tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67564341407941298862024-03-17T20:02:28.375-07:00Knowing HumansStudy their behaviors. Observe their territorial boundaries. Leave their habitat as you found it. Report any signs of intelligence.Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.comBlogger193125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-54178732534041586132024-03-10T15:46:00.000-07:002024-03-10T15:50:15.468-07:00Kapor Should Concede To Kurzweil<p>In 2002, <a href="https://longbets.org/1/">Mitch Kapor bet Ray Kurzweil $20K that "by 2029 no computer or machine intelligence will have passed the Turing Test."</a> Given the recent progress in LLMs, Kapor's arguments are not holding up very well. The following parts of his essay are now cringe-worthy:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>It is impossible to foresee when, or even if, a machine intelligence will be able to paint a picture which can fool a human judge.</li><li>While it is possible to imagine a machine obtaining a perfect score on the SAT or winning Jeopardy--since these rely on retained facts and the ability to recall them--it seems far less possible that a machine can weave things together in new ways or to have true imagination in a way that matches everything people can do, especially if we have a full appreciation of the creativity people are capable of. This is often overlooked by those computer scientists who correctly point out that it is not impossible for computers to demonstrate creativity. Not impossible, yes. Likely enough to warrant belief in a computer can pass the Turing Test? In my opinion, no. </li><li>When I contemplate human beings [as embodied, emotional, self-aware beings], it becomes extremely difficult even to imagine what it would mean for a computer to perform a successful impersonation, much less to believe that its achievement is within our lifespan.</li><li>Part of the burden of proof for supporters of intelligent machines is to develop an adequate account of how a computer would acquire the knowledge it would be required to have to pass the test. Ray Kurzweil's approach relies on an automated process of knowledge acquisition via input of scanned books and other printed matter. However, I assert that the fundamental mode of learning of human beings is experiential. Book learning is a layer on top of that. Most knowledge, especially that having to do with physical, perceptual, and emotional experience is not explicit, never written down. It is tacit. We cannot say all we know in words or how we know it. But if human knowledge, especially knowledge about human experience, is largely tacit, i.e., never directly and explicitly expressed, it will not be found in books, and the Kurzweil approach to knowledge acquisition will fail. It might be possible to produce a kind of machine as idiot savant by scanning a library, but a judge would not have any more trouble distinguishing one from an ordinary human as she would with distinguishing a human idiot savant from a person not similarly afflicted. It is not in what the computer knows but what the computer does not know and cannot know wherein the problem resides.</li><li>The brain's actual architecture and the intimacy of its interaction, for instance, with the endocrine system, which controls the flow of hormones, and so regulates emotion (which in turn has an extremely important role in regulating cognition) is still virtually unknown. In other words, we really don't know whether in the end, it's all about the bits and just the bits. Therefore Kurzweil doesn't know, but can only assume, that the information processing he wants to rely on in his artificial intelligence is a sufficiently accurate and comprehensive building block to characterize human mental activity.</li><li>My prediction is that contemporary metaphors of brain-as-computer and mental activity-as-information processing will in time also be superceded [sic] and will not prove to be a basis on which to build human-level intelligent machines (if indeed any such basis ever exists).</li><li>Without human experiences, a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it by probing its ability to communicate about the quintessentially human.</li></ul><div>Kapor's only hope in this bet depends on removing the "human experience/quintessence" decorations from his core claim that "a computer cannot fool a smart judge bent on exposing it". There are no general-purpose LLMs in 2024 that could pass 2 hours of adversarial grilling by machine learning experts, and there probably won't be in 2029 either. But with sufficient RHLF investment, one could tune an LLM to be very hard to distinguish from a human foil -- even for ML experts. </div><div>So Kurzweil arguably should win by the spirit of the bet, but whether he wins by the letter of the bet will depend on somebody tuning a specialized judge-fooling LLM. That investment might be far more than the $20K stakes. Such an LLM would not be general-purpose, because it would have to be dumbed-down and de-woked enough to not be useful for much else. </div><div>I predict that by 2029 we will not yet have AGI as defined by OpenAI: highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work. A strong version of this definition would say "expert humans". A weak version would say "most humans" and "cognitive work". I don't think we'll have even such weak AGI by 2029. But beware the last-human-job fallacy, which is similar to the last-barrel-of-oil fallacy. AI will definitely be automating many human cognitive tasks, and will have radical impacts on how humans are employed, but AI-induced mass unemployment is unlikely in my lifetime. And mass unemployability is even less likely.</div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-53190147412676338142023-07-21T14:08:00.003-07:002023-07-21T14:18:00.463-07:00Barbie's Hidden Post-Feminist Message<p>Spoilers ahead!</p><p>Greta Gerwig's Barbie is a very entertaining movie, and is surely the least-flawed feminist manifesto you'll ever find in summer-blockbuster format. The film has a few minor problems and two major ones -- one of which just might be the film's hidden post-feminist message.</p><p>The Matriarchy in Barbie Land (BL) starts off as a powerful satire of our Patriarchy. The gender roles in BL are a complete (though sexless) reversal from the power structure that feminists say obtains in the Real World (RW). The indictment of RW Patriarchy is all the more effective because the Barbies innocently find the Matriarchy unremarkable, while the Kens are only vaguely frustrated at having their worth determined entirely by the Barbie gaze. (Gerwig made sure to use "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Male_gaze">gaze</a>" in the script here.)</p><p>There are a few noticeable flaws in the script, that could have been fixed without undercutting the powerful Galt-like speech that Gerwig speaks through her self-insert character Gloria (ably played by America Ferrera). The two most obvious:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Gloria's husband is a throwaway character, with maybe 3 uninteresting lines in 3 unimportant scenes. In this film he's the dog who didn't bark, a Chekhov's gun loaded with blanks and never fired. His only purpose in the film seems to be to blunt potential criticism that Gloria's speech is that of a bitter single mom. But his character didn't need to be so glaringly irrelevant. A few minutes of well-used screen time for him could have established that Gloria's indictment can still be validly issued from inside a normal marriage.</li><li>Ken returns to BL after experiencing Patriarchy in the RW for at most a few hours. He then is able to effortlessly conquer BL off-screen using just the idea of Patriarchy. This gives Patriarchy far too much credit, even considering how innocent the Barbies are. But perhaps the alternative would be problematic: if Patriarchy uses mechanisms instead of magic, then its actual workings would have to be examined, and Ken doing actual work might give him agency and sympathy. Still, other alternatives can be imagined, e.g. Ken returning with patriarchal cultural media. If Patriarchy works like a magic wand, then critiquing it becomes harder than necessary.</li></ul><div>A much bigger problem with the film was one on which Gerwig felt forced to <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/LampshadeHanging">hang a lampshade</a>: pretty privilege. That topic is brushed off with a fourth-wall-breaking one-line admission by the narrator that Margot Robbie is still very pretty even when she thinks she isn't. Mattel knew better than to open that can of worms, which is avoided for the rest of the movie. There are attractive plus-size Barbies and attractive wheelchair Barbies, but there is no analogue to Ken's homely friend Allen (inevitably played by Michael Sera). The topic is almost encountered at the end of the film, when a smartly-dressed Barbie says "wish me luck" as she bounces toward what we're to think is her first job interview in the RW. What viewer could possibly question how a Margot Robbie look-alike will fare in the job market? But mid-brow feminism doesn't want to grapple with subjects like pretty privilege or height privilege. The first rule of Victim's Club is: never admit any privilege or responsibility, because fighting injustice might be harder if we address inconvenient truths. Target the easy wins, because the ends justify the means.</div><div>Unlike so many films aimed at youth, Barbie's villains were not villainous because they were businessmen -- they were villainous because they were <i>men</i>. The script inadvertently gives a stirring defense of capitalism at one point. When Gloria suggests marketing a new normal/average Barbie -- prettiness level unspecified! -- the Male CEO summarily dismisses the idea. But when a Marketing Man computes that this product would be very profitable, Male CEO instantly endorses the idea. Gerwig here seemingly admits that dollars are not only colorblind but also gender-blind.</div><div>The only jabs at capitalism in Barbie were some throwaway lines plus a boardroom stuffed with men who -- like every man in the RW with a speaking line -- were 100% caricatures. (And like the Kens, they were admirably diverse. Gerwig can't be expected to oppose sexism <i>and</i> racism in the same film.) By the end of the film, Mattel's image is rescued by the ghost of Barbie's dead inventor. Indeed, the whole movie can be read as a cleverly subversive way to co-opt feminism to defend the Barbie franchise from feminist criticism.</div><div>And this gestures toward the true flaw -- or true genius -- of the film. Simplistic anti-feminists will complain that the film demonizes and caricatures men, but our culture's norms have many problems worth criticizing -- and "Patriarchy" is a useful handle onto many of them. Gloria's speech makes a one-sided but powerful critique of those norms. Unfortunately, its effect can be seen as undermined by the climax of the film, when the Barbies overthrow Ken's newborn magical Patriarchy and completely restore the Matriarchy. But under Matriarchy 2, the Barbies are fully conscious of the gender asymmetry -- and they admit out loud that they just don't care. By a Straussian reading, this could be the film's true post-feminist message: women are not only just as good as men, but also just as bad.</div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-52249562070902548922023-02-22T22:27:00.001-08:002023-02-22T22:28:06.679-08:00Mother Mother Was Not Marceline<p>On the <a href="https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=29084">Death Tape</a> recording of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown">1978 mass murder-suicide in Jonestown</a>, Jim Jones repeatedly implores the parents to poison their children without hysterics. At 36m45s he nearly shouts:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman, Times, serif;">Mother, Mother,
Mother, Mother, Mother, please. </span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman", Times, serif;">Mother,
please, please, please. Don’t– don’t do this. Don’t do this. Lay down your life with your child. But don’t
