big Pharma is going to do just fine. If all that screeching about needles was supposed to blow back on them at some point, it doesn’t seem to have worked very well.

“The Ramtha School of Enlightenment doesn’t count.”

No, you’ve got me confused with lil’ Markie G — he’s the one who’s constantly pushing proud Midwestern-value paragons such as Vivek, Prasad and Bhatticharaya. Confusion seems to be thing with you!

“C’mon, I’m dying to hear you tell us your supposed specialty? You won’t because it’s one of the low IQ degrees like psychology, anthropology or the absolute worst for IQ, sociology, right? Am I close?”

Your batting average is consistent, I’ll give you that much (as in consistently dismal). As to the specific department that issued those papers, I’ve given you clowns more than enough hints on that already, though again, I think someone like you will need a little help figuring it out.

1.5 days ago: Agreed. HA is a deranged head-case…. It is better to ignore him,…

2.4 hours ago: Again with the needle bulls**t.

Wow, so THIS time, his resolution to finally quit me once and for all me lasted a WHOLE DAY AND A HALF!!! Congratulations! That’s real progress, little guy.

Just keep trying, you’ll get there. The key is persistence. We’re all rooting for you.

I do feel bad for poor Jenneric American — apparently, even those who are on his side only pretend to listen to him.

And here we go round again as we try to shift the conversation elsewhere. Too much egg on the face, eh? Let’s see what the roulette wheel of lame and repeated questions Markie G will ask this time.

“Big pharma, who you have been stooging for here the last five years, lost that election.”

Yeah, I’m sure people have totally given up on their little blue pills and fat-loss injections. (Obviously, not everyone is terrified of a needle, eh? Something to think about.) You really think they’re on the verge of ruin? On the contrary, Big Pharma will do just fine. Whereas if another bonehead medical decision puts you in a hospital, I’m not liking your odds. Watch yourself.

“Now the Ukrainian Zelensky regime, who you have been stooging for here too, is desperately seeking a cease fire since they are losing their war. “

What, did Pokrovsk finally fall, after months of you breathlessly telling us it would? No, it looks as if it’s not even clear that the Russians will try gong there this summer. It sure hasn’t fallen. Boy, what a long 3-day-offensive this is turning out to be! And are the Ukrainians so desperate that they’ve finally started drafting 20-year-olds? No, on that as well. So how desperate are they? Seems to me they’re just doing what they need to do in order to keep the aid, such as it is, coming in, knowing that Putin can’t really end the war at this point without dealing with the economic hangover, and it’s clear to most everyone but Trump and his fellow Putin stooges that he has no interest in that. Like he’s really going to do what America wants right as Trump is beefing with China? Right…. And what about all the times you told us that Kursk is some Ukrainian version of Gettysburg? As I recall, that conflict DID take about three days to settle, whereas 3 years on, you’re just now telling me the Ukrainians are on the verge of collapse, and THIS time, you really, really mean it? Where have I heard that before?

Oh look, even Putin just admitted that the Ukrainians STILL haven’t been pushed out of Kursk. So thanks Markie G, but you need to upgrade that roulette wheel. I’m starting to understand why even the rest of your fellow Putin stooges are telling you that tangling with me is not helping the cause and it’s time to back off. Hey, maybe you guys need to admit you’re not up to the task, and sell yourselves out to the North Koreans, and get their help? — oh wait, they’re the ones who were supposedly going to push the Ukrainians out of Kursk. Never mind.

“Your obsession about me and constantly mentioning me in your comments to others is getting kind of creepy.”

Try not going after me when I expose the COVIDiot sample-size-of-one scams. That was the only reply that takedown got, and it consisted of a gracious apology in which you admitted that yes, it was a stupid thing to have slapped a “thanks”…. PSYCH!!! Of course it wasn’t anything like that. It was actually a transparent weaselly diversion manouver so as to change the subject to Rand Paul or anything less embarrassing. My memory is long — you think I won’t make fun of weasels like and the rest of the rodeo clowns who piled on after that?

And face it, you’re the kind of bonehead who is hard to ignore. The comedy gift that keeps on giving. You prattle like you’re some kind of expert on informed consumer choice, even though you yourself couldn’t make it past Basic Health Care 101 — probably because you’re too scared of needles, or something equally juvenile, AND AS A RESULT OF THAT YOU WOUND UP IN A HOSPITAL WITH COVID. It’s like a Larry David skit or something. You prattle about good old midwestern America as an antidote to the liberalism of the day, and the dangers of Big Pharma, only to wind up boosting “pillars” of midwestern conservative thought like (I kid you not) VIVEK RAMASWAMY, who just so happens to be a… wait for it… BIG-PHARMA-GRIFTER himself (whereas one of the main backers of Vance, another one of your so-called pillars, has been honeypotted by Moscow.) So much for America First.

Even other commenters have remonstrated with you for engaging with me. First of all, that should tell you something about whether they think that you — or Mr Anon or res or the rest of the Chihuahua posse — have had any success whatsoever taking me down. Secondly, in the 24 hours since you were told that, I’ve already gotten a handful more comments from you — so you can’t even do that right. If people want to criticize my replies for being too similar, that may have something to do with the fact that you can’t seem to keep asking the same stupid questions even after they’ve been repeatedly answered. Finally, when you’re not slobbering over some Indian ethnic while you’re praising good old midwestern values, you’re lusting after some non-binary nepo-baby from LA (and what’s with that doggy kink?) who is according to you a musical genius, even though her most successful breakout material turns out to have written by her brother. You think I’m the one who’s creepy or a little off?

It’s like some comedy writer invented you. If you had some genuine remorse for these boners, or showed some willingness to do better, it’d be another matter, but as it is, when it comes to exposing bonehead COVIDiots and smug alt-right loons in general, you’re low hanging fruit.

Consider doing what others have advised you do. Admit your failure, slap that LOL on my comment when you see it — like the sign of utter defeat that it is — and bother someone else. Better yet, put me on ignore. You really think I’ll miss you?

Or don’t. Either way, I’ll deal.

As much as some of my readers insist that I should simply be ignored, it seems another faction just can’t let me go no matter how hard they try. Which side is gonna win out?

“It appears you are the one engaging in diversionary tactics, not wanting to talk about or even think about how your side lost the election.”

I’ve answered this same stupid question directly several times. Even once in in this thread. And as others have noted, it’s ridiculous to pretend that one election decides every single thing you want it to. The public voted primarily on illegals and DIE and the laughable promises to the effect Trump would not go out of his way to wreck the economy, and as dumb as that last one has proven to be, most sane people (i.e. you and the other COVIDiots excepted) have in the last few years found other issues to occupy their time with. Rest assured, once people like stop yammering about it, and passing around bogus research on it, it won’t be me who keeps dredging it up, though I may well refer to howlers like that sampel-size-of-one scams that people like you endorse for quite sone time — assuming you don’t come up with something even more boneheaded that makes that look relatively tame.

And if I were the authoritarian you claimed, I would not have encouraged you throughout the pandemic to take your loony conspiracy theories to the courts, despite the fact that on more than one occasion, they decided the government mandates had gone too far. Unlike the MAGA crowd, I have some respect for the rule of law. Lastly, my views on the pharmaceutical industry were likewise made clear in one of my earlier replies to your desperate diversions when I noted that “Big Pharma puts most of its money into little blue pills and weight loss injections and keeping the price of insulin sky high and stuff like that.” That’s not the kind of language pharma shills typically use, though even I will admit that as venal and corrupt as they may be, they’re still not as dangerous as a bunch of loons whose understanding of basic science is so pathetic that they happily pass around and gobble up research scams (even if they are from the sacred land of India whose ethnics you seem to have fallen head over heels for) and instead of denouncing stuff like that, they go after the people who dare to expose it for what it is. When it comes to authoritarianism, stop pretending you people aren’t the baddies.

“But I did not receive two hundred thousand dollars of my government pension since I am still working at almost 69.”

We can ignore the big slab of porkfat you really didn’t deserve because of some hypothetically even larger slab of porkfat? Curiously enough, with very few exceptions, those are EXACTLY the same kinds of cheap rationalizations that were used to institute all these porkfat policies in the first place. It’s always “Here, let’s cut these people a slice of porkfat or else we’ll need to cut them an even bigger slice.” It’s always another replay of “Honey, they were on SALE. That means the two weeks of your salary that I just spent on these high heels actually SAVED us money.”

And all this from the guy who, when he’s not sitting in a hospital courtesy of Uncle Sam, yammers about how Uncle Sam keeps shelling out too much.

“As for that sample size of one study, are you talking about that J. Ross comment? I put a thanks on that for him providing the information for me to look at. “

Was the reply to J. Ross that I have linked to LITERALLY OVER A DOZEN TIMES really a reply to J.Ross? If you had actually clicked on the link any of those times I provided one, you’d see that, yes, it was. Glad that’s all cleared up.

And now you’re saying that you — and the several other COVIDiots who did what you did — are all thankful for being presented with a scam research paper so laughably ridiculous that it makes the truthers seem even more pathetic and clueless than before (and that’s saying something). You were actually grateful for that? See, outside the echo chamber, the rest of the world actually frowns on misleading headlines that waste everyone’s time and leads to a credibility gut punch for everyone involved in producing and promoting it. Think about what it says about you and them that you are grateful for actions which makes you appear even more ignorant and more desperate. Think also about what your subsequent feverish diversion tactics — by you, res, and Mr Anon — to try and effect damage control and change the subject to something less embarrassing — instead of honestly admitting and denouncing and regretting the utter stupidity that was foisted on you — says about your willingness to carry on an argument in good faith. I’m sure there are weasels on all sides of the fence with regard to this issue. or anything else, but I don’t slap a grateful thanks for their wease plays.

