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Another brilliant and thought provoking piece, el gato. I have felt for many, many months that most of this is unadulterated propaganda on a level that we have not seen for decades. Recently I sent an email to dozens of prominent activists, (formerly known as journalists) with 11 questions that to my knowledge had never been asked of the pseudo experts, TV docs and politicians. The result? I did not receive one response or acknowledgement of my email. Of course I tried this tactic because I got absolutely nowhere with the elected lords that govern over me here in the province of Ontario. I am sure you and many here could likely guess what some of these questions were - I asked about such silly things such as a proper cost/benefit of lockdowns, why were cost effective and efficacious prophylactics not pursued instead of emergency approved treatments (loaded and circular question I realize), why is debate not encouraged and displayed in a transparent fashion between the unelected and conflicted “Scientology Table” and other world renowned experts etc. The fact that this crazy never ending feedback loop of fear propaganda, stoked by power hungry politicians, praised by the Journos who benefited from the fear and ultimately aided and abetted by the likes of Gates, Soros et al is not as plain as the proboscis on my face speaks not only to our collective laziness but also to our dogmatic beliefs and overall apathy. The bottom line is we are not demanding more from our politicians and the media who are supposed to hold them to account. I will continue to fight the good fight but I must admit I am exhausted. So disappointed with many of my friends and family who are so disengaged and uninterested in the stripping of our rights and freedoms. I guess if we are not going to fight for these freedoms and our power hungry leaders know it, they will continue to pepper us with soft tyrany, you know for the good of the collective society

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big business and government riding around in the same car is always dangerous. you get rampant cronyism, an outsourcing of constitutional violation, and broken markets riddled with privilege and monopoly. it's a bad way to go.

but when media becomes complicit as well and acts not as a counterbalance to such a confluence but rather as a cheerleader and apologist for it, the damage becomes multiplicative. what was supposed to be a seat belt becomes an entanglement in razor wire.

now you're facing a unified edifice of power, money, and information and we seem to be at or around a local maximum on it. traditional media has been utterly broken and captured. those that were not are getting more and more shut out. investigative journalism is all but dead and the fearsome muckrakers that once held the powerful to account now publish puff pieces about how great it is to have corrupt policy rammed down your throat.

the spillover into social media as an outlet for truth, free expression, and investigation reached a point where leviathan weighed in there too. this is the problem with living in such a regulated and permission based society. twitter, fb, youtube, and probably worst of all, google search has gone big into the censorship business. they established truth panels and fact checkers whose partisanship is extreme. it's pravda masquerading is wikileaks.

but you cannot hold this in forever. places like substack crop up and journalists unwilling to submit to censors and orthodoxy get a voice (and a paycheck) not predicated on ideological purity but rather upon convincing people their content is worthwhile.

the next move is out of the walled gardens entirely to real, secure peer to peer internet and social media. this will render the very idea of censorship anachronistic.

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/a-cats-tale-how-getting-canceled

i leave this one pinned for a reason. this is, to my mind, the big coming fight. how to we take information, media, the public square, markets, money, and commerce out of leviathan's reach? you cannot tax what you cannot see and you cannot regulate what you cannot touch. this will represent the greatest shift of power in human history as people become customers of the state, not serfs beholden to it.

government should serve the people, not the people government and to the extent that it does not, it should be left to wither. collaboration without government coercion is the future and that future is extremely bright.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond. I hope you are right, Gato. I unfortunately don’t share your optimism. I am a big believer in the theory that the pendulum always swings too far and although this seems hard to believe, I don’t think we are there yet. I am thankful for platforms like substack, Medium and Patreon, all of whom give talented writers and broadcasters a medium to truly express their 1st Amendment rights to people like myself who fled the grifters and activists at MSM. My lack of confidence in the future of our democracies is the dearth of leadership within our young generation. Not surprising that a generation that was coddled, told they were special and rewarded for being mediocre embraces safe spaces, micro aggressions, CRT and the latest elitist, socialist and post modernist shiny object that promotes victim hood, are in many cases absolutely frantic about COVID! These youngens’ have a miniscule risk of a bad outcome from COVID and the majority are cowering in a corner. Silly me, I thought after having their lives wrecked for a bad respiratory virus, they would be breathing fire and demanding answers. I actually thought we might see the next generation of libertarians to take on the evil government machine. Well that ain’t happening but they do seem to be enjoying their terror filled lives. Time for me to seek out my safe space in the basement bunker!

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Dude. First, I feel your pain. Second, you said it better than I could. You and the Bad Cat make a great team!

