[ExI] Reality is a Communist Plot

Sat Aug 1 19:39:55 UTC 2026

On Sat, Aug 1, 2026 at 2:55 PM Gregory Jones <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

*"I know personally at least four people who were harmed by the vaccine
> (two fatalities)*

*I asked Claude (set to Extra) the following question:*

*Me: In discussing Covid somebody said to me "I know personally at least
four people who were harmed by the vaccine (two fatalities)". While not
mathematically impossible I think that is pretty unlikely. Am I right?*

*And this was Claude's answer: *

*Claude*: "Quantified statistical improbability through rigorous Fermi
estimation

*Your intuition is right*, and the numbers back it up pretty strongly.
Let's actually run it.

*The base rates.* From CDC/VAERS and academic surveillance data (Vaccine
Safety Datalink, not just raw unverified reports):

   - Myocarditis/pericarditis: roughly 6–40 per million doses depending on
   age/sex/dose number, and *it's almost never fatal — no deaths from
   vaccine-associated myocarditis were confirmed in the US* as of early
   2022, and a French cohort of over 4,600 post-vaccine myocarditis cases had
   zero in-hospital deaths and an 18-month mortality of just 0.2%
   - TTS (blood clots, J&J only): about 4 cases per million doses, with 9
   deaths among 60 confirmed cases out of 18.6 million J&J doses — but J&J was
   a small slice of total US doses.
   - Anaphylaxis: about 5 cases per million doses, rarely fatal with
   treatment.
   - Raw VAERS death reports (unverified, just temporally associated, not
   causally confirmed): 19,476 reports across 672 million doses, or 0.0029% —
   CDC is explicit that a report doesn't mean the vaccine caused it.

So even taking the most generous possible reading — treating every single
unverified VAERS death report as if it were confirmed caused by the vaccine
(which is not what CDC or epidemiologists believe) — you get roughly 1
confirmed-or-alleged death per ~13,000–35,000 vaccinated people. The actual
causally-confirmed rate is almost certainly much lower than that.

*The network math.* A generous personal network — everyone you've
meaningfully known across your whole life, not just close friends — is
maybe 500–1,500 people. At ~80% vaccination uptake, that's 400–1,200
vaccinated contacts.

Plugging in even the most charitable-to-the-claim numbers above (large
network, raw uncritical VAERS rate as the death rate), the expected number
of vaccine-caused deaths in one person's personal circle comes out to
roughly 0.02–0.09. Poisson probability of seeing 2 or more against that
expectation lands somewhere around *1-in-300 to 1-in-6,000. Using the more
defensible causally-confirmed rates instead, it drops to somewhere around
1-in-100,000 or rarer. And that's before even accounting for the "4 harmed"
part, which pushes the joint probability down further* still.

*One more tell:* in the actual data, fatality among confirmed vaccine
adverse events is low — near 0% for myocarditis, ~15% for TTS, low for
anaphylaxis. A claim of 2 deaths out of 4 total "harmed" (50%
case-fatality) *doesn't match that profile at all*. That's a separate red
flag beyond the raw base-rate math.

None of this means real vaccine injury doesn't happen — it does, in the
rare categories above. But the specific claim of personally knowing 4
harmed with 2 deaths is the kind of thing that, if we take "harmed by the
vaccine" to mean actually caused by it, *would be a wild statistical
outlier* — one you'd expect to see maybe once in many thousands of
similarly-sized personal networks, not something an ordinary person should
expect to stumble into.

The much more common explanations for anecdotes like this: post hoc
misattribution (someone who died or got sick shortly after vaccination, in
a population where the elderly and immunocompromised were vaccinated first
and have high baseline mortality/morbidity anyway), a loose definition of
"harmed" that includes common expected side effects rather than the rare
serious ones, or motivated recall within a social circle already primed to
attribute health events to the vaccine. Doesn't mean the person is lying —
just that "I know someone who..." is a notoriously unreliable way to
estimate a population-level rate, precisely because of how salient and
memorable these stories become once you're looking for them."