do this.</span></p></blockquote><p>Notable survivors of Peoples Temple speculate that he was rebuking his wife, Marceline Jones. Their only biological child, Stephan Carter, was not in Jonestown that day, but is <a href="https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=32388">convinced</a> it must have been his mother. Tim Carter was in Jonestown for the beginning of the poisonings, and saw his wife and infant son die. He points out that in Peoples Temple only Jim Jones could be called "Father", and that only Marceline was called "Mother". In at least one recent interview (2018 Terror In The Jungle), Carter says that Marceline was screaming "stop this!" However, the documentary does not give any details about when or how Carter heard this. There is no corroboration for these assertions in either the Death Tape or in the published eyewitness accounts. Instead, we know this:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Moments before the revolutionary suicide meeting, as the assembled crowd awaited their fate in the pavilion, Marceline was conferring mere steps away with the JT leadership: JJ, Beam, McElvane, Katsaris, Johnny Jones, Harriet Tropp. Tim Carter noticed Dick Tropp arguing alone against suicide, with no support from Marceline. Instead, Harriet chides her brother as "just afraid to die".</li><li>During the meeting, mere minutes before the poisoning begins, Marceline calmly helps shame and bully Christine Miller for arguing against mass suicide. Marceline does this after hearing Jones announce that the departing Ryan delegation has been targeted for murder: "some have stolen children from others, and they are in pursuit right now to kill them". She knows that this White Night is not a drill.</li><li>Children were already being poisoned when Tim Carter sees his son and wife get poisoned. This is at least 20 minutes before Carter on his way out of Jonestown distantly hears Jones say "mother, mother, mother" over the PA. Carter thinks this was Marceline opposing the poisoning of children. But Carter was on the pavilion stage with 10 to 15 children's bodies already on the ground, and in no interview has he reported any opposition by Marceline specifically at this time -- the only time he was present at the poisonings.</li><li>While Maria Katsaris is on the PA trying to speed up the poisoning of the children, JJ calmly says "Marceline, they've got forty minutes". There's no sound on the tape here indicating opposition from Marceline.</li><li>Survivor Odell Rhodes was probably still at the pavilion during "mother, mother", and survivor Stanley Clayton definitely was, because he stayed until only 100-200 were left alive. They both reported people resisting poisoning e.g. spitting it out. They surely would have noticed and later reported it if Marceline was dissenting strongly enough for Father to passionately rebuke her over the P.A.</li><li>During the "mother, mother" rebuke, a woman is screaming -- most likely the very woman Jones is rebuking. Jones tells the mother: "Lay down your life with your child." Marceline's children in Jonestown were all adults. Son Lew died with the elite leaders in Jones' cabin. Security leader Johnny Brown wouldn't have taken poison early, with the children. And daughter Agnes was 35. There was no "child" of Marceline's present to lay down her life with. Her body was not next to any of her children.</li><li>The recording pauses after the "mother, mother" rebuke, and the very next thing on the tape is Marceline calmly saying "--want the children out of S.C.U. [Special Care Unit]". She apparently was helping make sure that no children survived.</li><li>Jones was continually pausing and resuming the tape, trying to control what got recorded for posterity. On multiple occasions toward the end, he briefly turned on the recording to sternly shame and rebuke the parents of screaming children. But if a PT leader as prominent as Marceline were suddenly opposing the suicides, he surely wouldn't have recorded that embarrassing dissent.</li><li>In "Awake in a Nightmare" (Feinsod, 1981), Marceline consoles Odell Rhodes at a point after the "mother, mother" scolding, as the two of them comfort dying chidlren. In this detailed recounting of Rhodes' story, there is no hint that Marceline had just been scolded -- nor that she spoke up for the children.</li></ul>Marceline Jones is widely treated as a sympathetic figure among survivors and researchers of Peoples Temple. She indeed worked frantically a year earlier in Sept. 1977 to avert a mass-suicide ultimatum that Jim Jones had issued. She surely would have preferred that Jonestown not die. But when the oft-rehearsed mass suicide finally became reality, we have no evidence that she spoke up against it. Instead, we hear her shame the one woman who did.<p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-53550050607167679692022-11-03T13:22:00.004-07:002022-11-03T13:22:50.130-07:002020 Election Stolen Fair and Square<p>The 2020 election was "stolen" fair and square: via Russia collusion hype, Ukraine impeachment charade, Reade/Hunter non-coverage, pandemic politicization, pandemic election regulations, de-platforming, vaccine announcement delay, etc.</p><p>Isaac Saul at Skeptic.com ably <a href="https://www.skeptic.com/reading_room/not-rigged-how-we-know-recent-elections-not-fraudulent/">debunks</a> Democrat claims that 2016 was stolen, and Trumper claims that 2020 was stolen (with a detailed focus on Georgia).</p><p>Republicans Ted Olson, Mitch McConnell et al. <a href="https://lostnotstolen.org/">analyze</a> the 64 cases Trumpers filed against the results -- losing all cases but one. Both authors have long been demonized by Democrats -- Olson for his involvement in Bush v. Gore, and McConnell for packing the Supreme Court with conservatives.</p><p>Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/19/nevertrumps-latest-attempt-to-dismiss-election-concerns-is-particularly-dishonest/">complains</a> that Olson's team are anti-Trump, and that their analysis doesn't explore the losing cases in detail. But Hemingway doesn't even try to defend Trumper claims of hacked voting machines and fraudulent ballots, dismissing those long-debunked claims as "red herrings". Hemingway instead focuses on pandemic-related procedural changes and technicalities like having changed counties in the month before the election. Hemingway's article doesn't dare charge that any of these issues resulted in a single faked vote for Biden. Turns out she's as embarrassed by Trump's fraud claims as are the Never Trumpers she vilifies.</p><p>The Democrats didn't need to secretly fake ballots or hack voting counts in order to steal the 2020 election. They media "stole" it for them in broad daylight, and then <a href="https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/">bragged</a> about it.</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-57262582260696886302022-10-28T15:00:00.003-07:002022-11-01T14:06:26.048-07:00What They Don't Tell You About Airtags<p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>The Find My page on icloud.com does not show AirTags.</li><li>The FindMy app in MacOS (Monterey 12.6) does not reliably show you the locations of your AirTags. On one Monterey Mac, Find My took 24 hours before it started showing their location, while my other Monterey Mac still hasn't listed any AirTags after a week. All flavors of Find My can locate all my Macs and iPhones, so this is not an AppleID problem, but instead apparently an Apple policy. I suspect they are trying to discourage free-riding by people (like me) who don't use iOS. (I use an old SIM-less iPhone to register my AirTags, to find them if I ever need to.)</li><li>Unlike with Tile, you cannot share your AirTags with anyone. So only my AppleID can see the locations of our pets.</li><li>AirTags have anti-stalking privacy features that limit their usefulness as anti-theft trackers. (Admittedly, Apple advises not to use them to track stolen items.) Anti-stalking features kick in only when your AirTag is out of Bluetooth contact with any device on which your AppleID is signed in.</li><ul><li>If your AirTag is away from your devices for >N hours, then it will beep for about 10 seconds. N seems to be about 24, but Apple presumably can change this at any time. I've seen this happen for 2 AirTags, but haven't yet experienced a 2nd beep on either.</li><li>If your AirTag is away from your devices but some other iOS device remains in Bluetooth range while the device is moving, then iOS warns you that you might be being stalked. If the unattended AirTag remains in range for >10 minutes, iOS will offer the option to make the the AirTag beep. You can even do this on Android, if you manually run Apple's tracker scanner app.</li></ul><li>These anti-stalking features mean that smart car thieves can find your AirTag in only 10 minutes, while dumber thieves might notice it when they drive the car a day later.</li><li>There are YouTube videos explaining how to remove the speaker from your AirTag. Doing so made my AirTag barely audible to me only if I hold it against my ear, but inaudible a foot away.</li><li>Of the 2 4-packs of AirTags I recently bought, one had no removable speaker, and yet still makes the full beeping noise. Has Apple changed their design to foil AirTag silencing?</li><li>iPhone 11 and newer can use Ultra-Wide Band to pinpoint any AirTag's location to within inches. I don't know yet if this capability is restricted to the AirTag's owner, versus being available to potential stalking targets. If the latter, then smart car thieves with a modern iPhone will be able to find any AirTag you hide in your car.</li></ul><div>There are so many iPhones here in the Bay Area that my AirTags got pinged every 5 minutes during a test drive -- even while sitting in a parking lot. By comparison, my Tile got pinged only twice in 30 minutes.</div><div>So I'll be hiding muted AirTags in our cars and e-bikes, and hoping that car thieves don't read my blog.</div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-84373758216874010212022-09-01T13:41:00.004-07:002022-09-01T13:49:01.503-07:00Claremont Theist Embarrassed By Theology<p>In the conservative Claremont Review, Spencer Klavan <a href="https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/worlds-without-end">uses</a> the Marvel multiverse to launch a survey of many-worlds theory that starts well but stumbles badly halfway through.</p><p>Klavan ably summarizes the Marvel multiverse and the related science of quantum physics. He touches on the idea of possible intelligent design in the life-friendly fixing of our universe's two-dozen fundamental constants. He even admits that we can dispense with a designer if we take the simple but breathtaking step of considering all possible universes to be equally real. But his stumbling begins when he posits that this step is just hubris from physicists, instead of exploring the academic philosophy behind the idea: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_realism">Modal Realism</a>.</p><p>Klavan is trivially correct to complain that multiversal realism should not pretend to be a scientific/empirical truth, on par with quantum physics or Big Bang cosmology. But he uses this strawman to ignore the possibility that a multiverse theory can be epistemologically superior to his preferred theory (involving a loving God who "invites" humankind to know "His glory"). Klavan simply shrinks from the challenge of comparing two philosophical theories: 1) that all universes are equally real, or 2) our universe was created and fine-tuned by a loving superhero of unknown origin, operating via unknowable mechanisms, and who reportedly has an obsessive interest in H. sapiens.</p><p>Here is the closest he can bring himself to a bake-off between those two theories:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p style="text-align: left;">They are competing theologies—one of them handed down to us through ancestral wisdom, the other dictated to us by scientistic pseudo-clerics and by the spirit of our fractious age. One way of adjudicating between theologies, though, is to ask whether they can inspire art that expresses the full range of man’s nature in a satisfying way. </p></blockquote><p>That's it. No discussion of parsimony. No discussion of the epistemological trade-offs in the two offerings. Just a fawning hand-wave toward "ancestral wisdom", coupled with a drive-by ad-hominem against "scientistic pseudo-clerics". And then a silly attempt to use artistic track records as a way to adjudicate the truth-value of competing theories.