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The official data from official sources was pretty much always accessible, and outside places where they sped up the curve by infecting all the at-risk at once, there was never much of a hospitalization crisis at all. Jay Inslee dismantled the field hospital at Century Link in early April 2020, and there's no way he does that if he thinks there's even a 1% possibility that it will be needed.

We're still locked down in Washington.

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They never really used the Navy ship of the Javits field hospital in NYC.

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Gatito! Listen from this Brazilian, we know stuff. Print screen as much as you can, keep doing this, and hopefully in our lifetime the truth will come, then publish all the print screens (because by then they will delete all the past info) and hopefully we will have our day of justice... if that doesn't come, then we will be onMad Max/Matrix world (and I will be in some remote area in Brazil)

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I created a quiz with Tom Woods to help people on the margins escape the cult. If NPIs worked, a minimally data literal layman should be able to tell apart the places with the hardest vs softest restrictions, right?

https://www.covidchartsquiz.com/

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*literate

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I don't know if I can stomach the entire piece. I just got to the part where they present as an insight:

"It shows a highly nonlinear sensitivity of Pinf to changes of Nv."

Yeah, no shit Sherlock, two lines above you made the assertion:

Pinf=1−(1−Psingle)^Nv.

That equation defines that nonlinear sensitivity. Again, if your model assumes the result, you'll get that result! Science!

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Wherever you look, you find what you are looking for.

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Yes, it's propaganda. And it's very effective. These are not stupid people...not most, anyway. And they're the first to flash credentials. My question: do they actually believe the narrative? And, if they don't, what is their end game? Why would they tell such ridiculous, incongruous, easily falsifiable lies? Is stupidity, hubris, avarice, greed, weak character, or even tribalism enough to make sense of the past fifteen months. My instinct says no...even if the alternative is dystopian and incredible. Nothing about the past year makes sense to me.

I know why people believe them. Most don't have the time or the inclination to investigate. Some don't have the aptitude. They cannot fathom that public health officials, medical doctors, and the media would collude to lead them down the primrose path. They want to believe these people have their best interests at heart, that they are truly working for the greater good...even when none of it works or makes sense. They can't see it. Not yet, anyway.

We can hope the nonsense back and forth over masks, the push to vaccinate children, the change in detecting and counting breakthroughs (better understood as concealing) will finally shake the multitude from its stupor.

I've heard a few of the leading dissident voices say we can't worry about these people. In truth, I was horrified. How is that any different than the arrogance displayed by the bad guys? I realize they're frustrated and weary...and probably hurt. Many have taken a lot of flack for their efforts.

But these people need our help. Even the nasty ones. So we have to keep trying.

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BTW, I received an invitation to a virtual town hall on C19 vaccines for children via Fakebook today, even though they've been blocking my posts every day for about a week. I saw that the famed Dr. Paul Offit, MD, of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was on the panel.

So, I went to his Fakebook page and sent him a very pointed message through Messenger...made sure to include the statistics from the CDC. :). Felt a little better after.

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Wait. The CDC has statistics? Real ones? I thought all they had was vaccine patents and boatloads of flip-flopping masquerading as “Guidelines” for fools to “follow.” Offit would profit from your advice and I’d sure like to know how that went.

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I'm sure Offit won't respond. I can only hope my verbal smackdown will jostle a conscience somewhere in his brain.

Today, Fakebook is preventing me from tagging people on posts to my little ole page, which only reaches family and some friends. I can be intense, so I try not to inflict myself on people who aren't used to me. ;) I asked people to share the articles, posts, and data on health dept posts since Fakebook was preventing me from doing so. Now I can't tag people.

As luck would have it, a "vaccine" clinic notice from my county's health department showed up in my feed, so I tested it again. Got through their blockade and posted information, including the latest analysis of the data from EudraVigilance. It's become an entertaining game of cat and mouse.

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Excellent! I’ve been on my own tirade with Publix against masking unvaxxed employees thereby discriminating against natural immunity. FB did not allow my posting of a brighteon video in a group so that failed. I am not deterred in the least. ONWARD!

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The county responded and claimed the VAERS and EudraVigilance reports are not investigated. Well, duh. Whose fault is that? Eudravigilance has a gate keeper, so they are harder to dismiss...and Europe has more reports of injury and death for less "vaccinations". So I dropped the hammer and made multiple posts. They cut me right before this last comment...