*John K Clark*
psr

n Sat, Aug 1, 2026 at 4:01 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 31, 2026 at 10:03 PM Gregory Jones <spike at rainier66.com>
> wrote:
>
> *> If Krugman forgot to add to his list of conspiracy theories one still
>> gaining popularity: that Covid was not a lab leak.  That one is still
>> making the rounds.  spike*
>>
>
> *I asked Claude (set to Extra) the following question "Was the cause of
> Covid a lab leak?" and this was his answer:*
> *==*
> *Claude:* "There's no scientific or intelligence consensus — the question
> remains genuinely unresolved and contested.
>
> *On the intelligence side:* U.S. agencies are split. The FBI assesses a
> lab-related origin as most likely with *moderate confidence*, and the
> Department of Energy reached a similar conclusion with l*ow confidence*.
> The CIA shifted in January 2025 to say a research-related origin is "more
> likely" than natural transmission, though only with l*ow confidence*, and
> it explicitly stated that b*oth research-related and natural origin
> scenarios remain plausible*. Other intelligence agencies continue to
> assess natural spillover as more likely, or say there's insufficient
> evidence to conclude either way.
>
> *On the scientific side:* A 2025 WHO report found the pandemic's origins
> still uncertain, noting much of the information needed to evaluate the
> lab-leak theory was never made available to investigators. While a zoonotic
> (animal-to-human) origin is currently considered the best-supported
> hypothesis by available scientific data, the WHO says the question will
> remain inconclusive until more data or information is shared. Scientists
> remain divided as well.
>
> *The core arguments on each side:*
>
>    - *Zoonotic spillover*: Early cases clustered around the Huanan wet
>    market in Wuhan, which sold live wild animals; this mirrors past
>    coronavirus outbreaks (SARS, MERS) that jumped from animals to humans.
>    - *Lab leak*: Wuhan hosts a major virology institute with a history of
>    coronavirus research; some proponents argue certain genetic features of the
>    virus, or the fact that all known cases trace to a single introduction
>    event, are more consistent with an engineered or lab-adjacent origin than a
>    natural spillover.
>
> Notably, some of this back-and-forth is politically charged — the current
> White House has published material asserting lab leak as the "true origin,"
> while under the prior administration the *CIA had stayed agnostic for
> years before its 2025 shift, which by its own account was a
> reinterpretation of existing intelligence rather than new evidence*.
>
> Bottom line: this is an active, unsettled dispute rather than a case with
> a definitive answer — treat any confident claim in either direction with
> some skepticism unless it's backed by specific new evidence."
>
> *John K Clark*
>
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>>
>> On Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:32 PM John Clark via extropy-chat <
>> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>>> Nobel prize winning economist *Paul Krugman* had something interesting
>>> to say a few days ago:
>>> ===
>>>
>>> *             Reality is a Communist Plot*
>>>
>>>
>>> *                                                    by Paul Krugman*
>>>
>>> *The Covid vaccine didn’t work, and vaccines cause autism
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/a49c1fa7-0056-4810-8036-dfa7a6f60aea?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.
>>> But hydroxychloroquine
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/da5a2025-ec96-4773-a734-a0f1be26cb4c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> worked,
>>> and so did ivermectin. Anthony Fauci killed millions of people
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/abcbf591-99ca-4400-8842-fa3dfc792cb1?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>>>
>>> *Climate change is a hoax. Wind power caused a massive TV blackout
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/c6b894f5-a94a-4880-a265-e80bbe76f163?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> during
>>> the Trump-Biden debate. Solar power is useless because the sun doesn’t
>>> shine at night, and batteries don’t exist. Smoke blanketed North America,
>>> not because of climate change, but because Canada didn’t rake
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/3fe8b8c6-18e0-4500-ab3c-750b8fd86d2f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> its
>>> 2 million square miles of boreal forest.*
>>>
>>> *We’ve destroyed Iran’s military, and the Iranian regime is begging for
>>> a deal. Also, the U.S. isn’t running out of precision weapons as a result
>>> of the Iran war, and furthermore the shortage is Joe Biden’s fault.*
>>>
>>> *The economy is in a “golden age.” Prices are down. And Trump has a 59
>>> percent approval rating
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/f477f9fb-f775-4864-a952-28d2fd71d2f5?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>.*
>>>
>>> *Trump won the 2020 election.*
>>>
>>> *Communism is the greatest threat facing America.*
>>>
>>> *The modern American right is very good at hating. MAGA hates immigrants
>>> (unless they’re white South Africans); it hates liberals; it hates
>>> scientists.*
>>>
>>> *What the ongoing show trial of Fauci
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/5381f7e7-a885-47be-8dfe-1fe50c569363?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
>>> which motivated this post — has really driven home, however, is that what
>>> Trump and his supporters hate most of all is reality. They know what they