(That being said, the journal that scam research was printed in does seem to unusually focused on India, and we’ve already established you’ve got some weird fixations about that, and that does somewhat explain at least your credulous affirmation).

“Since you hate the Russians so much,”

Oh, and there he goes again with the rodeo clown diversion games! Whenever the egg on his face starts to curdle, it’s always “let’s talk about Kursk, or Pokrovsk, or Ron Paul” You really think that’s fooling anyone?

Just some mild myocardiopathy…

I’ll leave the AIDS worries to you, not knowing which of the risk groups for that disease you yourself might be in. As for mycardiopathy or anything else associated with COVID — and I know this hard to believe for people who are so desperate to feed their confirmation bias that they buy into headlines based on sample-size-of-one research scams from India or wherever — the side-effects from the vaccine are far milder than what you experience from COVID without any prior vaccination.

The overall risk of myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle – is substantially higher immediately after being infected with COVID-19 than it is in the weeks following vaccination for the coronavirus, a large new study in England shows.

(I know the truthers want to pretend that damage from the so-called clot shot — but strangely, not from COVID itself — can lurk around for 10-15 years before doing you in, but again, if you look under the hood at the cheap rationalizations for this claim, you’ll see they are based on a sample size of ONE SINGLE PATIENT — I kid you not — and conjectures and handwaving about how the vaccine may have “POTENTIALLY played a role” in a myocarditis death a full year and a half after a vaccine. CONJECTURE BASED ON ONE SINGLE CASE and published in some shady journal of innovation who seem to favor Indians when looking to further their predatory publishing scam.)

I know Markie G wanted to have it both ways and believe not only the truther memes about how we’re all going to get COVID anyway and we should just sit back and enjoy it, but also cling to the notion that he didn’t need a vaccine because he might never even get COVID. He does that kind of hypocritical cherry-picking often and it’s something he’s known for. Sad to say, it didn’t work out for him all that well, and as he himself has admitted, he landed in a hospital with COVID (not sure about any mild AIDS), but since he works for the government, he received a big slab of porkfat governmental insurance to tide him over. To the extent you’re interested at all in what he has to say on that topic (apart from knocking it down with a feather), hopefully your stupid life choices work out better for you than they did for him.

“HA is a deranged head-case.”

But even by your own implicit admission (or omission), I’m not someone who wets his bed over a needle while raging and fuming at the horrific monstrosity that is — I kid you not — the USDA Food Pyramid. Now that you’ve gone back to pretending to ignore me, welcome that as an opportunity for you to deal with your own immense first and foremost.

“HA, the boy who resists learning.”

Sorry, numerous accreditation and certification committees of various stripes, and with far more credibility than some internet expert on “unstable neanderthal dna” (who evidently can’t even remember what he himself cited a few comments upthread), have ruled otherwise, and based on the wild and incongruous guesses as to my identity and origins, they know me far better than anyone around here.

And thanks so much for your commiseration and “feeling for me” — obviously, if an inability to learn were an issue, it would be one you could well empathize with — but there’s no sense in citing what I write if you can’t even connect to anything there. I get it, by completely ignoring what was stated, you don’t have to reveal the fact that you’re unable to remember it from one comment to the next — even if you’re the one who originally wrote it — but it’s not as if that isn’t obvious.

“In the latter stretch of this thread, a lot of people have been engaging with HA who should know better not to.”

We’re in total agreement there, boss. You finally got one right. To the extent that anyone on the level of Markie G and Curle and the rest of the clowns here — and that includes you — ever thought that they were going to come out ahead, given what you have to work with, you deserve what you got.

“Every HA text wall is just like the 10,000 that went before.”

There’s a grain of truth in that, too — this is way better today than your usual losing streaks. Because yes, every chance I get, I’ll keep reminding you of that sample-size-of-one scam paper that the usual idiots gave a rousing round of applause to, and then, when I called them out on it, instead of admitting that they yet again made fools of themselves, all they managed to put together by way of a response was a pathetic pack of yappy chihuahuas to nip at my heels and desperately demand to change the subject — to Kursk, or Rand Paul, or whatever else. Did any of you really think that was gonna work?

And now, you really think I’m gonna let you walk away from that? No, I’ll keep rubbing your noses in it just like you deserve (and like I just did). So yeah, let this be a warning. If you don’t want an umpteenth reminder of how the COVID truthers are largely a bunch of idiots passing around one scam paper or misleading rephrasing after another, by J Ross or whoever else, don’t make the mistake that Markie G and Mr. Anon and res and the rest of the chiuahua posse did. Just walk away with your tails between your legs. Know your limitations. Give me that LOL if you want, and pretend it’s something other than yet another whimper of utter defeat, or better yet, put me on ignore like Mr. Anon finally claims to have done (hopefully, that’ll last longer than all his other broken resolutions to quit me for good).

The moral of the story is don’t tangle with me. Because if the best you can come up with is sample-size-of-one scams, and whatever other refurbished anti-vaxxer Facebook memes that Adam Smith feeds your way, then you’re not up to the challenge. Keep slapping yourselves on the back and LARPING about as Monty Python’s Black Knight. Pass around some Billie Eilish videos, too, while you’re at it — that’s way more your speed, and really, it’s all you’re good for.

“Yeah, as evidenced by the fact that: a.) I didn’t read that post…”

Sure you didn’t, o great defender of humanity against the diabolical — and obviously designed by the Freemasons — Food Pyramid. Here I thought you were more likely to be one of those anti-fluoridated-water kooks, or maybe one of those guys who waves signs on the freeway about how the government needs to fess up about the alien remains in Area 451, but I clearly underestimated you.

Yeah, it’s the great and sinister FOOD PYRAMID that we really gotta watch out for. Whoever said the COVIDiots weren’t worth listening to?

“F**k off, you malignant toad.”

And look, he’s back to zapping me with the asterisk-filled expletives. Oww, they hurt almost as much as that ouchy needle!

“I’m putting him on ignore;…”

FINALLY, he’s starting to take the hint. There is hope after all! Persistence is the key. My work is finally nearing completion.

“It’s pretty funny how you became evasive and switched the topic away from who your Big Pharma buddies supported.”

No I already addressed that. I have no buddies in Big Pharma (unlike you, given that your BFF is a BigPharma-grifter like Vivek Ramaswamy) — I just know that when it comes to COVID policy, the alternative the truthers have offered consists TO THIS DAY of sample-size-of-one scams from India and cheap COVID reworkings of the anti-vaxxer oldie-but-goodie tidbit of how kids who get the flu shot are still more likely to wind up in the hospital with flu. I.e., not much of a trade-up.

I mean, you’ve had five years to get your act together and that’s the best you could come up with? And trying to switch the topic to Big Pharma in the first place (or even worse — and I’m speaking in whispered tones as I type this — the unmentionable horror that is the USDA Food Pyramid!!!) is just an example of you trying to divert from your idiocy and your gullibility on COVID. It won’t work, because I, for one, will be sure to keep calling it out for the cheap rodeo-clown trick that it is.

Yes, Big Pharma is treacherous and evil, but if you want to know who’s even worse, look in a mirror. So pick your poison — and when you do, avoid looking to the COVIDiots for advice, given their penchant for stupid medical life choices that land then in a hospital for no good reason.

“Oh, are you pretending now that you might have voted for RFK Jr. or the Libertarian party candidate?”

No, and not the Greens either — it took some digging to find a third party candidate who wasn’t a Putin stooge, but they’re out there. And you still think you can gaslight me into pretending you know who I voted for better than I do? Sorry, it’s not gonna work — I was there.

Anyway, it’s good to know that you’ve outed yourself as a full-blown Trump supporter, finally. Turns out all that blather about the debt and everything else was just another smokescreen, eh? Given that you’ve now veered off into two-candidates-and-two-candidates-only territory, we can add MAGA loon to your Covidiot and Putin-stooge merit badges. It’s the tinfoil-hat trifecta!

It’s weird how my ever-growing fan club desperately keeps trying to find out more info about me, only to wind up spilling the beans about their own true natures. What’s that Nietzsche quip about staring into the abyss?

“Nobody cares what you think,…”

You really think that’s gonna fly at this point? Obviously, the COVIDiots and Russian trolls (and whatever weird combination of treachery and lunacy that Markie G has embraced) don’t appreciate having someone rub their noses in their pathetic cowardice over a needle. Obviously they think that if everyone could just ignore the numerous sample-size-of-one scams they keep desperately offering up and passing around to try to convince themselves that they were right all along, then like the emperor’s new clothes, it WILL be the bestest and most magnificent coverup ever and then one will be able to gaze on the naked fear that trembles underneath.

But alas, here comes HA, presumptuously daring to violate the fragile recesses of their safe space, and alerting everyone to the soft silent sounds of crickets that follow whenever the topic of discussion returns to all these colossally stupid research/analysis scams from India or Moscow or wherever else that the so-called America-first crowd has embraced. They care a lot, apparently.