</p><p>The giveaway, of course, is that Klavan calls them "competing theologies" instead of "competing epistemologies". In doing so, he circularly smuggles into his argument his foregone conclusion: that any fundamental explanation of existence should be considered a "theology". With his unquestioned assumption that any theory of reality must posits gods (or their equivalents), it's easy to shill for your society's traditional sky-fathers.</p><p>The subtext here is amusing: Klavan recognizes that the crutch of "theology" is embarrassing for any modern philosophy, and his only defense of it is to allege that the other side is guilty of it too. Only a few centuries ago, theologians were proud of their vocation, and claimed to have multiple independent proofs of the existence of their god. (Aquinas had five!) Now, even theists accidentally use "theology" as a kind of intellectual slur. Game over.</p><p>Claremont is supposed to represent the pinnacle of current intellectual conservatism. Is this really the best they've got?</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-43080055434098487192022-04-02T15:55:00.001-07:002022-04-02T16:03:07.023-07:00The Drug of Myth Arc<p> Here are my favorite live-action sci-fi/fantasy/superhero dramas:</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>The Boys</li><li>Battlestar Galactica</li><li>Westworld</li><li>Heroes</li><li>Legion</li><li>Humans</li><li>The Expanse</li><li>Watchmen</li><li>The Umbrella Academy</li><li>Jessica Jones</li><li>The Man in the High Castle</li></ol><p></p><p>Why do these shows all lean so heavily on <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MythArc">Myth Arc</a>? Can't anyone do a riveting long-arc fantasy series that doesn't rely on glacial revelation of some secret plan that some of the characters have known from the beginning? </p><p>You could argue that the alternative would just be a soap opera, but there have been great ones: Sopranos, Vikings, Rome, House of Cards. I suppose having a Myth Arc has since Babylon 5 been table stakes for a fantasy series. (Even more so now in the age of streaming, which doesn't worry about viewers starting in the middle). You could in theory write a fantasy series without a Myth Arc (or a comedy series without romantic tension), but it would be like opening a coffee/tea shop without any caffeine on the menu. Your prospective customers would just patronize somebody else willing to deal them the drug they demand.</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-18029197071742443072022-01-03T23:13:00.001-08:002022-01-03T23:15:56.514-08:00My Million Dollar Pandemic Mistake<p>I moved my 401Ks from equities to bonds on 2020-03-09, the week before the market bottom. For various reasons, I did not move back into equities until May 2021. I finally admitted to myself that I shouldn't try to avoid a market peak if I obviously couldn't avoid a market trough.</p><p>But my fundamental mistake wasn't merely that I tried to time (i.e. outsmart) the market. My real mistake was rationalizing the pandemic as a one-time excuse to end my 25-year streak of following <a href="http://simplyrich.com/">Less Antman's investment strategy</a>. Less explains it better than I could, below. (And no, I can't claim that his "check the stores" test justifies my mistake. I work in e-commerce, and we were never closed.)</p><p><i>(1) The wealth of a society is in the goods and services produced, and not in the monetary system. Check the stores: they're still open, providing lots of goods and services, and owning shares of the world's most profitable businesses makes your wealth as safe as the continued provision of those goods and services (if they disappear, money is useless).</i></p><p><i>(2) SOMEBODY has to own stocks at all times: the so-called "flight to quality" actually represents some people panicking out of the true source of wealth and handing ownership of these sources at fire sale prices to other people in exchange for green pieces of paper with pictures of presidents on them that aren't guaranteed to be redeemable for anything. Someone once described a bear market as "that time period during which stocks are returned to their rightful owners."</i></p><p><i>(3) Diversify, diversify, diversify. Own lots of businesses in lots of industries in lots of countries.</i></p><p><i>(4) The much higher rewards of equities over the long term result primarily from the uncertainty of returns over the short term. Thank the volatility: it is your best friend in the end. Here is why:</i></p><p><i>Stockholders are owners of businesses, and owners get paid last, after employees, contractors, suppliers, and creditors. So changes in available revenue affect owners first, and that is the source of a great deal of uncertainty and occasional outright panic. Point granted: stocks are much more volatile than bonds and cash, and employees have a much more predictable flow of wages than their bosses do of dividends and capital gains. Yet since owners are paid last, in the long run they can be expected to be paid most — not always and certainly not in all companies, but for someone who owns a globally diversified portfolio of the world’s productive businesses, it’s a pretty good guess. My purpose in life is to tell my clients this as often as necessary.</i></p><p><i>So might I suggest that you remind yourself during scary times, why you’re invested in stocks? You’re providing the service of accepting the short-term uncertainty that others want to avoid. You’re the rock, the stable source of capital for businesses, without which market economies cannot function. Be a rock and react like a rock to the non-news that human nature goes through periodic bouts of extreme fear.</i></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-65687606174910853802022-01-01T16:31:00.004-08:002022-01-04T14:31:14.621-08:00My 2021 Predictions<p>I had a good year for predictions. The only thing I got arguably wrong was to predict the jury would convict Rittenhouse on the weapons charge, but technically the prediction wasn't tested as the judge dismissed that charge before the jury could consider it. (I still would bet that the jury would say they would have convicted on that charge if it reached them.)</p><p>In <a href="https://blog.knowinghumans.net/2021/03/sars-cov-2-might-be-lab-leak.html">March</a> and <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1378449691130556416">April</a> I was thinking there was a reasonable chance that SARS-CoV-2 was a lab leak. But after tuning into the debate on Twitter, by <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1427849981461897217">August</a> my estimate was 20% and was still dropping in <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1461756199309770752">November</a>. In <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1467141885856681987">December</a> I said "Expect the CCP to successfully promote indefinite uncertainty".</p><p>In May I <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1389472217692479491">promoted</a> an article by The Drive about adversary drone tech, and I said "I bet China, not aliens" are behind any serious phenomena that the Navy is seeing. Now, per Mick West, I would rate mistaken identity even more likely than adversary tech for even the most interesting incidents.</p><p>In May there was a flurry of enthusiasm over a claim of fungal spheres growing on Mars. I unsuccessfully <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1390712662858735616">offered</a> Robin Hanson 10:1 odds that this claim would fizzle quickly. Nobody seems to be talking about it any more.</p><p>In June I created a <a href="https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7384/alien-tech-in-solar-system-before-2030/">question on Metaculus</a> about whether it will be widely accepted by 2030 that alien technology has visited our solar system. The community of 59 forecasters agrees with my prediction of 1% chance. If Metaculus allowed lower bets, I would say 1/1000.</p><p>In the run-up to the Pentagon's <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1408844506749825026">disappointing</a> late-June release of UFO info, I successfully <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1396862655504130049">predicted in May</a> that there would by Jan 1 (today) be no public</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>CONTINUOUS multi-sensor track of hypersonic or hyper-G behavior</li><li>sensor data contradicting Mick West's explanations of the 3 Navy videos</li><li>imagery any harder to explain than the 3 Navy videos</li></ul><div>Alas, I could not get any UFO enthusiasts to take bets on this.</div><div>In June I noted a shocking "big news" claim by anti-vaxxer Steve Kirsch about recent mortality data as the vaccines rolled out. An obscure Twitter user pointed out that the alleged anomaly was normal, and I successfully <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1477422198381973504">predicted</a> his explanation would hold up. Kirsch later deleted his "big news" tweet.</div><div>In November I successfully <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1457924096700784641">predicted</a> the outcome of the Rittenhouse case and ensuing lack of riots. After the verdict I <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1461771274045124616">predicted</a> that "2A advocates unfamiliar with Rittenhouse's internet footprint will be disappointed in him as a 2A poster child". The jury is still out on that one.</div><div>In November I <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1462124619788214274">endorsed</a> the pre-omicron view that the ZeroCovid policies of China/Australia/NZ had clearly stopped making any sense. Omicron reinforces this view. It's going to be interesting if Omicron variolation combines with vaccination to finally turn Covid into "no worse than the flu". Expect to hear "I told you so" from both China/NZ lockdown extremists as well as from anti-vax/anti-mandate extremists. I predict that everyone will end up believing they were right all along about this pandemic, which means that our species will be no better prepared for the next one.</div><div>After the SCOTUS abortion oral argument, I <a href="https://twitter.com/brianholtz1965/status/1466185447495770116">predicted</a> on Dec 1 a 75% chance that the court will overturn Casey's viability line, and this will badly hurt the GOP.</div><div>In December I debunked a pro-vax claim about a 4-yr-old dying of Covid, but said that the rest of the list of 253 ["covidiot deaths"] at http://sorryantivaxxer.com are unlikely to be debunked.</div><div>In December I <a href="https://blog.knowinghumans.net/2021/12/q-unmasked.html">published</a> my earlier conclusions on the identities of Q. I say there is only a 10% chance that any substantial fraction of Q's output was done independently of the team I identified. All five of my specific predictions about Trump/Q in that post will continue to hold up.</div><div><br /></div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-29384275105774770232021-12-04T12:43:00.005-08:002022-12-12T06:14:17.426-08:00Q Unmasked<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTzNPK0_So1NtejDKfQdu62vJZHnUF5hPPsJ6ZnEWQG0-aal9qqHJaCFgOGI6Ta7xY23w-WWVQnT_WNN1GrNxBKgMD4Fy_xJfyedi0BElNTjyBjdPx54eKjCIYQdXl56VDtFlpl5Hcii1R/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="232" data-original-width="672" height="221" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTzNPK0_So1NtejDKfQdu62vJZHnUF5hPPsJ6ZnEWQG0-aal9qqHJaCFgOGI6Ta7xY23w-WWVQnT_WNN1GrNxBKgMD4Fy_xJfyedi0BElNTjyBjdPx54eKjCIYQdXl56VDtFlpl5Hcii1R/w640-h221/image.png" width="640" /></a></div><br />[These notes were drafted April 2021 but not cleaned up and posted because my interest in Q waned as QAnons largely stopped claiming Trump is still really president. Publishing now in Dec 2021 to summarize the available Q evidence. Nothing here is original/novel, but I haven't before seen this info collected in one place.][Dec 2022 update: excellent Q overview <a href="https://www.mysticmag.com/psychic-reading/what-is-qanon/">here</a>.]