In this final installment, I’ll do some summary, provide one, okay, a couple more examples of frequentism gone wrong, with one example I find instructive from the Covid-19 war crime ahem, “pandemic.” I’ll attempt to explain why “The Science” is NOT simply an accretion of “knowledge” and why the “Laws” of Physics don’t actually rule anything. (Quotes and italics here are used to make a particular point – as in the difference between fresh fish and “fresh” fish.)1 But I’m going to start by sharing a hypothesis that I saw presented at a recent lecture on this subject, about a phenomenon that I described in PR 4, that I think may shed some light on why we continue to have… the (ongoing) replication crisis, iatrogenic deaths in the “healthcare system” disease economy amounting to something like 400,000 people per annum killed in America, and massive pharmacological and broader scientific fraud, all produced by “The $cience.”
I. Certainty versus Uncertainty – a hypothesis.
At an early orientation lecture in law school back in 1996 – one of those ones you get in the first few days, where families are invited to come along and listen – either the Dean or one of the senior 1L professors gave a brief lecture. He told us that there had been a (then)-recent psychological study by some prestigious law school or institution, maybe the testing body for the LSAT or the ABA, or Stanford or Yale or some shit, and the upshot of it was that the trait that most closely correlated with whatever the metric was [be it success in law school, passing the Bar, successful law practice, satisfaction with career, etc.], it was not LSAT score, or undergrad GPA, or anything quantifiable like that; rather, it was the ability to tolerate ambiguity. At the time I remember thinking that was an awfully odd claim – not at all what I had expected. What place would a comfort with uncertainty have in the law, I wondered? Were people not either “guilty” or “not guilty” before the law – a nice binary distinction – or liable or not liable for a civil wrong?
I hope that if I have conveyed nothing else throughout this discourse that I have imparted the necessity and significance of plausible reasoning to the law and to science, with a great nod to Francis Bacon’s initial work in defending and grounding both in induction. Subsequent developments in that same philosophical and intellectual tree – including by Henri LaPlace, Harold Jeffries, George Polya, Claude Shannon, R.T. Cox, David Stove, and Edwin T. Jaynes,2 and many other, less known and named intellectual heirs – have yielded significant advances in Information Theory (Shannon) and Probability Theory (Jaynes): they amount to a quantitative method for dealing with our ignorance and uncertainty in science, the objective branch of knowledge.
In one of the early installments in this series, I mentioned a “schism” in science:
…reminiscent of the one in the Catholic church, but this one begins with David Hume’s inductive skepticism, owes some of its intellectual origins to European upper society’s fascination with “games of chance,” but it truly manifests in the American body scientific as a result of the work of two academics: Karl Popper and Ronald Fisher.
I’ve gone over and over various manifestations of frequentist science in law and society more broadly, but what I didn’t cover fully was the why of this schism.3 I started with Hume’s inductive skepticism, but that in and of itself hardly seems sufficient to have driven this wedge into the House of Science, causing it to break into two rival gangs fighting for control of what Science is.
I was at a lecture this past weekend in which the central thesis was that this dichotomy is the byproduct of what seems to be a psychological predilection for certainty that avoids the emotional and intellectual discomfort that comes from uncertainty. You can sort a number of issues that I’ve discussed in these preceding 12 installments into seemingly dichotomous rival camps that look something like this:
Psycho-social Certainty Uncertainty
Logic & Knowledge Deduction - Hume Induction - LaPlace
Science Demarcation Falsification - Popper Predictive Strength - Glassman
Probability Theory Pr (D|H) - Fisher Pr(H|D) - Jeffries
Statistics Frequentist - Venn Bayesian - Shannon
Physics & Universe Ontological - Bohr Epistemic - Jaynes
Looking down the left-most column, what you see are all of the ways in which one’s dislike of uncertainty will likely draw one toward particular views of Science that appear to provide more certainty. The “data” obsession and the infinite dice-throwing [non]-“empiricism” of Fisher won out over the prediction of experimental results of Laplace, all of which led inevitably to the conclusion reified by vote at the 1927 Solvay Conference: that the Universe itself is indeterminate and can’t be known.
If you prefer the comfort of certainty, it’s very likely that you will find it hard to resist the siren song of that path, where the only knowledge that you can believe in is the closed loop of deductive knowledge. You will likely come to see science as being about falsifying prior theories, rather than understanding that new work can in fact limit or expand prior work, not simply divide it into a binary of yes (TOTALLY TRUE!) or no (TOTALLY WRONG!). Those with a penchant for certainty will find the probability of the data, given the anti-hypothesis (the null) to be more “objective” and disclaim that the probability of a hypothesis given the data even has meaning. As we took up in the more recent pieces, these two belief systems are with us today, in two co-existing but incompatible views of physics and the very structure of the universe, as being either indeterminate (i.e. probabilistic) and then “collapsing into existence” upon observation (the Copenhagen interpretation) – that the falling tree doesn’t make a sound in the woods if we aren’t there – OR that probability is instead epistemic, a rational measure of our ignorance and uncertainty about the universe… that God does not in fact play dice with Existence, and beavers chew down trees that fall in a noisome, crashing mess, whether we’re around to witness it or not.