That’s obvious to most everyone but you, I suspect, buried as you are over the hurts and wrongs that the Food Pyramid inflicted on you. The struggle is real, eh?

“’HA’ is not an American.”

He or she? Maybe someone working in pharma? Maybe someone from Kyiv or Tel Aviv? You little hens can get together in another one of your knitting circles (don’t worry, the needles they use there aren’t that pointy) and cluck about who I really am to your heart’s content. I’m not giving anyone here any more geolocation clues than I already have. Suffice it to say I’m obviously a far more patriotic American than the ones here busily selling us out to Putin or Modi (or Xi — don’t want leave out Ron Unz, given that he’s shifted his stooging from Russia to China). All that complaining about the Jewish lobby selling us out to Israel, and THIS was their solution? To sell us out to Putin and Modi and ON TOP OF THAT, to elect someone desperately vying for the “honor” of ethnically cleansing Gaza?

“The two choices were Trump or Harris.”

No, there were several other candidates. Your boy RFK wouldn’t have gotten his government job had he not managed to rack up his 5% of the voter base. Why have you forgotten that all of a sudden when you were repeatedly yammering about how the election and that 5% somehow proves that he’s what “the voters” chose? What a convenient reality people like you live in, where you can just cherry-pick portions of it whenever it suits you and pretend the rest doesn’t exist. Such a surprise that reality whacked you right into a hospital bed.

“Given that you are an extreme Trump hater, let’s not pretend here that you did not prefer to see Harris win.”

See, with characteristically crystal clear Markie G logic like that, I’m starting to understand how you came to endorse that sample-size-of-one debacle. You can believe it or not, but it is possible to strongly dislike both Trump and Harris. On this particular site, there weren’t a lot of Harris stooges making complete asses of themselves, whereas the number of people gullible enough to believe in Trump were too many to count. To the extent you want me to sling an equal number of arrows at both those sides, address that more fundamental imbalance first. Go on, I’ll wait.

Lastly, when it comes to Vivek, or the rest of the Indian lobby, I was happy to provide multiple links and evidence of you explicitly giving them the thumbs up. Feel free to provide similar actual evidence that I was rooting or voting for Kamala, or let’s mark this as yet another desperate effort to gaslight me by pretending you know more about my voter preferences than you, in the absence of any actual evidence to that effect.

“Your ’cause’ is to defend the biggest mistake/crime in recent history.”

You’re still talking about the Food Pyramid, right? Yeah, I learn something new here every day — that’s gotta be why I keep posting. That, and waiting for someone to finally explain to me how the COVID truthers managed to embrace something as colossally stupid as that sample-size-of-one nonsense. Covid has been with us for half a decade now, which means they’ve had more than enough time to get their act together, and yet, even now, they can apparently do no better than continue to make utter asses of themselves with scams like that.

But with regard to the real problem, thanks for setting me straight. From now on, the next time someone dares complain about MKUltra, or the Tuskegee Syphilis Trials, or My Lai, or the Trail of Tears, I’ll just shake my head and sigh and say “Why do you bother with something so picayune and trivial? Don’t you know that the REAL villains are those who gave us the Food Pyramid? Mr. Anon told us so.”

And from now on, every time I’m in traffic and look over to see some lard-bottomed yokel washing down his Doritos and M&M’s with a Big Gulp bucket of Mountain Dew, I will lean over and say, “Sir, you have obviously been led astray in dietary matters by an overly rigorous adherence to the USDA Food Pyramid; don’t worry, this is all the fault of our government and medical establishment, since they are the ones who have forced you to eat like this. From now on, you should stop listening to them and embrace your right to eat whatever you want. Spread the word!”

“I didn’t pick out the heads of government agencies personally. “

Given which particular heads you seem quite happy to do free PR work for — is this another one of your governmental operations that we’re supposed to be grateful for? — let’s stop pretending you don’t have a type. I didn’t vote for or endorse Kamala whereas this isn’t the first time you’ve assured us that people like Vivek, Bhattacharya and Prasad are the wave of the future, and with regard to the first name, you were pushing him way before the elections.

“Your reading comprehension problems are more than obvious.”

So says the guy who evidently couldn’t be bothered to even read what he himself quoted, or else, is confused by a word like “sibling”, or something equally ridiculous. And this time you’ve shifted to some vague stream-of-consciousness rambling that could have been cut and pasted from almost anywhere and applied to almost anything. “More than obvious…inability to understand…appropriately placing evidence in context…” Does this have anything to do with anything that was said? Who knows? But at least that way, you’re safe from blurting out something as stupid as denying this had anything to do with autism in siblings. Don’t want to make that mistake again, do we?

Trying to gaslight me into thinking I’m just incapable of appreciating your genius obviously isn’t working, but why don’t you write the researchers themselves and offer them your expertise? Maybe they will grasp your brilliance better than I can. Don’t forget to work in “unstable neanderthal dna” into your email — I’m sure that zingers like that will clue them in that they’re in the presence of awesomeness.

“The medical establishment endorsed it.”

And it was still far healthier than what the “customer is always right” food triangle — consisting of fat, high-fructose corn syrup, and whatever goop they put in those nuggets that they insist is chicken — that somehow came to be the accepted alternative. Try and get that in your head. You got no leg to stand on there.

“And I noticed that you elided over the other two…”

How about you notice instead that I pay you way more attention than you deserve as it is? Providing point by point answers to your entire list of drivel would require me to read it first, and even I have standards. So next time, if you have more important issues that you insist I address, try leading with one of those instead, as opposed to something as pathetically lame as the food pyramid. Oh, the horror! What’s next on your list of eternal outrages from past decades that haunt you to this day — a diatribe on the communist totalitarians who came up with Smokey the Bear and that “Indian” crying about all the litter? The buzzkills who told us to quit smoking and to buckle up and to not drink-and-drive? Or how about the gay lobbyists who exposed our children to the sordid doings of Bert and Ernie, not to mention Batman and Robin? So creepy. Never forget! Eternal vigilance!

it’s worth noting that one of the papers you presented are primarily concerned with autism in siblings

You don’t know how to read.

Are you kidding me? THE WORDS “YOUNGER SIBLING” ARE CONTAINED IN THE URL ITSELF. Do you even read what you post? Here, I’ll repeat the link that YOU YOURSELF POSTED (click on the first link if you doubt me):

https://www.psychiatryadvisor.com/autism-does-race-sex-affect-risk-of-younger-siblings/article/515748/

Is that not clear? Do you not even know what ‘sibling’ means?

And here are the very first words of that article that YOU YOURSELF CHOSE TO BLOCKQUOTE

“In this study, we demonstrate that the risk of receiving a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorders is approximately 14-fold higher in younger siblings with affected older siblings,”

Still want to pretend I’m the one with reading comprehension issues? Good luck with that.

And since I’ve reached my 3-comment an hour limit, let me also say to Buzz, thanks for the upvote. I know I’m doing something right when I get a raspberry from the likes of you (and an agree from the anti-vaxxer loons is just icing on the cake) and I could hope for no better praise around here, but it’s pretty clear I don’t need your help, given the pathetic performance Curle is pulling today.

“The same “experts” who pushed the Food Pyramid on the public…”

Seriously, that’s the best you can come up with? The Food Pyramid? You’re not even trying. And it wasn’t Big Pharma that pushed the Food Pyramid on you. And anyway, as is pretty evident to everyone but the nutty conspiracy theorists demanding the gum’mint stay out of their business, when the consumer is allowed to park their obese behinds on their Rascals and scoot on down to Walmart to exercise all those sacred consumer freedoms you uphold, no one is happier than the factory farmers and the snack food and sugar-water manufacturers. It’s Doritos and Skittles and Nuggets, twenty-four seven, with snap or two of Slim Jims for special occasions. Yeah, thanks so much for that — it’s SO much better than the diabolical food pyramid, am I right?

Maybe you should go back to pretending you don’t bother reading what I post — not that it was ever true, but you were less of an embarrassment back then.

“It is common for people to have their health insurance through their employer.”

Yeah, and when the employer is ol’ moneybags Uncle Sam, that’s who winds up eating the costs for your stupid medical choices. What, did I stutter?

“You mean the experts under the control of big pharma, right?”

As opposed to pharma-grifters like ol’ Vivek? That was your alternative, remember? As in frying pan, meet fire.

“Dr. Jay Bhattacharya…Dr. Vinay Prasad,…”

AND HERE WE GO AGAIN — what is with you and the Indian lobby? Do you have a fridge full of cow urine, too? You know that there are actually other people in this world worth listening to aside from the ones emanating from the country that STANDS MOST TO BENEFIT when we shift to bogus COVID cures like Ivermectin, right? Speaking of which, guess which country that is largely sourced from? Would it surprise anyone that the sample-size-of-one scam you were so grateful for likewise came from a scam journal likewise focuses heavily on one specific country? No, no one but you. So who do you think you’re fooling?

For the record, I have numerous Indian contacts. Swell people in my experience, without exception. Maybe I’ve just been lucky, maybe I’ve traveled in rarefied circles. I’ve read the Bhagavad Gita, I’m familiar with the Mahabharata — did my time getting familiar with the culture. Even visited there. But I’m betting even most of my Indian friends would look at you and shake their heads and look away. Pathetic wannabe.

“This article does a good job of describing the instability created by hybridization which is another word for out breeding.”