<p></p><h2>Summary</h2><div>The original anonymous 4chan Q LARP was hijacked by Coleman Rogers and Paul Furber, who were joined by -- and later expelled by -- Ron Watkins and his father Jim (pictured above).</div><div><ul><li>2017-10 Q begins as one of many anonymous 4chan LARPs (FBIAnon, HLIAnon, CIAAnon, CIA Intern, WH Insider Anon), probably as confessed by users Microchip and Dreamcatcher.</li><li>2017-11 Q identity is assumed by Coleman Rogers (PamphletAnon), working with Paul Furber (BaruchtheScribe), Rogers' wife Christina Urso (Radix) and perhaps Tracy Diaz (TracyBeanz) and Jerome Corsi. Ron Watkins (CodeMonkeyZ) soon joins the team.</li><li>2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan, controlled by Ron Watkins and his father Jim. Furber is expelled from Q, and claims Q is now an imposter.</li><li>2018-08 Rogers is expelled from Q, leaving the Watkins in control.</li></ul></div><h2>Timeline</h2><ul><li>2017-10-05 Trump: "Maybe it's the calm before the storm."</li><li>2017-10-28 #1 "HRC extradition already in motion"</li><li>2017-11 Rogers+Furber+Diaz create /r/CBTS_Stream</li><li>2017-11-09 #128 Q begins using Matlock tripcode</li><li>2017-11-25 Rogers+Furber+Diaz "gain control" of Q</li><li>2017-12-01c Q 1st post on 8chan CBTS</li><li>2017-12 Q changes tripcode to M@tlock!</li><li>2017-12 Jerome Corsi, Infowars</li><li>2018-01 Q moves from 4chan to 8chan with same tripcode</li><li>2018-01-05 Furber says original Q tripcode is compromised [e1 49m], Rogers disagrees</li><li>2018-01 Mon Furber removes both of Q's tripcodes</li><li>2018-01-09 Q joins Rogers' 8chan /thestorm #515 e153m</li><li>2018-03 /r/CBTS_Stream removed from reddit</li><li>2018-04 Corsi says imposter takes over Q</li><li>2018-04-08 #1082 JFKjr</li><li>2018-04 Rogers creates Patriots' Soapbox</li><li>2018-05-19 Q accidentally leaks too-long tripcode NowC@mesTHEP@in--23!!!</li><li>2018-06-15 Rogers "finds" anonymous Q post unsigned by tripcode</li><li>2018-07 /r/greatawakening removed from reddit</li><li>2018-09-18 #2224 /CM pls confirm #2226 Q knows # of IPs!</li><li>2018-12-12 Q says JFKjr not alive</li><li>2019-08 8chan goes offline</li><li>2019-11 8kun replaces 8chan</li><li>2020-02 Jim Watkins registers "Disarm the Deep State" PAC</li><li>2020-02-17 #3872 "Game Over" the day Fred Brennan flees Watkins-triggered prosecution in Philippines</li><li>2020-06-06 #4437 Q posts Python code</li><li>2020-07 Twitter bans 7K QAnon accounts</li><li>2020-12-08 last Q drop</li></ul><h2>Q Fails</h2><div><ul><li>2017-10-31 #15 The wizards and warlocks (inside term) will not allow another SATANic Evil POS control our country.</li><li>2020-06-04 #4414 Central communications blackout [never happened]</li><li>2020-06-11 #4455 What happens when Ds can no longer CHEAT ELECTRONICALLY? Push vote-by-mail? [Oops, Q ignorant of Dominion.]</li><li>2020-06-24 #4755 The 'Election Infection' cannot stop what is coming.</li><li>2020-09-16 #4722 They will: not concede on Election Night, contest this legally in battleground states, project doubt in the election results, organize massive riots. Playbook known. [Trump, not Dems, did all 4 of these things.]</li></ul></div><h2>Q Uninformed</h2><div><ul><li>Q never mentioned Covid/pandemic until 2020-03-23. Q spent Jan-Feb of 2020 mostly talking about impeachment, and was unusually quiet in March. The "Plandemic" obviously surprised Q, who later said it was planned in advance to disrupt Trump re-election.</li><li>Q never mentioned Hunter Biden until 2020-02-06.</li><li>Q has never mentioned Dominion or Smartmatic.</li><li>Q has never mentioned the 2019 Ukraine impeachment whistleblower Eric Ciaramella.</li><li>Q has never mentioned Miles Taylor, the the HSA chief of staff who secretly wrote in 2018 in the NY Times "I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration".</li></ul></div><h2>Q Was Not An Intelligence Insider</h2><h2><ul style="font-size: medium; font-weight: 400;"><li>Q chose to first go public on 4chan, a site full of racism and porn.</li><li>Q's first 127 drops did not have any authentication (i.e. tripcode)</li><li>Q's first tripcode ("Matlock") was chosen very poorly.</li><li>Q did not understand that only the first 8 characters of a tripcode count, and instead chose longer passwords that gave no additional security.</li><li>Q's passwords were known by random Qtuber Coleman Rogers.</li><li>Q relied on easily-cracked site-specific tripcodes, instead of using off-the-shelf signing tech (e.g. PGP) that works securely and anonymously and portably.</li></ul></h2><h2>Watkins == Q</h2><ul><li>Q was suddenly so concerned about 4chan being "compromised", but had no such concern about Watkins' 8chan/8kun.</li><li>After his problems with 4chan, Q had zero concern for establishing a method of identity verification independent of the Watkins.</li><li>Coleman Rogers on a livestream was able to find and recognize a Q drop that someone had to point out to him was not signed? ("Oh, Q must have forgot to sign it.")</li><li>Q did not post for the 3 months that 8chan was down? ("Nothing can stop what is coming" -- except the Watkins' inability to operate their site.)</li><li>Q was able to post on the new Watkins 8kun site when most users couldn't.</li></ul><h2>Notes</h2><p></p><ul><li>Watkins profits from QAnon</li><ul><li>8chan/8kun advertising</li><li>qmap.pub</li><li>Goldwater news service</li><li>"Disarm the Deep State" PAC</li></ul><li>Q never mentioned aliens, and said [#376] UFOs are a distraction</li></ul><p></p><h2>My Predictions</h2><p></p><ul><li>Trump will never endorse Q and will disavow if asked directly, but will troll on this topic with weak interviewers/audiences.</li><li>Trump will continue to claim credit for the Warp Speed vaccines, which will continue to be seen as wildly successful.</li><li>Q will never resume classic Q posts claiming "the plan" is still in motion. That became untenable when it was apparent in early November that Trump would be leaving office Jan 20. Aside from a couple last "Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming" drops on Nov 12, the Q operation effectively shut down on election day 2020. And after Jan. 6 and the Dominion lawsuits, the Watkins know they cannot take the legal risk of resuming the old operation.</li><li>Q will probably never post again on 8kun or any Watkins-controlled forum, as the Watkins do want to invite subpoenas for their hosting operations. And Q never took the obvious step of establishing an authentication identity independent of the Watkins, so Q is done.</li><li>Q never had any access to insider government intel, and so will never be able to use such access to re-establish his identity on some post-Watkins channel. Nothing Can Stop What Is Coming -- except Q's amateurish inability to post independently of a pig-farming porn entrepreneur like Watkins.</li></ul><div><div><h2>Q Tripcodes</h2></div><div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">Matlock ></span><span style="font-family: courier;"> ITPb.qbhqo</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">M@tlock!</span><span style="font-family: courier;"> > UW.yye1fxo</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">Freed@m-</span><span style="font-family: courier;"> > xowAT4Z3VQ</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">F!ghtF!g ></span><span style="font-family: courier;"> 2jsTvXXmXs</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">NowC@mes ></span><span style="font-family: courier;"> 4pRcUA0lBE</span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">StoRMkiL</span><span style="font-family: courier;"> > CbboFOtcZs </span></div><div><span style="font-family: courier;">WeAReQ@Q</span><span style="font-family: courier;"> > A6yxsPKia.</span></div></div><h2>References</h2><div><ul><li>2021-01 <a href="https://arxiv.org/pdf/2101.08750.pdf">Gospel According To Q</a> - academic paper analyzing Q canon and stylometry. Includes charts of Q drops by tripcode, and Q aggregation sites.</li><li><a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/">Qult_Headquarters</a> - QAnon debunking subreddit</li><li>2020-12 <a href="https://www.thestreet.com/phildavis/news/qanon-is-an-attack-on-democracy-and-must-be-eliminated">QAnon Must Be Eliminated</a> - screed purporting to trace the origins of Q</li><li>2020-04 <a href="https://github.com/ohQLgWcdD4Cw9F/q/blob/master/q.org">questions</a> about Q OpSec and adjacency to Watkins and porn</li><li>2019-06 <a href="https://twitter.com/PokerPolitics/status/1135811817073270785">list</a> of failed Q predictions</li><li>2019-05 <a href="https://therealsamizdat.com/2019/05/18/q-files-interview-with-paul-furber/">Paul Furber interview</a> - alleges Q was hijacked 2018-01-05</li><li>2018-09-04 OAN Jack Posobiac <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSDqBVVFfsM">interviews</a> alleged original Q Microchip</li><li>2018-08 ground-breaking NBC <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/how-three-conspiracy-theorists-took-q-sparked-qanon-n900531">analysis</a> of Q origins: Rogers, Furber, Diaz</li><li>2018-08 <a href="https://old.reddit.com/r/Qult_Headquarters/comments/93v1ui/a_noncomprehensive_timeline_of_qs_failed/">list</a> of failed Q predictions</li><li>2018-08 anonymous patriot's <a href="https://pastebin.com/P1g5RPWs">critique</a> of Q OpSec e.g. tripcodes</li><li>2018-05 <a href="https://steemit.com/drama/@tracybeanz/she-stood-in-the-storm">Tracy Diaz essay</a> - denies Q complicity</li></ul></div></div>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-61610504620028474452021-11-04T17:55:00.005-07:002021-11-04T18:14:03.160-07:00Do Covid-19 Vaccines Contain Luciferase?<p>Some anti-vax conspiracy theorists claim that the Covid-19 vaccines contain a satanic molecule called luciferase, for tracking vaccine recipients. They claim that it is one of the vaccine ingredients that is obscured under a trade-secret rationale.</p><p>Luciferase wouldn't be an "ingredient" of the vaccine, any more than "spike protein" is an ingredient. When they test a pre-release dummy "pseudovirus" to assess its tissue distribution, they engineer the virus code to express luciferase. In such cases, luciferase isn't IN the vaccine, it's CREATED by the vaccine. (None of the anti-vaxxers I've read seem to understand this part of the biology.)</p><p>The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines were sequenced (by researchers from Stanford and Palo Alto VA hospital) using spare droplets from some discarded doses. The open-source sequences are online <a href="https://github.com/NAalytics/Assemblies-of-putative-SARS-CoV2-spike-encoding-mRNA-sequences-for-vaccines-BNT-162b2-and-mRNA-1273/blob/main/Assemblies%20of%20putative%20SARS-CoV2-spike-encoding%20mRNA%20sequences%20for%20vaccines%20BNT-162b2%20and%20mRNA-1273.docx.pdf">here</a>.</p><p>If the vaccine sequences included a section coding for luciferase, surely some anti-vaxxer would have found it already. (Or, maybe none of them understand how this stuff works, and I'm about to blow the lid off this case for them.) One source suggests that the codons for luciferase are GATGAAAAGTGCTCCAAGGA. That sequence is not present in either of the vaccine sequences.</p><p>Luciferase is useless as a molecular "reporter" unless combined with a substrate molecule (typically luciferin). Light from the luciferase/luciferin reaction is <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7377714/">detectable for a short period using sensitive scanning equipment</a>. Coding for luciferase in the actual vaccine would only make you trackable if they later inject you with luciferin substrate and then put you under their scanner.</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-15285597387878471462021-09-16T13:27:00.004-07:002021-09-16T13:29:46.629-07:00UK Vaccinations vs Deaths<p>As the aggregate data continue to show that vaccinations are inversely correlated with deaths, variant anti-vax theories are arising. One variant theory is that the vaccine death-jabs were already known back in January to be so non-deadly that midazolam was secretly used in United Kingdom nursing homes for mass murder of the frail elderly (whom the vaccine apparently couldn't kill).</p><p>The presence of midazolam in nursing homes has <a href="https://fullfact.org/online/david-icke-midazolam/">a far less sinister explanation</a>: it is "prescribed in advance for patients who are nearing the end of life should they experience any common and unpleasant symptoms such as anxiety, pain, nausea and vomiting associated with the dying process."