>>> want to believe. They fly into paroxysms of rage whenever someone points
>>> out that the world isn’t what they want it to be. And they always want to
>>> shoot the messenger.*
>>>
>>> *Of course, motivated reasoning isn’t confined to the right. Some people
>>> on the left insist that zoning restrictions have no role in causing high
>>> housing prices, that it’s all about Wall Street greed. Many centrists
>>> insist that being in the middle on a left-right scale — which isn’t even
>>> how most voters think about politics
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/d4a07203-f369-4717-9c8b-c6093004660f?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o> —
>>> is the secret to electoral victory. And so on.*
>>>
>>> *I’m not immune to the temptation to believe what I want to be true. I
>>> try to fight it, but don’t always succeed. Still, I try to acknowledge and
>>> admit it when I have let wishful thinking warp my judgement.*
>>>
>>> *But what we’re seeing now isn’t run-of-the-mill motivated reasoning.
>>> It’s something far more extreme.*
>>>
>>> *If believing something suits MAGA’s prejudices and interests, they
>>> don’t hesitate: they simply insist that it’s true. They routinely dismiss
>>> scientific and statistical evidence, but they don’t stop there. They’re
>>> perfectly willing to deny reality even if the truth is staring them in the
>>> face.*
>>>
>>> *Thus, Trump urged Americans to remember that 2024 TV blackout, which
>>> nobody remembers because it didn’t happen. He insists that California has
>>> “blackouts and brownouts every weekend
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/b51cede3-a3b6-4f53-a618-0d553187cbe0?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
>>> when the state’s 39 million residents can tell you it doesn’t. He says that
>>> you must show ID to buy groceries
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/a886c68e-c550-4a12-9b0b-db828fbfbe8c?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,
>>> which everyone who buys their own food knows isn’t so.*
>>>
>>> *Do Trump and his followers actually believe these things? As I see it,
>>> that’s a category error, starting from the presumption that they even
>>> accept that objective facts exist. All the evidence (Hah! “Evidence!”) says
>>> that they don’t.*
>>>
>>> *George Orwell, whose work seems more relevant by the day, knew all
>>> about this mindset. In his essay “Looking back on the Spanish war
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/4e798ccd-8d7e-49a0-8d16-ae546e2baf0b?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>”
>>> he wrote about how the rise of totalitarianism had changed the rules:*
>>>
>>> *In the past people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously coloured
>>> what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they
>>> must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that ‘the facts’
>>> existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was
>>> always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by
>>> almost everyone.*
>>>
>>> *Totalitarians, however, denied that objective facts existed.
>>> Furthermore, reality is mutable, changing with the leader’s whims:*
>>>
>>> *If the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’ –
>>> well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two
>>> and two are five.*
>>>
>>> *If you find the assertion that MAGA has a totalitarian mindset over the
>>> top, all I can ask is, have you been following the news?*
>>>
>>> *What’s remarkable is the extent to which Republican politicians act as
>>> if they are living in a totalitarian state, when they aren’t — not yet,
>>> anyway. ICE would clearly like to be an American Stasi, policing any
>>> deviation from the party line, but it’s not able, so far, to arrest members
>>> of Congress who express skepticism about the president’s claims. And many
>>> Republican politicians still, I believe, know the difference between
>>> fantasy and reality.*
>>>
>>> *But they behave as if they were courtiers to Kim Jong Un. Trump
>>> speeches are sometimes followed by “endless applause moments
>>> <https://substack.com/redirect/249c4a19-6eff-4e54-bbd2-b3c11ac10ede?j=eyJ1IjoiNngzbm4ifQ.I1PMvYo4mI3PquTDRhL5Dev-9_ouIq3kw6ZhrVNsy8o>,”
>>> because none of Trump’s loyalists wants to be seen as the first person to
>>> stop clapping.*
>>>
>>> *The susceptibility of the GOP to this totalitarian mindset has come as
>>> a surprise even to cynics. I have some idea of how this happened: It
>>> involves a confluence of big-money corruption, crony capitalism, religious
>>> fanaticism, and the ever-present forces of racism and sexism. But that’s a
>>> subject to be delved into another day.*
>>>
>>> *What’s clear is that the war on reality is exacting a high price on
>>> America as a whole.*
>>>
>>> *Remember, 1.2 million Americans died from Covid — a number that would
>>> have been much lower if MAGA misinformation hadn’t caused so many people to
>>> refuse vaccination. Now we’re seeing a frightening rise in measles and
>>> other infectious diseases, and God help us if another pandemic strikes with
>>> Trump or his successor still in charge.*
>>>
>>> *Climate denial and hostility to renewable energy will mean more
>>> pollution even as it consigns the U.S. to energy and economic backwardness.*
>>>
>>> *And the Iran war — which Trump started and now refuses to end because
>>> he won’t accept reality — has destroyed America’s credibility and depleted
>>> our weapon stocks with stunning speed.*
>>>
>>> *But anyone pointing out the obvious is, of course, a Communist.*
>>>
>>
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