"You are injecting them with a genetic technology that will instruct their cells to produce the spike protein...the protein that the Salk institute says is responsible for the weird, unexpected cardiovascular symptoms with infection. You are literally training their bodies to make the trillions of copies of the protein that can damage the endothelial cells lining their blood and lymph vessels. And, as my post above demonstrates, contrary to the narrative, the vaccine-encoded spike proteins can leave the injection site and were detected in the plasma in 11 of 13 study subjects."

I was so annoyed that I sent the comment though messenger. Then, a troll came to Fakebook page to harass me. I blocked her. And then asked the county comms person if the troll worked for her. I also told her that she would remember this conversation, and wondered what she would tell herself then...'cause she can't claim she didn't know.

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As gato has brilliantly pointed out, these people are shameless. I hope you’re making an impression but it is exhausting. Pace yourself. This is far from over.

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El gato, do you not fear the collapse of the global psyche that could accompany the realisation that most people have been living in a delusion? The after effects could be far worse than the virus or the lockdown, with the possible collapse in the belief in science. Maybe the "shame evading variants" (excellent phrase) may be necessary to save the collective sanity of the world. Question is: should we be complicit in supporting the paradigm that lockdowns were good science. This could be our Darkness at Noon moment, when the idealistic communists went along with their show trials to save communism.

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in a word: "no."

it was just this sort of "lying to everyone for their own good" thinking that caused this mess. it will not restore faith or get us out of it nor will we suddenly know how to use it wisely this time and not let it get out of control.

i was speaking to this a bit the other day:

https://boriquagato.substack.com/p/the-fearmongering-sorcerers-apprentice

it ALWAYS gets out of control and the gamification of manipulation runs riot even among the well intentioned. (and not all these folks are well intentioned)

further, we have to think about the next one. lockdowns did not work. at all. they did not flatten curves, reduce deaths, or have any measurable effect on the pandemic. but they ravaged economies and societies, lives and livelihoods. this has been the most damaging non wartime policy per unit time ever adopted by humans.

we cannot repeat it and if we try to pretend it worked, we're teaching people to do it again next time. that's like telling a child that they did not really burn their hand on a hot stove. any momentary benefit is far outweighed by the fact that you're setting them up for more future injury.

i see no risk of a loss of belief in science. the last 18 months have been a complete derangement of science. realizing that and realizing that these "experts" were dishonest, incompetent, and tailored their "findings" to politics, not politics to standing science and data. the way to restore faith is to call out those who ran roughshod over 100 years of evidence based pandemic guidelines and to take away their power.

the lesson here is not "science does not work" it's that "you cannot trust politicians and their hand picked experts to tell you what the science is."

pretending they were right seems a poor way to teach such a lesson.

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I do agree with you totally. Let's pray that the meltdown in global psyche doesn't occur when reality dawns. The Darkness at Noon idealism of those communists who sacrificed themselves for the cause failed to stop the inevitable emergence of the truth.

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Great insightful read.Brilliant as usual

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seen on twitter, [i won't hunt it down] some 'science guy' (bs mech eng, i studied with many none of us had a bio class) at cnn or msnbc said words to the effect 'unvaxxed would incubate new horrifying varaints'. no bio engineer used the word incubate!!

i won't go any further than to observe the 'editors' would let nothing out which does not reinforce dogma that you and i are the cause of covid cases, icu, dead etc. that we direct the virus and any case is our fault.

the editors would breech no implication that the positive 9negative i am old) RNA strands known as SARS C oV 2 are not totally under human control.

as to economy the dogma says dumping trump usingh huge unemployment does not hurt the economy....... shorter; as keynes noted 'don't [sweat the small stuff] worry the economy in the long run we are all dead'!

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all lock downs did was reduce human interaction measured in 'mobility'. that flattened the curve of death, but the flatter curve leads to more deaths at slower rate, in the end it is likely no difference in deaths and as we see no high mobility location overloaded the hospital system; uk and eu have lesser facilities than us, and were not broadly overwhelmed.

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i have seen absolutely no compelling evidence that it flattened any curves and quite a lot that it did not. when you run regressions/correlations on that mobility data and the R for cases or deaths, it's so close to zero as to be indistinguishable. you get perfect gompertz curves with mobility dropping like a rock or spiking back up with opening. none of if affects disease spread or death rate. they track as totally independent variables. i had reams of this posted on twitter back before i got de-catformed. it's really remarkable how totally it failed to do anything.

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Agree, it was the sales pitch......

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"how totally it failed to do anything." - Except it got Biden-Harris in office and reinforced Deep State across Canada, EU, Australia, New Zealand. It was never about the virus...

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Another dose of brilliant feline insight from the king of bad cats.

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