It does nothing of the kind. First of all, it’s worth noting that one of the papers you presented are primarily concerned with autism in siblings — i.e. we’re talking about the kind of autism that is presumably (but not necessarily) heritable. It’s not clear that that covers all cases. The researchers also posit that there may be different kinds of autism (or produced by different genes) in different races even though at this point we’re crudely slapping a binary “autistic” label on kids without that much regard to the nature or degree of the condition.

Secondly, the hybridization in the paper you referenced concerns that between Neanderthals and modern humans — you seem to be under the illusion that it refers to “race-mixing”.

In any case, it’s way too early in the game for some wacko obsessed with race-mixing to say “I knew it all along!” For one thing, I’m gonna guess that some people in racially mixed marriages are ipso facto less willing to respond to (and maybe even less able to recognize) social conformity cues — i.e. they’re already a little like autistic people who likewise have trouble recognizing social cues, and to the extent that’s heritable, they may pass on that tendency. The explanation for the higher prevalence of sibling autism in mixed marriages that was mentioned in one of the papers may be as simple as that. Likewise, mixed marriages — where couples don’t care about race — may involve similar leeway when it comes to age gaps or other behaviors that might also predispose a child to autism.

Of course, none of that nuance and caution will stand in the way of some nutjob obsessed about black men getting a hold of “his” white women. That’s pretty much what we’re getting from you.

“Says the guy for whom the full scope of his vocabulary and what he might be exposed to related to thinking is limited to his ability to make a no-effort search for it on google.”

No, I asked you first what that might mean. But even YOU couldn’t be bothered to fess up, presumably because you knew that the truth, as you eventually let it slip — i.e. that it was just some sloppy and grossly misleading “shorthand” you came up with all by your lonesome — was going to make you look like the laughingstock you are. Unstable dna, you say? Yeah, I’m sure that’s the mot juste — for sure, every researcher in the industry will be using a phrase like that given that a genius like you managed to coin it.

You’re like one of those random-guy-on-internet loons who never bothers to provide links at all but who complains whenever someone submits a link from Wikipedia because he thinks his blather is more authoritative. However deficient Google may be, it’s a lot more credible than anything emanating from your fevered imagination even when you managed to distort and twist and misread it out of what was once genuine research. You’ve just made that pretty clear.

“You are presenting the two possibilities… There were actually four possibilities, though, with the other two being not getting the vaccine and not getting Covid and getting the vaccine and still getting Covid…”

They factor all those possibilities in before deciding on a costly and onerous mass vaccination campaign (and I already covered the “get vaxxed and still get COVID” possibility when I mentioned “breakthrough infection”). The experts are often wrong, but their track record is generally better than nutjobs yammering about mass die-offs and nanobot injections and totalitarian psyops.

There’s a non-zero probability you’ll never need health insurance, either, but the consequences of what might happen if you do are onerous enough to where generous ol’ Uncle Sam, aka Mr. Moneybags, lavishly doled that out to you as part of those perks you now claim you’re entitled to, while simultaneously whining about too much government generosity. Really, it’s not a good look. But it worked out well for you, given your stupid medical choices, and yet again ol’ moneybags was there to dig you out of that hole you landed in.

And all that lofty “regulatory capture” blather is just a cheap rationalization (oftentimes spewed by the same loons pushing fears of mass dieoffs) for being too dumb or lazy or both to listen to actual medical experts (as opposed to the fringey cherry-picked loons who placate anti-vaxxers and libertarian conspiracy theorists). The absurdity of all that is rendered even more pointy in light of how easily a PHARMA-GRIFTER like Vivek was able to sucker you in by playing on those cheap rationalizations. One born every minute, they say. How’s he doing, by the way? Are you two still tight?

“Google isn’t a close reading exercise. “

It’s a whole lot better than “unstable neanderthal dna” and other such word salads. And when it comes to trying to assess just how crazy and stupid a phrase like that is, Google does indeed make for a pretty good first pass. Again I ask you, how utterly misleading and wrongheaded and nonsensical does a phrase have to be that not one single person in the entire searchable internet, expert or otherwise, can be cited as having made use of it?

The fact that someone who clearly doesn’t have a clue about what he’s yammering about is lecturing anyone else on Google or reading comprehension or anything else is just more of the same.

“We know now that the Covid vaccine does not lead to any serious long term effects, at least not the mass dieoffs some were predicting, but at the time it became available there were no studies of the long term effects of the vaccine due to it being rushed through the approval process.”

By the time you passed on that vaccine, there were plenty of studies indicating that the effects of a bareback ride on COVID were — when all the risks were stacked up – far worse overall than what you’d experience after a vaccine (even if that included a breakthrough infection). To the extent you were gullible enough to ever pay attention to those who were predicting mass dieoffs and the like (and I can see how gullibility is a thing with you, based on your willingness to slap a “thanks” on that sample-size-of-one scam from India, and to prop up pharma-grifters like ol’ Vivek Ramaswamy, and to fall for quack COVID cures like that Ivermectin stuff that largely comes from India — say, have you ever noticed you seem to be a real sucker for the curry?), that’s what I mean by stupid life choices. You didn’t have to pay that much attention to people like that, and it explains how you and others like you wound up wetting your beds over needles and things that were never worth a minute of the drama and hysterics you invested in them.

But given that gullibility, it’s good for you that you chose to suck on the government teat, what with all their eagerness to subsidize the dumb healthcare choices of those they insure, so I’ll give you that. Kudos.

“Doesn’t sound as if peace is just round the corner.”

Nobody but Putin stooges like Trump (“the war is going to be settled… within 24 hours, you watch…”) ever claimed Putin would make way for peace just around the corner.

This was written a year and a half ago and stands up far better than any of the drivel spewed by Russia trolls like Simplicius or Macgregor or you. That’s a pretty low bar, but even so, its continued relevancy is remarkable.

Right now, even if Zelensky agrees to negotiate, there is no evidence that Putin wants to negotiate, that he wants to stop fighting, or that he has ever wanted to stop fighting. And yes, according to Western officials who have periodic conversations with their Russian counterparts, attempts have been made to find out.

Nor is there any evidence that Putin wants to partition Ukraine, keeping only the territories he currently occupies and allowing the rest to prosper like South Korea. His goal remains the destruction of Ukraine—all of Ukraine—and his allies and propagandists are still talking about how, once they achieve this goal, they will expand their empire further…

If the alternative to a vaccine is spending several days in a hospital (ask your fellow needle-phobe Markie G about that), I’ll stick with the former, thanks. Unlike Markie G, whose repeated and stupid life choices are backstopped by his generous ol’ Uncle Sam (i.e. by his “employer” arranged insurance that Markie G insists he is entitled to — emphasis on the “entitled”), I bet I’d have some pretty steep out-of-pocket copays and such if I were to wind up in the hospital for some stupid mistake (or for anything else). I’m not sure how much exactly, but I’d also bet the pills and the IV’s and all the rest of that paraphernalia would make Big Pharma and the medical establishment even richer, so I plan not to find out — and the same goes for the rest of the living-on-the-edge idiocy you and Markie G like to wallow in.

What, you think there are no day-after side-effects to those measles parties your crowd keeps wanting to bring back? Now go post some memes — we can both agree that an anti-vaxxer trying to poke fun at people with mental difficulties is laugh-out-loud comedy gold, though I suspect we’re laughing for different reasons.

And don’t forget trying to scam us with that totally-on-the-level claim about how kids who get the regular flu shot are 3x more likely to be hospitalized with the flu. As much as I’d like to blame all the COVIDiots for being that stupid — especially since J Ross seems to be running his own COVID version of that same scam, pulled from somewhere deep within his secret vault of research that not even he knows how to unlock — I need to emphasize how that earlier scam was yours and yours alone. So much in the way of intellectual handicaps when it comes to your posting, and here you are thinking you needed to ridicule some Down syndrome kid. Projection, I suspect.

And like I said, it’s kinda strange how the subsequent larger and more detailed study — the one that subverted the one you like to show around — managed to somehow slip by you.

Well, look at that: a committed ANTI-VAXXER is attempting to make fun of intellectual disability. Oh, the irony; oh, the lack of self-awareness.

“I fear needles! Said fear cost me a splendid career as a heroin junkie.”

Yeah, I get that. In my case, it was the relevant medical literature (and I don’t mean sample-size-of-one scams from India) that helped dissuade me from a career of shooting up.

But the COVIDiots obviously don’t care too much for what the medical establishment advises. Whatever works, I say. Live your best life, bedwetters.

“Instability is a short hand description…”

In other words, so stupid and sloppy and misleading that not a single entry in all of Google has ever made us of it. What does that tell you? And on top of that you then expect everyone else to know exactly what it is you’re referring to when you yourself were too lazy to look up what you actually meant.

Ironically, that inability to perceive things from the point of view of someone who isn’t clued into how your own brain idiosyncratically processes info is classic autistic behavior. I’m thinking there may be more to your own personal experience with autism than you’re letting on. No wonder the woman with the autistic kid was able to relate to you.