</p><p>Here are the latest date-aligned data for the UK. The winter surge of deaths there peaked around the time that 10% of the population had received the death jab.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2KSFew55BEJnXIUUG3UC9lVc09Wb64Ygr4u_X87uTMwnYsnRPq380sD5L07GC8SPybR8PvWF5PXbKZf4zvIWsp7gKuxvWDbWesx1pbMP4qiUYdtsqPQPmEaHiR5k2gVwhFHH_bx9qXeSo/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="1592" data-original-width="956" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh2KSFew55BEJnXIUUG3UC9lVc09Wb64Ygr4u_X87uTMwnYsnRPq380sD5L07GC8SPybR8PvWF5PXbKZf4zvIWsp7gKuxvWDbWesx1pbMP4qiUYdtsqPQPmEaHiR5k2gVwhFHH_bx9qXeSo/w384-h640/image.png" width="384" /></a></div><br /><br /><p></p><p><br /></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-70111854235234691002021-07-05T18:22:00.000-07:002021-07-05T18:22:11.964-07:00Levels of Alien Belief<p>A list of alien beliefs, in rough order of increasing implausibility.</p><p>And remember: "<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Y3FzVQi-R8">Never go full History Channel</a>."</p><p></p><ol style="text-align: left;"><li>Alien craft/effects occasionally get observed, esp. by pilots/military.</li><li>Government conceals definitive evidence of alien activity on Earth.</li><li>Aliens mutilate farm animals and/or create crop circles.</li><li>Alien tech is hypersonic / transmedium, defying our understanding of fluid dynamics.</li><li>Alien tech is hyper-G / anti-gravity, defying our understanding of gravity/momentum.</li><li>Aliens have abducted humans.</li><li>Government possesses alien artifacts/bodies.</li><li>Government possesses working alien technology.</li><li>Government has communicated with aliens on Earth.</li><li>Government cooperates with aliens on Earth.</li><li>Governments/media are controlled by secret global group(s) with alien awareness/tech.</li><li>Aliens have significantly influenced human history.</li><li>Aliens have significantly influenced human evolution.</li><li>Aliens have been in conflict with each other over Earth.</li><li>Aliens have created alien-human hybrids.</li><li>Aliens have installed hybrids as past or present important humans.</li><li>Aliens have telepathy.</li><li>Aliens have shape-shifting.</li><li>Aliens have teleportation or faster-than-light travel.</li><li>Aliens have time travel.</li></ol><p></p><div><br /></div>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-8682181885018843502021-06-17T18:54:00.000-07:002021-06-17T18:54:09.209-07:00Why Did We Fumble COVID-19 Therapeutics?<p>A variety of reasons, in roughly descending order of guestimated importance:</p><ul><li>The early focus was on "flattening the curve" to preserve hospital and ventilator capacity, and so insufficient attention was paid to early-stage therapeutics.</li><li>Hydroxychloroquine was unsuccessfully tried as a late-stage therapeutic, and this politicized episode made the healthcare establishment afraid of an embarrassing replay.</li><li>Therapeutics don't appreciably reduce R0 compared to a vaccine. Treatment is super important, but curtailing exponential spread is super-duper-important.</li><li>Risk-averse government bureaucrats didn't think to waive the rule that Emergency Use Authorization for vaccines is only allowed if no therapeutics are available.</li><li>Risk-averse medical bureaucrats are indoctrinated to oppose any therapy that hasn't been proven effective, particularly in randomized control trials.</li><li>The pharmaceutical industry has no profit incentive to re-purpose off-patent drugs for new indications.</li><li>The Orange Man was promoting therapeutics, and we can't give him a win.</li><li>It was harder to recruit early-stage trial subjects because 1) they're not in hospital beds and 2) the pandemic ebbed in summer.</li></ul>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-22187963009016873222021-06-15T22:39:00.006-07:002021-08-10T18:28:51.425-07:00COVID-19 Heterogeneity<p>A list of possible factors for why COVID-19 has affected different regions differently, in decreasing order of my guestimated importance. </p><p><b>Beware the political agenda of anybody selling a monocausal theory.</b></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>geographic/travel connectivity, incl. travel bans</li><li>vaccination curve</li><li>efficacy of vaccine(s) used</li><li>population age structure</li><li>lockdown policies</li><li>population density</li><li>hemisphere (summer vs. winter)</li><li>co-morbidities: obesity, heart disease, hypertension, smoking, asthma, diabetes/kidney, sickle cell, cancer</li><li>mask polices</li><li>vaccine demographic targeting</li><li>elderly clustering e.g. nursing homes vs. multi-generational domiciles</li><li>super-spreader opportunities</li><li>under-/over-reporting of COVID-19 deaths</li><li>domicile ventilation</li><li>air conditioning</li><li>temperature</li><li>humidity</li><li>ultraviolet incidence</li><li>prior culture of mask use</li><li>advanced contact tracing</li><li>cultural acceptance of lockdowns</li><li>compliance culture (e.g. Italians racing to trains against lockdown deadlines)</li><li>use of mass transit</li><li>prior experience with SARS/MERS</li><li>greeting culture: kiss, handshake, bow</li><li>nursing home return policy</li><li>South Asian Neanderthal haplotype (Zeberg, Paabo 2020) makes hospitalization 2X likely</li><li>chromosome 12 Neanderthal haplotype (vs RNA viruses, 2021) makes hospitalization 22% less likely</li><li>blood type?</li><li>vitamin D use?</li><li>anti-parasite Ivermectin use?</li><li>anti-malaria hydroxychloroquine use?</li></ul>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-2267356057266468162021-05-27T13:33:00.000-07:002021-05-27T13:33:16.046-07:00Vaccine Safety and Efficacy In Ireland<p style="text-align: center;"> <span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 28pt; text-align: center; white-space: pre-wrap;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSrc_s2Gqfw">Lie</a>:</span></p><span id="docs-internal-guid-6b3a91bc-7fff-44a9-bf38-3c74c81fe869"><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 343px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="343" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/K0xVsIUKSW8-doV6fqZELQiypXvTcbbin1YsXh8lV-_epvQl0_NBhUGol37PWWUFnJRGfXBJtpGbPSYpAXiDj7WUUWTyRzuXBf9ZTn2Um9RzIJE-cBQg6BmNOBa5QsHZiryGeM5m" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 27pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Truth:</span></p><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 389px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="389" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/T4GN8XRhpHGU4ZlIAbd7pmbWIxHw_hsR_Ycu54N3g5qXGh-44xKwDw7lCAMAUY0JIAxAElNnRmbfitPQ5YE8_OTqgH1doYn40Y9WRViR0qeA0bb6oIlbZD2LviNI7YFCw_hZnh3F" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 395px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="395" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/xBH5pDeZ1_VVDP2kNVotuvUm5fBVzGxTN_5wM1E8gQPjPFA3DpKPcyUEExNhy-RBQyQGboO7FjWgp9vMVsLKgvtMISO_AG504tKyCCVvt6pHBJD8o6cf3kRMG8KDG9ouEfcbWyNJ" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></p><br /><br /><br /><p dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 443px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><img height="443" src="https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/H5RbfBv0esVnSRR5nfYeRu3tuViefGwYeFbf1sfr2GQ4wx5Xm5pZ68MLSSnm8g8tDeH4N8YPzHJYfIhxcbaWXUCJhP6wt0GxcXwAnc_WWgGWNUJpcxL34giTu7ReEJ9C-CkDgGOC" style="margin-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px;" width="624" /></span></span></p><div><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="border: none; display: inline-block; height: 443px; overflow: hidden; width: 624px;"><br /></span></span></div></span>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-20251382640899680452021-05-26T00:26:00.177-07:002021-05-26T16:39:48.695-07:00Covid Vaccine Safety and Efficacy In Israel<p>The anti-vax group America's Frontline Doctors are promoting <a href="https://www.americasfrontlinedoctors.org/frontline-news/expert-evaluation-on-adverse-effects-of-the-pfizer-covid-19-vaccination">an article by Hervé Seligmann</a> claiming that "the Pfizer vaccines, for the elderly, killed during the 5-week vaccination period about 40 times more people than the disease itself would have killed". The article makes a basic mistake that invalidates its main claim.</p><p>First, Seligmann makes an apples-to-oranges mistake by comparing Israeli vaccinations from Dec 19 to Feb 11 with a baseline of "death rates per day for unvaccinated are estimated for the 303 days from March 1 to December 20". (Ignore his mistake of saying "death rates per day", he meant "per-day death rates".) A big problem with that baseline is that the vaccinations were just getting started as Israel suffered a third wave of deaths that dwarfed the deaths from March 1 to Dec 20. That's like saying that aiming firehoses at a burning building must be the reason why more people trapped in the burning skyscraper died after the fire trucks arrived versus before.</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkBKkMI6swnUcIAl2JI4_OAT7uaBSElxTZlOlJT6gxtFRUl8fNxjZSggPWDsccGZPcjsHbCzfiJjbJ8f-CwTR4bt_Gxi0ffw2fbQfC0yAfCsLRogfnmKtGAbqbXkUOlm6NZ4R5K2dw6AN_/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="390" data-original-width="703" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkBKkMI6swnUcIAl2JI4_OAT7uaBSElxTZlOlJT6gxtFRUl8fNxjZSggPWDsccGZPcjsHbCzfiJjbJ8f-CwTR4bt_Gxi0ffw2fbQfC0yAfCsLRogfnmKtGAbqbXkUOlm6NZ4R5K2dw6AN_/s16000/image.png" /></a></div><br />The first drop of water from a firehose doesn't immediately extinguish a fire, and it's well-known that it takes several weeks for COVID-19 vaccines to reach full efficacy. During that time, it's expected that just-vaccinated people will be more vulnerable to COVID-19 than when the 2nd dose has been given its two weeks to fully kick in. <p></p><p>Also, note that the earliest vaccines in Israel were given to the most vulnerable populations -- just as the third wave was heading for its peak. Seligmann's data conveniently ends at Feb 11, just as COVID-19 deaths per million in Israel were about to plummet. Israel reached 50% fully-vaccinated on Mar 16, and the data since Feb 11 indicate the exact opposite of the increased COVID-19 death risk that Seligmann claimed.</p><p>Indeed, thanks to Israel's data-intensive healthcare system, we now have detailed data on how COVID-19 differentially impacts unvaccinated people there. Studies published in <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-021-01337-2">Nature</a> and the <a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2101765">New England Journal of Medicine</a> confirm the success of the Pfizer vaccine in Israel.</p><p>P.S. Table 1 in Seligmann's article strangely labels the first column as "community". Maybe this is a language/translation problem, but nowhere does he explicitly say that this column counts COVID-19 cases among people who have received vaccine injections but are not fully vaccinated. So for his denominator, he chose</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>a vaccine-recipient population that is known to be skewed toward the most vulnerable, and</li><li>systematically excluded its members once their vaccine reached effectiveness, and</li><li>ended his data window just as Israel's death rate was about to plummet.</li></ul><div>The meaning of his "community" column was only clarified after I finally found this <a href="https://correctiv.org/faktencheck/2021/03/11/covid-19-in-israel-nein-die-impfung-erzeugt-keine-40-mal-hoehere-sterblichkeit/">detailed debunking of Seligmann</a> written in German. (The Google translation is amazing, and actually reads more like native English than Seligmann's own paper.)