[ExI] conspiracy theories, was: RE: Satoshi

Fri Aug 14 17:04:13 UTC 2026

From: John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> 
…

>> It wasn’t my theory.  I was quoting a guy named John K Clark, 

>…I don't remember saying that the best way to judge Covid death rates is by looking at ratings of TV shows….

I do.  A guy named John K Clark opined thus:

>…Well ... some people don't know much. Let's do some historical research and divide Americans from January 2020 into two groups: 

>…1) People who got their news primarily from Twitter/X, Breitbart and Fox.

>…2) People who got their news primarily from Science, Nature and The New York Times.

>…You'll find that people from group #2 were FAR more likely to live through the next 2 years without dying from Covid than people from group #1. Why is that? Because ignorance can be lethal, although people from group #1 wouldn't explain it that way, they would say the only reason it's true is because reality has a liberal bias…  John K Clark

We must compare similar media.  FoxNews and CNN are television (I don’t get either because I don’t pay for cable (it isn’t worth it to me in spite of their blond bombshells they routinely have as anchors (I would cheerfully watch them with the sound muted (but my bride would be suspicious)))) so we can measure them against each other using Neilsen ratings.  Did that.  By the (questionable) reasoning presented, FoxNews slew about 7% of its audience, CNN about 40% of theirs.  The surviving people have spoken.  I tossed in Reason, but it isn’t TV show, so its breakeven over that period is just for fun, not directly comparable.

The NYTimes is a newspaper, which has no direct metric to measure against TwitterX, Breitbart and Fox.  Since TwitterX is free, one must compare with other free media available since before the pandemic.  FacebookMeta grew during the pandemic, but not nearly as fast as TwitterX.  BlueSky opened to the general public in February 2024, so it isn’t clear the data from that is useful.

>…Did you look at my thread "Political ideology, vaccine hesitancy, and death"? I think Claude found a way of comparing Democratic and Republican death rates during the pandemic, both before and after the vaccine became available, that was just a teeny tiny bit better than TV ratings.

John K Clark

I did view that thread and found it highly questionable.  I don’t recall anyone at the hospital asking about my political orientation when I was sick with covid.  Had they done so, I would be most concerned about that line of inquiry.  

The statistics rely on how states voted, but red states and blue states are all very similar in that they have very red rural areas with very blue dots.  Before we can draw any reliable conclusions, we must determine the actual (former) political orientation of the covid corpses, then inquire as to their news sources, rather than presume that we know.

What we think of as the color of states is really a population ratio of urban to rural.  Think about it.  The political needs of urban people are just fundamentally different from the political needs of rural people.  The way a state votes is determined by the percentage of the population which lives in a city vs not.  That’s all you need really, urban vs rural.  Nothing more.  Covid traveled differently in the crowded city than in the open countryside.

The reason this is important: improving internet and StarLink enables more people to live and work outside of crowded cities.  Over time, this influences politics, for understandable reasons.

spike

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