The fact remains, lots of things are associated with higher risks of autism. If the father is over 40 at time of conception, the child is times more likely to be autistic. If the mother is older (geriatric pregnancy) the likelihood goes up as well. If the mother drinks alcohol, that also increases the odds. We know inbreeding increases the likelihood, too, so as I already noted, it may be that comparatively higher levels of dissimilarity also may contribute, so in that sense, race-mixing may be a factor, however slight. But only a moron fixates on that one cause to the exclusion of all else. Again, that’s the kind of thing one associates with being off-on-the-spectrum. So maybe that should be your bigger focus.

Despite all those differing causes, and even though it may well be that race-mixing has gone way up, we don’t even know if autism has increased at all, or if it is just the case that “rising rates are mostly attributable to broadened diagnostic categories and more comprehensive screening”. Or else, maybe it’s mostly just a reshuffling of names, with increased diagnostic screening for autism accounting for the remainder of the so-called increase:

The number of autistic children who enrolled in special education tripled from 93,624 to 419,647. In the same time frame, however, the number of children labeled as having an “intellectual disability” declined from 637,270 to 457,478. The shift of children from one diagnostic category to another explained two thirds of the increase in autism in this population, researchers say.

Those quotes are from SciAm, which you seem to like for whatever reason. See, everyone around here only points out the downsides of race-mixing. But looky here, even though — according to how you like to break things down — it may be making kids autistic, it also seems to be REDUCING the likelihood of “intellectual disability”. See? Every cloud, silver lining.

“How would you know?”

For starters, because it’s not in any of those links you provided. And because if I type the phrase “unstable neanderthal dna” into a search engine, the number of hits as of now is exactly ZERO. And because if I stick in that phrase without the quotes, I only get some stuff about Neanderthal population bottlenecks, and how RNA is unstable (unlike DNA), and links that are more or less the same, but again, the phrase “unstable DNA” or “unstable Neanderthal DNA” is nowhere to be found. You really think if “unstable Neanderthal DNA” is the answer to autism or something that anyone of note has studied, there’d be zero hits on it?

And you obviously have no clue as to what any of it means either, except to say “The literature is filled” with this and that. Is it really? OK, so cite some of that literature — in particular, something with the phrase “unstable Neanderthal DNA”, instead of just telling me it’s out there… somewhere. Who do you think you’re fooling with that con?

And if even you can’t find that phrase, anywhere, well, there’s your answer.

“Oh, and quit getting so sexually worked up over the Ukrainian midget, it’s unbecoming.”

Ah yes, the old let’s-switcheroo-over-to-Ukraine whenever there’s too much egg on your face and try for best two-out-of-three. Taking a page from Markie G and res and the other rodeo clowns, are we? Not that those squid-ink deflection tactics ever worked out well for any of them. In any case, as I told your fellow Putin loon upthread, I’m more than content to leave Ukraine aside, if only the rest of you could shut up about it.

“Again, aside from your general mendacity you outdo yourself with your lack of reading comprehension and attempting to restate questions.”

No, I didn’t come up with the word “unstable Neanderthal dna”. That’s a phrase YOU made up.

Ditto for “the different broad categories of races have different Neanderthal contributions making the combinations even more unstable”. In other words, even though you don’t know what unstable dna is, and can’t be bothered to elucidate even when I press you on it, you somehow know that mixing different amounts of it in any genetic pairing makes it even more unstable, for some other reason you can’t be bothered to detail. Talk about propagation of errors.

Did all that come from your fixation on mixed-race fetish porn? I don’t really know, but since it’s as relevant to your thesis as all that hogwash verbiage you managed to string together, I guess that means it’s a-OK, right? After all, fair is fair.

There was a similar brouhaha at one point about how Kleinfelter’s syndrome (i.e. XYY chromosomes) had some link to criminal behavior. As I recall, that turned out to be more or less irrelevant, and even if it’s true that XYY types are more likely to be found in prisons, they’re grossly outnumbered by criminals with plain old XY profiles. I don’t know if this any different, but given that autism’s racial profile is White:Hispanic:Black:Asian::2.7%:3.3%:3.7%:3.8, whereas Neanderthal gene profiles are roughly 1-2% for Whites and Asians, and 0.3-0.5% for Blacks, there’s a lot more to this than just race mixing, as in trying to explain violence with XYY profiles.

Also, I strongly suspect that part of the reason there are more cases of autism in CA than WV — which you also seemed to think is really relevant — is because there are far more psychiatrists and counselors in CA willing to slap an autism label on any goofball kid that comes their way.

That being said, Sailer has noted several times that as much as inbreeding causes birth defects and other problems, being relatively far apart genetically can also result in couples having a higher incidence of miscarriages and such (though the profile is not as steep as what we see with inbreeding), and that the sweet spot is somewhere not far from where the medieval church mandated you couldn’t go beyond (whether by luck or some other reason now forgotten). So to the extent that a susceptibility to autism is partly genetic, which seems likely, it may well be affected in a similar way. But that still doesn’t mean that race-mixing is a main driver, and at this point that is as stupid as saying it’s caused by vaccines. And all that still doesn’t address your crackpot theory that Neanderthal DNA is “unstable”, esp. given that blacks have relatively little of that, and relatively high rates of autism (and that is true even in Africa where all that race mixing you’re obsessed with is less likely). My most recent brush with autism concerned the child of two African immigrants, so that cancels out your SO’s brush, so set that aside too.

I know that’s a big disappointment to you, since everything is blackety, black, black, black in your little head, but try and resist sticking complicated phenomena into that crude little one-issue-only hole in your brain. Some things are just too complicated to be reduced in that way.

“any chance HA could go back to the Karlin threads”

I’ve never been on the Karlin threads, at least not in a couple of years, apart from exchanging a comment or two with him directly back when would post something on some Sailer thread. Yet again, you are confused. They see me here, they see me there, they see me just about everywhere — and then they have the gall to tell me I’m the one obsessing about them.

And coming from someone as eager as you to derail every other thread with ruminations on how your boy Putin is doing, a propos of nothing whatsoever, that seems more like the kind of advice you need to be following. I mean, at least I wait until you or some other Putin troll brings up Ukraine before diving in.

“’Creepy’ is a a somewhat female adjective to use.”

When it’s directed towards someone who is so clearly fixated on the notion that the object of his attention is female (as in, he’s FINALLY gotten a “broad” to pay attention to him) the adjective is also eerily appropriate. Accent on the “eerie”.

And given what you just said, if you’re trying to tell us that applies to you, too, feel free. I’m way ahead of you.

“Your wall of text did not address those two simple questions.”

It brought them down to a level even someone like you might understand — i.e. I had to rope the Jews in some way, and also this election which Markie G assures is a sign that he and you are “winning”. That took a bit of elaboration.

And like I said at the start, the fundamental unanswerability (or at least intractability) of questions like those you posed actually helps my case, not res’s “11-figure” this and that, so if you don’t like my wall of text, direct your stupid questions his way. Maybe he’s dumb enough not to see them as being the inane and feeble gotcha attempts that they are.

“The reason “ENTIRE school districts” is important stems from ENTIRE meaning no sampling bias present within that district.”

No, it’s a scare word allowing you to grasp at straws about things that are conveniently hidden behind a paywall. You and I have no idea which district(s) we’re talking about, or whether any of the 13K districts the researchers could have chosen from (hypothetically) even had a vaccine mandate and for how long and whether students were able to opt out with weekly testing as in many cases they were, etc., etc. Therefore, whether or not some mandate extended to an ENTIRE district somewhere is in and of itself meaningless. Even if half the schools in the entire country were under a mandate, it’s still unclear as to which of them participated in this study. So why do districts even need to be brought up? If the study was carried out in a major hospital in some metropolitan area, there may be kids going there from the inner city district, and other kids from the suburbs from some other district and still others from a private school. I.e. you don’t even need to bring districts in to the discussion. You and people like you bring up scary words like “entire school districts” because you want to muddy the water and deflect and obfuscate and grasp at any straw. That lessens the likelihood that anyone is allowed to peek under the hood and reveal the sample-size-of-one lunacy that lies underneath.

Is that clear? So sorry I had to clue you in on that, but keep in mind, I’m just the messenger — trying to get in my way won’t fix the problem. Neither will deluding yourself into thinking you’ve won the war because a huckster like Trump allowed a huckster like RFK into power.

“The substantiation is all there. Especially in the scientific American piece.”

No, the word “unstable” does not appear in that piece. NOT ONCE. Lots of conjecture about how autistic people have larger portions of “25 of these Neandertal-derived expression quantitative trait loci”, but nothing about how “the different broad categories of races have different Neanderthal contributions making the combinations even more unstable”. You just cooked that part up yourself. I’d recommend clearing out your internet cache, particularly any links related to porn sites– I’m guessing that’s where a lot of this comes from.

Or else, maybe you also confused by phrases like “functional imbalance between the activity of excitatory neurons and inhibitory ones”. But in that case, they’re just describing one of the manifestations of autism, and how it messes things up, whereas you seem to be under the illusion that the “imbalance” is between differing amounts of “unstable Neanderthal DNA” derived from two parents. Again, that’s nowhere in the article or anywhere else outside your fevered imagination.

I.e., you’re a loon scrambling up concepts you know nothing about..

“Too bad that seems to be all you have. Are you disputing the point “entire school districts were coerced into the covid shots”?”