</div><div><b><u>Update 12pm</u></b>: Who debunks the debunkers? The German article makes a false claim here:</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibegtKgcR9yBHsw2tvbC5nbk0iTyq8jHyuaWDe88ps7_s3nGa7XaV12V36F3VCMDjO5Dyr1WHXlEFgqWCH4zSRYivoLDGSgHE6YWQwNqNdV7u5b5S0ubH_abZy4ueTY5zwkb8Lt7aB7oEb/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="674" data-original-width="663" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibegtKgcR9yBHsw2tvbC5nbk0iTyq8jHyuaWDe88ps7_s3nGa7XaV12V36F3VCMDjO5Dyr1WHXlEFgqWCH4zSRYivoLDGSgHE6YWQwNqNdV7u5b5S0ubH_abZy4ueTY5zwkb8Lt7aB7oEb/s16000/image.png" /></a></div><br />But ratios obviously matter more here than absolute numbers. The death rate among vaccinated COVID-19 victims was 709/54588 = 1.3%, while the rate among unvaccinated during the same period was 1566/368826 = 0.425%. However, note that <a href="https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4826">the Pfizer vaccine efficacy in the 21 days between doses 1 and 2 is 52%</a>. So to make the comparison fair, the denominator for the vaccinated case should include all the cases that the vaccine averted. This doubles the denominator, making the relevant 1-dose COVID-19 death rate be 0.65%. That's only 50% higher than the unvaccinated COVID-19 death rate. That could potentially be explained by the fact that in Israel the vaccine was targeted early to the most vulnerable populations.</div><div>Israel's COVID-19 death graph above, with 2.5 months more data than the table above, shows that vaccines do not lead to more deaths from COVID-19. Some anti-vaxers have made a different claim: that vaccines will cause a spike in non-COVID-19 deaths. However, that claim is so far similarly contradicted by the excess-death data from the three countries that are making the most use of the most efficacious vaccines:</div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqdYjpNHHkxgiVnnioUS1zxcqT727F_MSCUjJY8R0s1O_V8oqBB4Z_CVFHSKkVew54ZtFPgRHFSSCDkqOFPNekICZxHhK4txi-bAhqgyfMRIiauCqJmj_rfrzfxLdJz5aWn_I_tmv34l8D/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img data-original-height="656" data-original-width="965" height="436" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgqdYjpNHHkxgiVnnioUS1zxcqT727F_MSCUjJY8R0s1O_V8oqBB4Z_CVFHSKkVew54ZtFPgRHFSSCDkqOFPNekICZxHhK4txi-bAhqgyfMRIiauCqJmj_rfrzfxLdJz5aWn_I_tmv34l8D/w640-h436/image.png" width="640" /></a></div><br /></div><br />In the U.S., U.K., and Israel as of April 11, 156M distinct people had received a vaccine so far, while the population-weighted excess deaths among them had already become negative (as Israel's population is only 9M). As of yesterday, a total of 207M distinct people in those 3 countries have received a vaccination. When will all those "death jabs" ever cause the de-population that some anti-vaxers say the vaccine is engineered to do?</div><div>My prediction: in 2021-2023 there will be hysteresis pressure toward negative excess deaths in the U.S. because many of the pandemic deaths were among Americans likely to die in the coming years. Any spikes in excess deaths will be traceable to new variants that might develop, especially in the virus playground consisting of the world's unvaccinated people. But such spikes should be manageable, as emerging data suggests that the existing vaccines have some efficacy against variants. And since our most effective vaccines are based on the new nimble mRNA technology, it will be straightforward to create booster vaccines for problematic variants.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-2763263844650263902021-05-11T11:41:00.004-07:002023-01-20T09:16:15.965-08:00What Have Your UFO Aliens Been Doing?<p>Assume for the purposes of this post that we believe (as I don't) that at least some UFOs involve alien technology. If so, when did this alien technology reach our solar system, and what can we infer it would do during its tenure here?</p><p>By "alien technology" I am indifferent about whether the technology is "manned". I assume that aliens are at least millions of years more advanced than humans. So I assume that aliens have long since traded biological substrates for technological ones, at least for expeditions like a mission to Sol. I also assume that they can imbue their expeditionary technology with alien intelligence and values.</p><p>We infer that the aliens aren't <a href="http://grabbyaliens.com/">grabby</a>, because 1) they haven't grabbed Sol's energy or material resources, and 2) they haven't grabbed the energy resources of our galaxy. Reasoning from the Fermi Paradox, we specifically assume that the aliens</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>were the first technological intelligence to start expanding in our galaxy;</li><li>are applying a Zoo Policy to not only our solar system but to nearly all of the exploitable resources of the galaxy;</li><li>are somehow able to coordinate and enforce their Zoo Policy across thousands or tens of thousands of light-years.</li></ul><div>Note that this model applies even if the aliens are a federation of civilizations with independent origins, though of course Zoo Policy enforcement then becomes more problematic. (If the first civilization are adamant Zookeepers, they have to ruthlessly enforce their policy on any new civilizations they allow to federate with them.)</div><div>We infer that if they forego the exploitation of our solar system's resources, it is because they value any local biosphere's evolutionary investments and achievements. So it's plausible that they would want to <b>protect local biospheres from extinction events</b>. Do we see evidence of this?</div><div>Venus and Mars became suddenly unfriendly to life roughly one and four billion years ago, respectively. Neither was due to impacts, and it's not obvious that protective aliens would have intervened in either case.</div><div>But it would be trivial for aliens to protect Earth from the impacts that have regularly confronted Earth with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event">mass extinctions</a>. (We ourselves are at most a century away from being able to do so.) So what recent catastrophic impacts should they have stopped if they were on duty at the time?</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>66Mya in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cretaceous%E2%80%93Paleogene_extinction_event">K-Pga extinction</a> an object a few tens of km diameter took out the dinosaurs and all tetrapods >25kg. </li><li>35Mya the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eocene%E2%80%93Oligocene_extinction_event">E-Og extinction</a> was perhaps caused by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popigai_crater">Popigai</a> impactor.</li><li>800Kya the enormous <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australasian_strewnfield">Australasian strewnfield</a> was created by an impact whose crater has not yet been found. It's unclear why this event is not associated with any mass extinction or climate catastrophe.</li></ul><div>That E-Og wasn't prevented suggests the aliens arrived too late to stop it. It would be very coincidental that the aliens arrived so recently that they could not stop the Australasian strewnfield event. (And no, the strewnfield is not because the aliens blasted the object to pieces. You prevent impacts but nudging the impactors, not by turning them into shotgun blasts.) With primates blossoming into tool use while also hovering at the edge of extinction, it seems irresponsible for zoo-keeping aliens to risk allowing that impact. </div><div>Many UFO believers speculate that aliens arrived due to our atomic testing. These speculations are some combination of fantastical and scientifically illiterate. The physics of detection and travel just don't work. If aliens are here, they've likely been here for millions of years, but E-Og limits their tenure to <35My.</div></div><div>Aside from protecting local biospheres from catastrophic impacts, what else would the aliens be up to? </div><div><b>Monitor the Zoo inhabitants?</b> When you set up permanent zookeeping in a solar system, do your monitoring missions use large easily-observed craft with spaceship-like acceleration capabilities? Or do you instead use small, stealthy, camouflaged devices, to allow close-up and loitering observation? If I were hunting alien observation tech, I wouldn't look in the skies for spaceships. I'd instead look in the trees, for birds and insects that are suspiciously hard to catch. Again, we humans are less than a century away from creating a never-ending plague of privacy-invading disguised surveillance drones. No human in 100 years will be using a flying saucer to spy on anybody. So why would aliens use them? (cf. "teasing", below.)</div><div><b>Abduct the Zoo inhabitants?</b> That of course depends on Zookeeper ethics. Zoo Policy doesn't tell us whether aliens value individuals like they value biospheres. If an alien values secrecy but is willing to kidnap and probe an individual human, that alien seems more likely to euthanize the test subject than to return it to spill the beans. So no flying saucers, and no returned abductees. </div><div><b>Tease the Zoo inhabitants?</b> Some say the aliens tease us with UFOs to test our reactions and prepare us for "Disclosure". But these are aliens with a monastic devotion to leaving the galaxy undisturbed in the eyes of anyone with optical and radio telescopes. So why would they reveal themselves only a few decades after we first noticed their millions of years of self-denial?</div><div><b>Protect Zoo inhabitants from each other?</b> If Mars has remnants of independent life, the aliens would know it and might very well want to protect it from Earth. There have been a lot of <a href="https://astronomy.com/news/2018/11/a-brief-history-of-failed-mars-missions">failed Mars missions</a>, but Elon Musk hasn't gotten the memo. Shouldn't we expect the aliens to protect Mars? If not now, when? (In Arthur Clarke's 2010, the Monolith aliens told humanity to leave Europa alone.)</div><div><b>Protect Zoo inhabitants from themselves?</b> If you think nuclear weapons give humanity the ability to extinct itself, you might expect the aliens to disarm us. Note that through most of the 1960s, a large fraction of U.S. Polaris missile warheads were <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1978/12/02/dud-1960s-polaris-warheads-surface-in-test-ban-debate/d27a057b-99f3-4959-8de4-7b3d2db34315/">inoperable</a>. And there are claims that UFOs have <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ex-air-force-personnel-ufos-deactivated-nukes/">deactivated nukes</a>. So yes, if you believe in alien flying saucers, you probably believe that aliens have the ability to deactivate most nukes if launched. (But aliens surely know that nuclear war could not extinct H. sapiens, and in fact would set us back a century at most. As horrible as that prospect would be to us, the Zookeepers might consider nuclear war to be growing pains -- a minor incident in one of the zoo cages.)</div><div><b>Cooperate with the Zoo inhabitants?</b> Most UFO believers say aliens are secretly cooperating with human governments. Such behavior would be strongly at odds with the Zoo Hypothesis. Recall that ZH says the galaxy looks uninhabited only because the Zookeepers are maniacally committed to not letting knowledge of their presence interfere with the advanced development of other biospheres. So again: why bother keeping the galaxy looking uninhabited if you're going to start working with the local primates around the same time that a Fermi notices you're absent? Oh sure, they're cooperating "secretly", but millions of UFO believers claim it's easy to see through the "secret". If these advanced aliens can't fool the History Channel, they're not very advanced.</div><div>Bottom line: most alien-UFO claims and theories are nearly impossible to square with what we can infer from 1) how long aliens would have to have been here, and 2) what they would and would not do once here.</div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-47246095642337723942021-05-05T23:48:00.010-07:002021-05-06T06:20:57.639-07:00Fertility, Clotting, and Immune Escape<p>Dr. Janci Chunn Lindsay <a href="https://www.jennifermargulis.net/halt-covid-vaccine-research-scientist-urges-cdc/">warned recently</a> that all the Covid-19 vaccines must be halted immediately due to three safety concerns:</p><p></p><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>fertility risk;</li><li>blood clotting;</li><li>immune escape.</li></ul><div>Each of these concerns can be addressed.