[ExI] Reality is a Communist Plot

[Gregory Jones]

I must put this debate on hold because of my current situation. My elderly
father in law has lived in Spokane Washington for 37 years.  We evacuated
with the others yesterday ahead of the fire.  Guessing it is in the
national news by now.  All are out safe but we don't yet know if he still
has a house.  It is inside the burn area on the map but we are told not all
the homes burned in there.  It took us fours hours to get to Ritzville
yesterday oy vey.  spike

On Sun, Aug 2, 2026, 4:18 AM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Aug 2, 2026 at 12:20 AM Gregory Jones <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:
>
> *> Allergic reactions that screwed up people are undercounted because the
>> correlation cannot be proven.  *
>>
>
> *For thousands of years that sort of thing has been a serious problem, but
> there is a relatively new revolutionary technique for overcoming that
> difficulty, it's called "science". Statistics show that during the Delta
> Wave variant of the COVID virus in 2021 an unvaccinated person was 10 times
> more likely to die than somebody who received one Covid shot, and 14 times
> more likely to die had they received an additional booster shot. And during
> the Omicron Wave variant of the virus in 2022  statistics show that
> unvaccinated people were 10 times more likely to die than those who got the
> primary shot, and 20 times more likely to die than those who had received
> an additional Omicron booster shot.*
>
> *To this day I make sure I'm up-to-date on my Covid shots because even now
> in the US hundreds of unvaccinated people are dying every month from Covid.
> And I also make sure I'm up-to-date on my flu vaccine shots, and shingles
> vaccine shots, and pneumonia vaccine shots, and RSV vaccine shots, and
> tetanus vaccine shots. I do this because vaccines have saved more lives
> than any other human invention. And mRNA technology has saved more lives
> than any other technology developed so far in the 21st-century.*
>
> *> The vaccine didn't work John. *
>>
>
> *BULLSHIT! I will not apologize for using that word because medical
> misinformation of that sort is killing people. The scientific consensus is
> that if every American who could've been fully vaccinated had been fully
> vaccinated then 234,000 people who died of Covid would be alive today; but
> those 234,000 people preferred to listen to what ignoramuses at Fox,
> Newsmax and Breitbart had to say about the disease rather than what
> scientific journals like Nature, Science and The New England Journal of
> Medicine had to say about the disease. And they paid the price for their
> ignorance. *
>
> *John K Clark*
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> On Sat, Aug 1, 2026, 12:40 PM John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 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*
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> 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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