I’m disputing the fact that “entire school districts” is any more meaningful than any other of the scare words you and people like you resort to when you have nothing of substance. Yet again, that seems to be all you can offer. ENTIRE school districts, you say? Wow — that’s a lot, right? Or is it? Hmm, just how many school districts are there in the US (spoiler alert: about 13,000) and how many of them had kids who were involved in this study? Do you know? Of course not — it’s all behind a stupid paywall, so all you seem to be able to do is to run rodeo-clown diversion defenses on behalf of the very same guy who gave us that sample-size-of-one “research”. Again, that seems to be the best you can do.

“Pretty sure HA is a broad.”

Oh, no! I’ve really stirred up the hornets’ nest this time. Even Badwhite has re0merged, ready as ever to regale us with his fantasies of how I’m a “broad”. Nothing creepy about that, whatsoever. If I don’t behave myself, he’ll yet again cut-and-paste his infamous “blah blah blah” comment. How many times have you tried that already? And don’t forget the “Agree: Johann Ricke” at the end — it’s the chef’s kiss, but I notice you left it out last time.

And look, even Mr. Anon managed to wake up. Any minute now he’ll start typing out those words with asterisks in place of the vowels. So scary! Hurts almost as bad as a needle. Oh, I’ve been foiled again!

“Its amusing how a commenter can make an off-hand comment to her and she cranks out a wall of text in response.”

Yeah, answering two stupid questions typically takes considerably more bandwidth than posing them. Thanks for that, Sherlock. You only figured that out recently? If I just cut-and-pasted “blah blah blah” instead, would it make you feel less insecure? I know you get real awkward and uncomfortable in the presence of “broads”, am I right?

“Even more amusing that she thinks people read the rants.”

They sure can’t seem to press that “Ignore” button for some strange reason, can they? And like you they can’t keep themselves from replying, so maybe you could fix your Sherlock deductive skills on what that means about whether or not people read me.

“I find it amusing that you are still trying to fight battles over individual scientific studies when your side has already lost the war.”

YOUR side introduced that scam research, little Markie G. We’re talking A FEW WEEKS AGO. You’ve had, what, four years to come up with anything substantive, and this is the best you’re able to do? Not much of a win, is it? And you don’t find it amusing at all — it’s, as I said, your squid-ink tactic of trying to obscure the fact that yet again, you’ve been made out to be a total laughingstock. We’re talking sample-size-of-one, published in some shady Indian journal of “innovation”. Things are really looking up, eh?

You already tried the same diversion a few days ago. And a few days before that. Everytime “your side” gets shown up to be the loons who publish yet another bit of laugh-out-loud lunacy you want to argue how you’ve won the war.

“When Big Pharma critics like RFK Jr. came out in support of Trump it therefore helped him to win.”

Yeah, the 6% or so of people crazy enough to vote for a guy who spent 14 years on heroin, or whatever, were enough to help Trump across the finish line. Like I said, asked and answered already. Still not much of a win, given how it’s turning out even for RFK. You really think sample-size-of-one scam research from India is going to be the norm from here on out? You think those measles outbreaks are a vindication of RFK’s approach and how he was right all along? Give me a break. Yeah, NEEDLE-PHOBIC BEDWETTERS VOTE TOO. Hurray for civilization.

“Given that there is very little room for sample bias in covid shots…”

Not true. You can aggregate different populations into separate cohorts at any point in the trial so as to better compare apples with apples. Boys vs. girls. Ages of the children. Are asthmatic or diabetic, etc.? When that was done for the regular flu vaccine, lo and behold, it turned out that even for sickly kids, the survival rates and hospital stays were more favorable for those who had received the shot. Good catch on the “as likely”, but even so, the differential is smaller, and without getting beyond the paywall, it’s hard to say whether the survey was carried out in a place with mandates or not. Based on J Ross’s previous sample-size-of-one debacle, the fact that it came from him in the first place argues against it being worth much of anything, especially if no one bothered to adjust for the “sickliness” (for lack of a better word) of the participants. Given what happened with the flu vaccine and the hay that anti-vaxx crackpots like Adam Smith keep trying to make of the original and misleading small-sample study (“Dange, danger: kids with flu shots are three times as likely to be hospitalized with flu!!!”) that kind of proper comparison should be a no-brainer.

“Plenty of school districts and even private schools required vaccination for enrollment,”

Again, we’re talking a time range of a few months ending in 2023. I’m guessing not a lot of districts were still mandating much of anything w.r.t. COVID, and presumably one of the items on the questionnaire was how long ago (and how often) the vaccine was administered, and where they received it.

“One of the critics of the FDA decision to approve Covid vaccines for children, Dr. Vinay Prasad,…”

Save it. Your usual rodeo-clown routine, in which you try to veer off elsewhere to avoid having to yet again stare at the egg on the faces of the needle-bedwetters, is not working for me today, which is not to say it ever did. You’re saying that crack team of professionals Trump has put together to look after us sure inspire confidence? They don’t seem to think so:

RFK Jr.: ‘I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me’

Hey look! A Covidiot just said something I agree with. Maybe there IS hope.

“Keep up, I provided it…”

Did you really? You made some wild and unsubstantiated assertions to the effect that “Neanderthal dna is unstable and the different broad categories of races have different Neanderthal contributions making the combinations even more unstable in kids”. How does that even make sense? If I have different amounts of “unstable Neanderthal dna” from two parents, you say it somehow becomes MORE unstable just because of the differential? Why doesn’t it just average out? Or are you saying the amounts need to be equal so that they can somehow cancel each other out? Is this like antimatter DNA or something? Who knows?

And why is it more unstable in kids? Does Neanderthal DNA decay or stabilize as one matures? That’s some crazy DNA you’ve chanced upon, like none we’ve ever come across, I’m guessing. But that’s not gonna stop you, is it?

More to the point, this wild theorizing has nothing to do with the links the provided.

The first one does — at least according to you — state that in some study “the highest absolute risk of autism [was found] among siblings was in mixed racial/ethnic groups”, but the link you provided is DEAD. As in retracted, or bogus, or who knows what. None of the other articles I found in this “Psychiatry Advisor” have a DOI number, so we’re not exactly talking about flagship research here.

As for the other link, you blockquoted it but apparently didn’t read the part that clearly says “the researchers emphasize that autistic individuals do not carry more Neanderthal DNA overall compared to non-autistic individuals.” Was that not clear enough for you? Apparently not.

The only evidence you’re presenting here pertains to the matter of whether or not you’re a total loon. And based on what I just told you, guess in which direction the needle is swinging?

Here I was thinking that sample-size-of-one scam COVID research — have I mentioned that already in this thread? I think I may have — was unusual in some way. I’m starting to suspect it’s more like the norm around here.

“But entire school districts were coerced into the covid shots, so the space for sample bias on covid shots is much lower.”

Maybe. The differential in the case of flu is 300% whereas for COVID it’s only %159 or whatever.

But as for the “entire school districts” who were coerced — ooh, that’s very scary and Orwellian, isn’t it? all those ouchy hurty needle mandates — I’m kind of guessing you didn’t bother to click on the link. The title of the study indicates it was carried out from Sep ’22 to Apr ’23, at which point COVID was already winding down (except in the minds of the bedwetters — it’ll always be peak pandemic for them from here on out). This is from Feb 23

So far, no state has mandated a student vaccine, and school districts aren’t likely to either….states are moving away from a vaccine mandate. Districts, which often look to their states for guidance on the issue, seem likely to follow suit.

Earlier this month, for example, California, walked back on its plan…Last year, Louisiana also decided against mandating the vaccine after initially proposing the idea in 2021….

Only the District of Columbia — but no state — has so far mandated a student vaccine,…

So that doesn’t really help your case, does it? It’s so nice to hypothesize this and that without bothering to make an effort to back it up by actually referencing the article in question. I’d guess that’s why you were one of the four horsemen of the Idiocracy who slapped a “Thanks” on J Ross’s earlier foray into vaccine scaremongering. I of course mean that sample-size-of-one colossal debacle of COVID scam research from some shady predatory publishing “innovation” journal out of India or somesuch — I may have mentioned it already once or twice already. If that’s the case, my apologies.

To be fair, the study J Ross linked to this is behind a paywall, so we have to take his unimpeachable word for what’s in it and even if you had bucked your usual habit of commenting on stuff you clearly didn’t bother to read up on, you would have hit that wall. Did they correct for kids with asthma or other comorbidities? They probably should have, given the anomaly I already detailed in the case of the influenza virus, but I guess we’ll never know.

“You have a lot of roommates in there.”

Indeed — so many needle-phobic bedwetters out there. Who knew? It’s downright overwhelming!

“New study finds Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 ‘vaccinated’ children are 159% more likely to be infected with SARS-CoV-2 and 257% more likely to develop symptomatic COVID-19 than unvaccinated peers.”

Not surprising, if true, since we see the same thing with the vaccinations regular flu. As Adam Smith so “helpfully” informed us, kids who take the influenza vaccine are 3 times more likely to be hospitalized with the flu than non-vaccinated kids. Why, you ask? (Not that J. Ross would ever stop to think about the drivel he’s so busy spewing, but I’m speaking rhetorically.)

It’s because the kids who get the flu shot are disproportionately kids with asthma or diabetes or some condition that messes with their immune systems, and their doctors therefore insist that they get that shot every single year. And yes, kids like that are a lot more likely than “normal” kids to wind up in the hospital, even with a flu shot.

But as a later study showed — which Adam Smith for some strange reason never got around to reading — those sickly kids who get the shot have better survival rates than similarly sickly kids who don’t get the shot.