</div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Fertility Risk</h2><div>This concern here is that there is a segment of five amino acids that is common between 1) the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein targeted by vaccines, and 2) the synctyn-1 and -2 proteins of the placenta. This concern has been thoroughly addressed since it was raised by Michael Yeadon on December 2, 2020. The universal theme of the responses is that such segments are far too short to trigger cross-reactivity. My favorite articles about it:</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>Health Feedback on Dec 10 gave a <a href="https://healthfeedback.org/claimreview/there-is-no-risk-of-or-infertility-from-covid-19-vaccines-as-sars-cov-2-proteins-and-placenta-proteins-are-different/">dry and straightforward overview</a> of the initial claim and of the various public analyses demonstrating why a sequence of merely 5 amino acids shared between the SARS-CoV-2 virus and the synctyn protein is not enough to trigger cross-reactivity. If you read only one response to the synctyn fertility concern, this is the one.</li><li>Edward Nirenberg posted on Dec 3 a prompt and <a href="https://edwardnirenberg.medium.com/are-covid-19-vaccines-going-to-cause-infertility-939bbdb62b64">fascinating response</a> explaining</li><ul><li>the evolution and purpose of the mammalian placenta</li><li>studies of women with Covid-19 during the first trimester show similar pregnancy outcomes as uninfected women</li><li>the biomolecular details of whether an amino acid sequence homology is significant</li><li>synctin and spike proteins are examples of convergent evolution.</li></ul><li>David Gorski on Dec 14 posted a <a href="https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/it-was-inevitable-that-antivaxxers-would-claim-that-covid-19-vaccines-make-females-infertile/">detailed response</a> explaining</li><ul><li>the history of infertility conspiracy theories in the anti-vaccine movement</li><li>inefficient old-fashioned Sanger sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 samples is unnecessary (aside from calibration) given modern sequencing techniques</li><li>if ADE were a problem we’d expect to have seen it by now</li><li>immunologist Andrew Croxford also showed it's trivial to find many other human proteins with such short homologies with the spike protein</li><li>Yeadon denies that the Covid-19 pandemic is real, and claims it is an artifact of mis-calibrated PCR testing</li><li>Yeadon argues that natural Covid-19 transmission is not to be feared, not realizing that anti-spike T and B cell responses should have the same fertility harms as anti-spike vaccine responses.</li></ul></ul></div><div>It's strange and suspicious that Dr. Lindsay echoes Yeadon's concerns four months after they've been debunked so thoroughly.</div><div>Lindsay also gestures towards 100 pregnancy losses reported in VAERS, and multiple reports of menses irregularities. She is right that these must be investigated, but investigation must include comparing with the expected background risk of such incidents. When you ignore comparative incidence, you open yourself to charges of fear-mongering, as lay readers often don't have the habit of comparing anecdotes against baseline expectations. Jen Gunter reviews the science about possible interaction between vaccination and menstruation in this <a href="https://vajenda.substack.com/p/the-covid-19-vaccine-and-menstrual">excellent article</a> from April. (Hat tip to <a href="https://vaxopedia.org/2016/08/31/vaxopedia/">Vaxopedia</a>, a guide to skepticism about vaccine skepticism.)</div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Blood Clotting</h2><div>This concern is not really a complaint about the vaccines at all. She says "The natural infection is known to cause coagulopathy due to the spike protein. All gene therapy vaccines direct the body to make the spike protein." She then cites a paper that is all about how <u>natural</u> Covid-19 can cause clotting.</div><div>Again, Lindsay offers no discussion of comparative incidence among populations, but just cites 795 clotting disorders in VAERS -- without mentioning that over 100M people had received vaccine injections. More importantly: if Covid spike proteins can cause (rare) clotting problems, then it becomes even more imperative to vaccinate. Vaccine recipients will surely have lower peak loads of spike proteins than would be caused by the many severe Covid cases that the vaccines are clinically proven to diminish.</div><h2 style="text-align: left;">Immune Escape</h2><div>Linday claims "We have enough evidence now to see a clear correlation with increased Covid deaths and the vaccine campaigns." On the contrary, Covid deaths have been plummeting in the three most-vaccinated countries: Israel, U.K., and U.S.</div><div><br />Regarding immune escape, McGill university posted in March a <a href="https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/covid-19-critical-thinking-pseudoscience/doomsday-prophecy-dr-geert-vanden-bossche">detailed explanation</a> of why mass vaccination would give SARS-CoV-2 less room to evolve variants -- as opposed to the alternative of letting the virus evolve freely while burning through the population. It points out that immune escape would still remain a concern, and that vaccines may need updating if variants evolve far enough.</div><div>The McGill posting links to an article by Edward Nirenberg who systematically rebuts Geert Vanden Bossche, a leading proponent of immune-escape fears. Nirenberg explains</div><div><ul style="text-align: left;"><li>the clinical evidence for vaccine effectiveness against variants</li><li>current understanding of mechanisms for asymptomatic infection</li><li>an allegedly basic mistake by Bossche on the role of NK cells in vaccine mechanism</li><li>the ever-growing clinical evidence that Covid vaccines aren't "leaky" (i.e. they reduce transmission)</li><li>the resounding success of a leaky vaccine in managing Marek's Disease in chickens.</li></ul><div>Nirenberg concludes: "Vaccines clearly reduce viral load, prevent severe disease, and disrupt transmission, and they can thankfully be readily modified to address problematic variants as is done every season for influenza with great effect."</div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-85987672620127116892021-05-05T00:30:00.001-07:002021-05-05T07:27:39.382-07:00Why Covid Vaccines For Young Adults?<p>Covid deaths in 2020 age 18-29: 1465 <br /><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm">https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid_weekly/index.htm</a></p><p>Fully vaccinated 18-29 as of May 4: 9.857M (18.39% i.e. of 56.6M total population 18-29)<br /><a href="https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/">https://usafacts.org/visualizations/covid-vaccine-tracker-states/</a></p><p>Covid deaths all ages among fully vaccinated as of Apr 26: 132<br />Total fully vaccinated as of Apr 26: 95M<br /><a href="https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html">https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/covid-19/health-departments/breakthrough-cases.html</a></p><p>U.S. Covid deaths 18-29 all time are 2000 out of 557K, i.e. 0.35%. So assume the same ratio applies to the 132 breakthrough Covid deaths: 0.35% * 132 = 0.46, so round up to 1 breakthrough death among 18-29yo.</p><p>In 9 pandemic months of 2020, deaths of 18-29 per million per month were <br />1465 deaths / 56.6 18-29yo population / 9 months<br />= <b>2.8 deaths per million per month of unvaccinated 18-29yo in 2020.</b></p><p>Assume the 9.587M 18-29yo have been vaccinated linearly for the first 4 months of 2021.<br />9.587M * 4 months / 2 = 19.7M vaccinated person-months. That's 1 death / 19.7M<br />= <b>0.05 deaths per million per month of vaccinated 18-29yo in 2021</b>.</p><p>This fits with the clinical trial data. 95% efficacy means that a vaccinated group suffers 1/20 the symptomatic Covid cases of an unvaccinated group. The above estimate suggests vaccinated 18-29yo are 1/50 as likely to die of Covid as unvaccinated 18-29yo.</p><p>We estimated above that 1 of the 132 breakthrough Covid deaths were 18-29yo (i.e. double the 0.46 deaths you would expect in that cohort if breakthrough Covid deaths have an age distribution similar to regular Covid deaths). Note that 55 vaccinated 18-29yo would have had to die of Covid in Jan-Apr 2021 to match the 2020 per-million-per-month Covid death rate of unvaccinated 18-29yo.</p><p>There are no data suggesting vaccinated 18-29yo are suffering excess non-Covid deaths compared to unvaccinated 18-29yo. If there were real data saying this, then vaccinations for this cohort would be stopped immediately. (The Johnson & Johnson vaccine was paused after 6.8M vaccinations because 6 women aged 18 to 48 developed blood clots, and one of them died.)</p><p>Of course, even 2.8 deaths per million per month is trivial. The primary rationale for vaccinating young adults is now de-emphasizing herd immunity, and emphasizing the suppression of variants (like the one now ravaging India):<br /><a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2">https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-00728-2</a></p><p>FAQ on Covid vaccines for people younger than 18:<br /><a href="https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210329/faq-what-to-know-about-covid-19-vaccines-for-kids">https://www.webmd.com/vaccines/covid-19-vaccine/news/20210329/faq-what-to-know-about-covid-19-vaccines-for-kids</a></p><div><br /></div>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-476798144814124182021-04-17T20:22:00.001-07:002021-04-17T20:26:26.011-07:00My Dead Man's Switch<p>If my wife and I both die at the same time, we need our estate's trustees to be able to take over our financial and electronic accounts. (Our trustees are a select few chosen from among our siblings, friends, and adult children.) But as trusted as our trustees are, we don't trust them to have access to all our accounts while we're both still alive. We don't want to store our account credentials in on-site storage that could be taken by an intruder or destroyed by a disaster. And we don't want to store our account credentials in an off-site service that is inconvenient to update and that itself has to be trusted not to use our stored credentials. What to do?</p><p>Our solution is to encrypt our account credentials with a special password known to our trustees, and then arrange that our trustees only get the encrypted credentials if we're incapacitated. For this we use <a href="https://www.deadmansswitch.net/">Dead Man's Switch</a>. It allows us to schedule an email to our trustees, that will only be sent if I fail to visit that web site for N consecutive days. The free default is 2, but I bought a $50 life membership that lets me set it to any value. I chose 10. That's long enough to let me be distracted by a vacation or health problem, but short enough to get our trustees going quickly if we actually die.</p><p>My dead man's email says:</p><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px;"><p>Subject: Is Brian incapacitated?</p><p>This email is automatically sent if Brian goes 10 days without visiting deadmansswitch.net. The encrypted information below gives you access to Brian's financial and online accounts. When decrypted it is a list of Brian's passwords. Decrypt it using the following steps. ....</p></blockquote><p>The email then includes instructions how to use infoencrypt.com. An InfoEncrypt ciphertext is encrypted using standard AES-128, and if InfoEncrypt ceases to exist then the ciphertext can still be decrypted on other web sites.</p><p>So my passwords are never stored anywhere, except in encrypted form. And the trustee password is never written down anywhere. It's a special password I've told only to my trustees. (I occasionally check that they still remember it. So far, so good.)</p><p>An extra level of security would be to divide the password among multiple trustees, so that no single one of them could immediately take our accounts if the Dead Man's email somehow was sent prematurely. But even if that happened, we'd still want to change our most sensitive passwords, in case our trustees colluded. (I had to do this once, because I turned on the gmail feature of inbox "categories", and didn't see my Dead Man reminder emails in the gmail Updates folder. My trustees were shocked to get the scary email announcing my possible incapacitation!)