Like I said the last time this thing came up, the COVIDiots are sore-pressed when it comes to originality. They just keep rehashing the same scams.

Now how about we take a closer look at that sample-size-of-one scam J Ross tried to foist on us just a while ago? Any takers?

“Now tell me some more about my Covid partisanship, I’m dying to know.”

Oh, did I imply that you ever thought COVID was a bigger problem than blackety black, black, blackety black? So sorry about that. My bad. After all, as you so authoritatively informed us “Autism increase is a function of interracial breeding”, isn’t that right? So there’s no way that COVID or anything else could find a place on your plate given what’s already on there. Hopefully RFK 2.0 and all those COVIDiots trying to save us from Big Pharma’s ouchy hurty needles will see the error of their ways and then we can finally be free of autism once and for all.

Hey, you got any sample-size-of-one research or anything like that you want to present on that autism/race-mixing theory? I gotta warn you, the local comment-engagement gestapo is a little inconsistent when it comes to stuff like that — on the one hand, they’ll slap a whole bunch of “Thanks” on most anything that feeds their confirmation bias (and let’s be real, blackety, black, black is a big deal for them, too), but if anyone actually dares point out what a bunch of idiots they’ve just shown themselves to be by cheering on that kind of scam research, they get real quiet or else feverishly demand that the discussion be turned to Kursk, or Ron Paul or most anything else. Very strange.

“The way I live in your head rent free is entertaining.”

Oh, so close! I thought you were about to say ENGAGING, but all I got was ‘entertaining’. Maybe next time, eh?

For now, for the umpteenth time, the very same expert who desperately tried to change the subject when I exposed the COVIDiots’ sample-size-of-one scams by by appointing himself the accuracy monitor of all my predictions on Ukraine (even though he couldn’t cite a single one of these predictions, when pressed) decides once again to tuck his tail between his legs and talk about something else. So much for being engaging. Yeah, next time for sure.

“What do you think the Eiffel Tower is worth? What do you think St. Peter’s Basilica is worth?”

If you’re trying to help me make my point, you’re doing a pretty good job, thanks, but all the same, I think I already had it under control. Once res finishes up “engaging” with that sample-size-of-one research scams that he and other anti-vaxx loons (like you) like to pass around — and then for some strange reason can’t even bring themselves to acknowledge once it has been exposed — we can see what he has to say. He’s the engagement expert around here!

For now, I’d add to that to-be-assessed list the value of all the beachfront property in Gaza, once Trump is allowed to “resettle” all the current residents there (and once we subtract off the cost of erecting that golden statue of himself). His son-in-law assures us that all that beachfront would be “very valuable”, and that’ll make for a great blurb to stick on the promotional brochure. And if you can put a “fair” price (so to speak) on getting that done, the Eiffel Tower and the Sistine Chapel should be a piece of cake.

“There is nothing bogus about asserting the Catholic Church has substantial (11 figure or more) assets.”

If it’s with tendentious misdirection like the ones in that article, there’s bogosity aplenty, for reasons I already made clear. When people use similarly specious arguments to tell you that the constituents of your body are worth about three fiddy, they’re at least doing it with tongue in cheek and primarily for comedic effect. Whereas you’re nutty enough to think that thing you linked to is totally on-the-level.

“P.S. Are you capable of engaging without throwing red herrings”

Like I just said, o helpful dispenser of tips on how to engage properly, you should first engage with that sample-size-of-one COVID research I mentioned, instead of being part of its damage-control brigade. THEN come and larp around as the resident comment engagement pro.

So much for res and his expert powers of engagement.

“Start paying attention to the commenters you are responding to…”

What part of “Blackety black, black, blackety black” was hard to understand? I summarized your sentiments perfectly.

And given how quick you and res and the other bedwetters are to dispense advice on how to properly “engage” in these comment forums, maybe you should first try engaging with that sample-size-of-one scam COVID research I may have mentioned once or twice. It received a heartfelt round of thanks when one of the bedwetters first posted it, but for some strange reason, none of you can so much as acknowledge it now that I dared to peek under the hood. What, is there not enough about blacks and Cofederate statues in that article to interest the likes of you? Then get res to to take a look — he’s mighty generous with the engagement advice, too.

“FWIW the Posner quotes are all under the section “Other incalculable assets” and do not appear in the “at least $73 billion” total.”

Not sure how retyping the same link to the same lame article changes anything I said, but OK. If that’s the best you can come up with, so be it. And the quote — as I directly cited it — refers to a parish priest complaining about how his church was “poor” and “didn’t have money for renovations”. The fact that it’s in one section or another doesn’t change the PLAIN MEANING of what he’s getting at — i.e. the parish priest is lying to you and actually, the Catholics are rolling in it.

So you can “judge for yourselves” all you like, but if all you can come up with is some pathetically lame argument about how it can’t mean what it PLAINLY SAYS because it’s in the wrong section, you might as well not bother. Swing and a miss.

“Are you capable of engaging without throwing red herrings (here Elon) around?”

No, pointing out that the same bogus arguments you’re helping to spread around are currently very much in the headlines — and therefore concern even to those who care little about confessional matters — is hardly a red herring. Are you capable of engaging without throwing desperate bogus arguments around? That’s the question you should be asking.

:The man obsessed with a Ukrainian midget?”

I don’t bring up Ukraine unless you or some other loon obsessed with the Russian midget brings him up first, so handle the damage on your own side before addressing mine. And given that I also enjoy making fun of your bedwetting fear of needles (not to mention the sample-size-of-one “research” that the bedwetters like to applaud), my so-called obsessions are at the very least more diverse than yours. But you don’t like to be reminded of that, so I can see why that second issue would slip your mind.

“Black school districts are to be avoided at all cost especially if you are a taxpayer.”

Here he goes again. Blackety black, black, blackety black. And I keep getting told that it’s the Michelle Obamas of the world who can’t shut up about that. Like I said, you and Michelle should just pretend we’re talking about Kazakhstan school systems next time any of this comes up.

“It isn’t hard to find and contains all of the elements of graft…”

I know that to a six-year-old with a hammer, everything is a nail, but just this once, can you try to extract your head out of your eternal obsession wid’ all dem black folk?

No one said there isn’t a whole lot of fat and graft and corruption and pork in government, be it in education or anything else, and how all that correlates to the number of black students or employees or officials in a given school system. That’s not the issue at hand.

Without reference to any of that, the question of how much a school system is worth — regardless of how much shuck ‘n jive you’re telling us dey be pullin on poor ol’ whitey down ovah in that school system — cannot be reduced to assigning a single number to all the residential square footage therein and going over to Zillow to see how much that’s worth at the going market rate. Yeah, it may well seem like those school systems are sitting on a gold mine when you pull tricks like that, as Elon and other shuck ‘n jive artists have recently tried to do, thereby managing to fool many, but it’s a grossly misleading approach. And that’s also a separate question from the one of whether it’s worth putting any money whatsoever into any school populated or staffed with black people in the first place. As eager as you are to answer that for us, we all already know what your answer will be, so there’s no point going there.

Next time, pretend we’re talking about a school system in Finland or Kazakhstan or some other place where the number of black schools is relatively low. The same question can still be asked, but over there, at least we can skirt around your usual obsessions.

And yes, that technically should have been “11 figure sum” — I just meant it as being “in the billions”.

“This site estimates “at least $73 billion” and has a useful enumeration.”

No, it really isn’t. I’ve given money to charities over the years, that in some cases I found out were run by Catholics (runaways, disaster relief, etc.) so, as cynical as I am, I took an interest in matters like this at some point, expecting to find I’d been taken for a chump. But as I came to learn, dropping some 10-figure sum with little in the way of context is like Elon or some other huckster claim the US public school system has outrageously squeezed out billions of dollars from taxpayers over the years, as assessed by way of its net real estate “holdings”, only to discover, upon closer inspection, that the “median” schools located on these properties are typically built with infrastructure that is rotten and decaying, are in constant need of fundraisers just to get by, and the teachers there have to take second jobs at the grocery store just to feed themselves and their families. Yes, some superintendents are grossly overpaid and school districts on the good side of town may have computer labs and 3d printers and Olympic-sized swimming pools, but it’s not as if the district kids from the ghetto get to utilize any of that outside of swim meets. And if we were to sell off all that vast “wealth”, we’d still need to buy some other property somewhere else to build another school on, so the net savings would be minimal. Same goes for closing down all those Catholic schools and hospitals and universities.

From the article:

Posner said he was raised Catholic and remembers the parish priest was always bringing up how poor the church was and how they didn’t have enough money for renovations.

As I read that, Posner is insinuating that the priest was conning everyone, and that all the Pope has to do is sell off a few Michealangelos in some Vatican vault and parish priests wouldn’t ever need to beg for funds. There are actually books based on this kind of supposed muckraking that I’ve come across in libraries now and then (Paul Blanshard comes to mind). I’m sure if you’re into Dan Brown, it’s juiciy clickbait, but based on Charity Navigator and outfits like that, I have no doubt those charities I tossed some bills to generally had to hustle hard for those dollars.

In the United States, more than 90 percent of revenues collected by parishes remains there. Those funds are not centrally collected, and they’re not really even centrally tracked, either by the bishops’ conference or by Rome…Second, much of the real money bypasses the hierarchy. To take the most obvious example, Catholic hospitals generate billions in revenue, well above what parishes will ever see from their collection plates…but they’re usually governed by a lay board of directors and incorporated under civil, not ecclesiastical, law. The same point holds for most Catholic colleges and universities.