</p><p>Dead Man's Switch is a nifty service. It should be combined with an encryption service like InfoEncrypt to make the above setup simpler and more secure. Even so, the existence of this setup means that certain movie script scenarios are now off the table for characters who can be expected to understand this straightforward technology. It's kind of like how so many old movie plots would no longer make sense in a world of cell phones and GPS and mobile internet and satellite emergency location beacons.</p><p>P.S. My backup to all this is <a href="https://myaccount.google.com/inactive">Google Inactive Account Manager</a>. If I don't access my Google account for 3 months, then my trustees get control of it -- including the file they need to decrypt to see my other passwords. Unfortunately, 3 months is the minimum timeout Google allows.</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-61603133394338914632021-03-29T20:30:00.003-07:002021-03-29T20:31:29.977-07:00Taiwan Independence Is Not Worth A Cupertino<p>During the Cold War, it was fine for Taiwan to free-ride on America's anti-communist containment strategy, and to shelter under America's dominant nuclear umbrella. But the situation changed around the time the Cold War ended in 1989.</p><p>While communism as an ideology lost the Cold War, the Chinese Communist Party studiously avoided the Soviets' fate. The CCP adopted just enough market freedoms to generate the easy catch-up prosperity needed to bribe its recently-starving citizenry into continued servility. But the CCP's legitimacy also leans heavily on the idea that the evil capitalists and oppressors who took refuge in Taiwan must never gain independence. The CCP's propaganda has convinced its 1.4 billion citizens that Taiwan independence is an intolerable affront to Chinese national identity. Of course, the real problem is that Taiwan is more than 3 times more prosperous than China, and enjoys vastly more political freedom. Together, these two undeniable facts are an existential threat to the ideological legitimacy of the CCP. For at least thirty years, the CCP leadership has known that they are only one Beijing Spring away from spending the rest of their lives in jail (or worse).</p><p>So the CCP leadership is playing for keeps in aspiring to finally complete the conquest of Taiwan. The American guarantee of Taiwan's defense was arguably a good idea back when it had almost no marginal cost. But now, a credible defense of Taiwan would cost America more than Americans (or the people of Taiwan!) are willing to pay. Even worse, it runs a constant and growing background risk of a catastrophic war that would stretch from the Taiwan Strait to at least Guam, inland China, Japan, Wall Street, near-Earth orbit, and cyberspace.</p><p>And it could easily lead to nuclear war. If China set up a sea and air blockade of Taiwan, the U.S. would have to either back down, or challenge this act of war by eventually shooting its way through the blockade. Win or lose, the resulting conventional war would be a catastrophe for America's economy. But worse, the war would be an existential threat to the CCP leadership. Military defeat would not be acceptable when they have a nuclear arsenal just sitting there. So they likely would nuke some mainland American target, or at least threaten to.</p><p>Which one? It would be a target with high strategic or economic value relative to civilian casualties. So forget Washington D.C. or Manhattan or any major metropolitan downtown. A lower-yield nuke into Pearl Harbor would mostly spare Honolulu, but the Pacific Fleet's carriers would once again not be present, and the historical precedent is not a good one. Hollywood would be an interesting economic/cultural target, but the population density is high, and the headline would be "L.A. Nuked". A better target would be anywhere along the 13-mile line from Sand Hill Road to Santa Clara Stadium. That line is the backbone of Silicon Valley: venture capital, Stanford University, the Page Mill Rd. Stanford business park, the Google campus, and the remainders of the Valley's aerospace and semiconductor industry. That's where South Korea might aim a trans-Pacific nuke if it could. But China would instead be tempted to aim five miles south, and take out the Apple campus in Cupertino -- especially if they thought it would help them dominate the smartphone industry.</p><p>Whatever target they chose, America would be much more averse to this escalation than would the CCP. And so America should game this out, and cut its losses. There is no strategic hope for the 24M people of Taiwan to remain independent from those whose control of 1.4B Chinese depends on a commitment to ending that independence.</p><p>Taiwan has been a losing hand since the Berlin Wall fell and China's market economy rose. It's just an accident of geography that the CCP victory in 1949 was not total. When the freedom of Taiwan was relatively cheap to guarantee, it was worth guaranteeing. But it's not worth sacrificing a Cupertino.</p><p>This is not yet understood -- neither in official Washington nor in Taiwan itself. More than half of the people of Taiwan <a href="https://thediplomat.com/2020/12/more-and-more-taiwanese-favor-independence-and-think-the-us-would-help-fight-for-it/">expect</a> America to fight for their independence, but the people of Taiwan are <a href="https://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-i-fear-for-taiwan.html">unwilling</a> to mount a credible deterrent. So some U.S. president should say publicly what Trump <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-03-21/niall-ferguson-a-taiwan-crisis-may-end-the-american-empire">said privately</a>: "Taiwan is like two feet from China. We are 8,000 miles away. If they invade, there isn’t a f***ing thing we can do about it."</p><p><br /></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-80516374466417195682021-03-23T15:21:00.004-07:002021-03-23T15:22:40.968-07:00Voting Is A Deadly Weapon<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6q2lzJ5Pstt_7dZdHSSZ_Juppy6Wday37jPZ8_116rLy7iD5SiguCCzupEHgYmZ7x8FIpQ9jGitV09mx2TbzcWgRx_ddrr0PiD6HWXphiGiyoz6cN6qKC9SoZhbOrMXUpNyk73rY_vZl/" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" data-original-height="555" data-original-width="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjA6q2lzJ5Pstt_7dZdHSSZ_Juppy6Wday37jPZ8_116rLy7iD5SiguCCzupEHgYmZ7x8FIpQ9jGitV09mx2TbzcWgRx_ddrr0PiD6HWXphiGiyoz6cN6qKC9SoZhbOrMXUpNyk73rY_vZl/" /></a></div><br /><p></p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-10398014518867768192021-03-22T20:32:00.007-07:002021-10-30T16:23:38.669-07:00Oversupply Of Woke Journalism Considered Harmful For Woke Journalists<p>Freddie deBoer is a self-proclaimed Marxist who understands enough economics to <a href="https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/its-all-just-displacement">diagnose</a> why an over-supply of woke journalism leads to sharply declining compensation for woke journalists:</p><span></span><blockquote style="border: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 40px; padding: 0px; text-align: left;"><p>A really important lesson to learn, in life, is this: your enemies are more honest about you than your friends ever will be. I’ve been telling the blue checks for over a decade that their industry was existentially fucked, that the all-advertising model was broken, that Google and Facebook would inevitably hoover up all the profit, that there are too many affluent kids fresh out of college just looking for a foothold in New York who’ll work for next to nothing and in doing so driving down the wages of everyone else. Trump is gone and the news business is cratering. </p><p>Why have half a million people signed up as paying subscribers of various Substack newsletters, if the establishment media is providing the diversity of viewpoints that is an absolute market requirement in a country with a vast diversity of opinions?</p><p>Establishment media’s takeover by this strange brand of academic identity politics might grow even more powerful, if that’s even possible, but dissenters will find a place to sell alternative opinion; there’s a market. What there might not be much of a market for anymore is, well, you - college educated, urban, upwardly striving if not economically improving, woke, ironic, and selling that wokeness and that irony as your only product. Because you flooded the market. Everyone in your entire industry is selling the exact same thing, tired sarcastic jokes and bleating righteousness about injustices they don’t suffer under themselves, and it’s not good in basic economic terms if you’re selling the same thing as everyone else. You add that on to structural problems within your business model and your utter subservience to a Silicon Valley that increasingly hates you, well…. I get why you’re mad. </p><p>In the span of a decade or so, essentially all professional media not explicitly branded as conservative has been taken over by a school of politics that emerged from humanities departments at elite universities and began colonizing the college educated through social media. Those politics are obscure, they are confusing, they are socially and culturally extreme, they are expressed in a bizarre vocabulary, they are deeply alienating to many, and they are very unpopular by any definition. The vast majority of the country is not woke, including the vast majority of women and people of color. How could it possibly be healthy for the entire media industry to be captured by any single niche political movement, let alone one that nobody likes? Why does no one in media seem willing to have an honest, uncomfortable conversation about the near-total takeover of their industry by a fringe ideology?</p><p>And the bizarre assumption of almost everyone in media seems to have been that they could adopt this brand of extreme niche politics, in mass [sic], as an industry, and treat those politics as a crusade that trumps every other journalistic value, with no professional or economic consequences. They seem to have thought that Americans were just going to swallow it; they seem to have thought they could paint most of the country as vicious bigots and that their audiences would just come along for the ride. They haven’t. In fact Republicans are making great hay of the collapse of the media into pure unapologetic advocacy journalism. Some people are turning to alternative media to find options that are neither reactionary ideologues or self-righteous woke yelling. Can you blame them? Substack didn’t create this dynamic, and neither did I. The exact same media people who are so angry about Substack did, when they abandoned any pretense to serving the entire country and decided that their only job was to advance a political cause that most ordinary people, of any gender or race, find alienating and wrong.</p></blockquote>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6756434140794129886.post-11318061103786674282021-03-17T09:53:00.003-07:002022-08-08T11:48:16.001-07:00Gary Kremen For Tax Assessor<p>Gary Kremen has a background in private-sector innovation, and a track record in public office for challenging entrenched interests. One of California's entrenched interests is its over-reliance on income taxes, as opposed to land taxes -- which economics textbooks recognize as the least bad form of tax.</p><p>This scientific insight about optimal tax structure has no better living advocate than Santa Clara County's own Fred Foldvary, the economist who coined the term <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism">geolibertarian</a> and who advocates so eloquently for a <a href="http://blog.knowinghumans.net/2008/01/tax-bads-and-untax-goods-with-green-tax.html">Green Tax Shift</a>.</p><p>If California is ever to going to shift its tax structure to be more economically and environmentally sustainable, then we will need someone like Gary in place to make sure that the Tax Assessor's office can adapt to the challenges of the 21st century. That's why I support Gary Kremen for Santa Clara County Tax Assessor.</p>Brian Holtzhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18284822676116941984noreply@blogger.com0