Since average parish expenses [in the US] are $626,000, most places are basically breaking even. (The national total for parish expenses works out to $10.7 billion.) Salaries are typically the largest line item, representing more than 40 percent of parish budgets. Other major outlays include the physical plant,; parish operations, such as a soup kitchen or catechism program; and in some cases, subsidies to a Catholic grade school.

Then again, there are more than a few people who think Elon really did save us all a potload of money, and that he and his fellow chainsaw wavers deserve our gratitude. A sucker born every minute.

“Since Newton lived from 1643 to 1727, He would have gotten into trouble (though not executed in England).”

I wouldn’t be so sure, though I should have said “might have gotten him executed” instead of “would have” — Thomas Aikenhead, the last Englishman to be executed under the Blasphemy Act of 1695, was done in 2 years after the act was passed. Newton’s Biblical “research” was by then several decades old (I’m guessing) and had it become discovered before he became famous (he was appointed the Master of the Mint in 1696, nine years after the Principia was published), his situation would have been dire.

(I had originally written “gotten him burned at the stake” instead of executed, but managed to change it before the 5 minute edit deadline ran out; as the wiki article mentions, the last person to be burned at the stake for heresy met his fiery end in 1612.)

“And so, when those great thinkers discovered that there is a God, they resorted to the comforts of their upbringings…They applied the only schemata they knew from their upbringings.”

Atheists typically do that, too. Look close enough, and there will often be some skeptical teacher or mentor who were part of their upbringing and who appealed to them more than the preachers or nuns or rabbis who hectored them. And that has nothing to do with the point I was disputing, which was that there must be some cognitive dissonance between proofs/logic and belief (whether that belief is derived from the comforts of their upbringings or anything else.)

And for what it’s worth, Newton was a Christian, so in that sense was indeed true to his upbringing, but his radically anti-Trinitarian transformation would have gotten him executed had it become public knowledge. Not much comfort in that, and pretty far from his upbringing. Von Neumann converted to Catholicism towards the end of his life, however shakily. Not only was that a departure from his upbringing, it failed to provide him much solace with regard to his terminal cancer diagnosis, which brings up the point that there isn’t fundamentally that much comfort in a religion where crucifixion is a gruesome reality but resurrection is some vague and elusive and ephemeral now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t routine. That helps explain why many people leave Christianity behind and instead opt for the comforts of Hollywood, or sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll and whatever.

“Perhaps-I am just guessing- he had a spiritual experience that somehow transformed his world-view & showed that all rigorous logic is just a smokescreen.”

Euler, Gauss, Liebniz, Newton, Ramanujan, and countless other high mathematicians were devoted theists. Even in the modern era, Gödel tried his hand at Anselm’s ontological proof of God, and was a regular Bible reader. There is no inherent cognitive dissonance between science and theism — Ramunujan regarded his mathematical insights as gifts from the Hindu goddess Namagiri/Lakshmi. Thomas Aquinas dedicated his entire life to rigor and logic, and then, after experiencing a vision, regarded it as “mere straw”, but that is not regarded by his followers as a repudiation or rejection of what he had worked on earlier, and the proofs are still of use to this day.

One doesn’t have to be a believer to recognize that systems of belief as scrutinized and picked apart and argued over as Aquinas’ was (and still are) are considerably more coherent and logically consistent than the typical post-modernist confused mishmash of science, Hollywood, Freud, “humanism”, gender-this-or-that, etc. That’s not saying much, but it’s saying something, and the notion that mathematicians are handicapped when it comes to belief is wrongheaded from a variety of perspectives, not just a historical one. Wittgenstein, the ultimate deconstructor, had trouble believing much of anything as a result of his analyses, but in terms of lifestyle (i.e. boots on the ground), he remained a simple Catholic.

Interestingly, Wittgenstein once said in a conversation “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view”. In my opinion the latter is plausible, but the former can be questioned. After all, Wittgenstein was brought up in a Roman Catholic persuasion, several times even contemplated becoming a monk and remained a pious man in search of religion throughout his life.

“The number of Trump defenders has dropped precipitously over the past few months.”

True. Then again, Mr. Oilcan Floyd, the very same commenter I was responding to, was willing enough to state that Trump “is better than the alternative”, and he’s hardly alone in that regard. By my calculation, that still amounts to a vote (or at least endorsement) for Trump over Harris. The ballot box doesn’t care how reluctant your vote is, it counts just the same.

Despite that, he now comes wagging a finger at me as if I’m somehow the one who has more to answer for than he does? I’m not falling for that.

“Any time you want to start engaging with real (quoted and linked) comments from myself and others about Covid at the time feel free.”

You first. (What’s that tiresome and overused quip about physicians healing thyselves or somesuch? — it would be oddly appropriate right about now). I’m still waiting for someone to “engage” with that COVID scam “research” from some Indian joural of innovation that was based in totality on a sample size of one, in which the vaccine and the death that followed a full year and a half later were connected by handwaving of the form “POTENTIALLY played a role”.

Was that not based on a real comment from J Ross? Why, yes, it most certainly was, and warmly appreciated at that, judging from all the “Thanks” it received.

But when I proceeded to rub the truthers’ noses in their fake research, all I got in reply were desperate deflections and digressions from you and the rest of the COVID truthers wanting to change the subject — hey, let’s talk about Ron Paul, or else, let’s consider what’s going on at Kursk (including some schoolmarm hectoring from you about how it’s MY accuracy that needs to be monitored with no word at all about that sample-size-of-one dump your team had just deposited into the fishbowl), then RFK, and whatever else the rodeo clowns will try next. No matter how many times I tried to get someone to respond it was always the same “look, squirrel!” tactics from the “Nothing to see here…please disperse” crowd, with goons like you in tow, as I said.

“Any time you want to start engaging with real (quoted and linked) comments”, you say? Poor little res — no one want to engage with him properly. Or so he claims. I do recall you had a convenient lapse when it comes to getting hypertext and links to work, but I think even for you, the above list of links ought to be a big enough paper trail to get you started.

“The original post by Colin, or someone else, made the point that slaves had a better standard of living than many working class whites at the time, which is true.”

Then you might consider replying to whomever it was that posted it. I’m not saying it’s not an issue worth discussing, but it doesn’t have all that much to do with what I took issue with.

“Do you think that slavery I’m North America was worse than the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians by non-native Jews? It’s a simple question,…”

Again with the veering off into endless detours. No, it’s not at all a simple question, except maybe to someone as desperate as you seem to be for any stick to beat Jews with. You’re a living breathing corollary of Godwin’s Law in the sense that I’d bet every single one of those endless detours will inevitably converge on one specific issue.

To paraphrase that Tolstoy quote about unhappy families, every act of barbarism/ethnic-cleansing/genocide/terrorism etc. is different in its own way, and with regard to the Palestinians, they are not something you get to reduce to some point on that 1-dimensional better/worse measuring stick that you’re eager to whack the Jews with. With regard to Trump’s offer to kick the Gazans out so as to make room for beachfront development and gold statues of himself (which is the latest development of that saga) I again see no reason why a question like that would be directed at me given that I’m the last person to try and defend Trump, and since you have an endless supply of his fans (or at least people who voted for him) around here to argue with instead. I’m not one of those. You’re telling me a man so desperate to be a stooge for Putin has a sociopath’s indifference to the kind of mass carnage needed to create all that beachfront? What a surprise.

“Brazil is a distant second-place to North America, while the islands were the worst.”

Some simple reasons for that:

For adult African males, life on a cotton or coffee plantation was less tenuous than was life on a sugar, cocoa or provisions plantation.

Also worth noting:

Mortality rates among freedmen of four sugar plantations went up after the Abolition of slavery [at least in Suriname]. Child mortality increased after the abolition of slavery,

and there’s this

One particular aspect that was quite different was attitudes towards feeding slaves. The French law about this was the most filmsy out of all the colonial laws, so how slaves were fed differed greatly. Some allowed their slaves small plots of land to plant in on weekends. Some gave their slaves food directly (though in French colonies this appears to be less common). But quite a lot paid them in rum (given its links with sugar), which they were then told to trade for food. Many just drank the rum and starved.

So while it sure was awful nice of them to give their slaves some wages, it turns out that doling that out in the form of liquor is a bad idea. Who would’ve guessed?

“It would help if you would actually reply to the points that other people make.”

You mean allow ADHD types like you to veer off into tangents every single time I point out something embarrassingly stupid that gets repeated around here, by way of damage control? Maybe that would help you, but no thanks — I’ve had about enough of the “Hey, look — squirrel!” diversionary tactics 101 with Markie G and res and Mr. Anon, as I have already recounted in detail. Not that people like him will ever stop trying:

Me: “Hey Markie, how about that sample-size-of-one scam research that people like you and Achmed and Missiouri and Adam Smith and Tre were so appreciative of? Tell us, how did the COVID truthers manage yet again to get taken in so easily by something so colossally stupid?

Markie: “uh…, how about we discuss RFK Jr instead?”

That kind of routine gets a little obvious after a while. You think I don’t see what you’re doing? And like I said, I’m already dealing with too many mixed signals.