II. A Parting Shot at Frequentist Science: Just How Risky Wasn’t Covid-19?
A. My Personal Hell Looks Like the DMV Office Run By Pharmaceutical Companies… So Does Yours.
Near the absolute top of the most infuriating pieces of my professional and personal life are the vaccine mandates: not merely for all of the obvious reasons, nor that I’m against all forms of tyranny, great or petty, particularly the ones “sincerely exercised for the good of its victims.”4 4 In the case of Covid-19, it wasn’t just the government tyranny of health officials and their lickspittles, it was the cruelest of all tyrannies: technocrats claiming to follow “the science” while willfully ignoring their own rules, even when caught or splashed right in their faces. And I’m not even talking about the “getting caught unmasked” breaking of kayfabe that we all lived through. Worse even than that rank hypocrisy: imagine going to the DMV and having all of your paperwork in perfect order, spending weeks and months preparing, learning and re-learning arcane rules regarding motor vehicle transfers, taxes, and fees, and then when you’re called up to the window, upon proudly presenting all of your immaculately filled out paperwork, along with a money order in the exact amount necessary, the DMV employee looks you dead in the eye and tells you that none of those silly regulations mean anything. And then, at the moment your blood pressure starts passing through 130/90 on its way to never-before-seen heights, and you start sputtering in protest, she (unquestionably a she, either by biology or dress) taps her pen on a blue sign with white writing that says, succinctly:
“All Rules Subject to Change on Our Whim Because Covid-19. Thank you for your understanding and patience.”
THAT was my Covid-19 experience with the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Yours too, whether you knew it or not. Let me show you what I mean.
B. …So Does Yours.
The following has always been – and still is – the FDA policy for health information providers:
Provide absolute risks, not just relative risks. Patients are unduly influenced when risk information is presented using a relative risk approach; this can result in suboptimal decisions. Thus, an absolute risk format should be used.
See Fischhoff B., Brewer N., Downs J. Communicating Risks and Benefits: An Evidence-Based User’s Guide. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), US Department of Health and Human Services; Silver Spring, MA, USA: 2011. [Google Scholar][Ref list].5
The National Institute of Health (NIH) funds and conducts biomedical research for the U.S. government, and is a very important sub-agency of HHS, alongside the FDA. They have a short paper explaining absolute and relative risk measures and how they are calculated. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK63647/
Relative Risk (RR) is simply the adverse outcomes (as a percentage of the test group) divided by the percentage of adverse outcomes of the control group. So, if a treatment had an adverse outcome of 15% in the test group and the same adverse outcome was 20% in the control group, the RR would be 15%/20% = 75%. This is to say that the higher the RR, the less effective the treatment happens to be. Should the RR exceed 100%, it means that the adverse outcome rates of the treatment surpass no treatment at all.
Relative Risk Reduction (RRR) is just 1, or 100%, minus the RR.
The problem with all of these rates is they omit the same critical information that is missing in the base rate fallacy – prevalence.
Absolute Risk Reduction (ARR) is meant to add this critical information into any intelligent risk calculation – or call it “knowing and voluntary” legal choice about your health if you like. ARR is the difference in the incidence of outcomes between the intervention group of a study and the control group. For example, and this is a HUGE mathematical problem for vaccine manufacturers, IF a large percentage of people in the unvaccinated group either don’t get the disease or get it and have no idea because it makes no impact on their life, then the ARR will not be great, even if the Relative Risk Reduction is high. More importantly, the Number Needed to Vaccinate (NNV), which is the inverse of ARR (i.e. 1/ARR) can turn the risk calculus ugly in a hurry, depending upon adverse outcomes from the treatment.
Let me put some concrete numbers to this:
The companies that made the various mRNA gene therapy products published data suggesting wildly successful “Relative Risk Reduction” (RRR) for their products. These numbers were 95.1% for Pfizer, and 94.1% for Moderna, and 67% for the Johnson & Johnson.
As was also noted in the BMJ Opinion, Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna reported the relative risk reduction of their vaccines, but the manufacturers did not report a corresponding absolute risk reduction, which “appears to be less than 1%”. Absolute risk reduction (ARR) and relative risk reduction (RRR) are measures of treatment efficacy reported in randomized clinical trials. Because the ARR and RRR can be dramatically different in the same trial, it is necessary to include both measures when reporting efficacy outcomes to avoid outcome reporting bias. In the present article, a critical appraisal of publicly available clinical trial data verifies that absolute risk reduction percentages for Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna vaccine mRNA-1273 are, respectively, 0.7%; 95% CI, 0.59% to 0.83%; p = 0.000, and 1.1%; 95% CI, 0.97% to 1.32%; p = 0.000. The same publicly available data, without absolute risk reduction measures, were reviewed and approved by the roster of members serving on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA’s) Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) for emergency use authorization (EUA) of the mRNA vaccines [10]. Ironically, the omission of absolute risk reduction measures in data reviewed by the VRBPAC overlooks FDA guidelines for communicating evidence-based risks and benefits to the public [11].
They intentionally omitted the ARRs for a reason – because it showed that the gene therapy products sucked – even as against the original strain for which they were designed (rather than the version extant by the time the products were approved, had manufacturing approved, manufactured, shipped, and delivered to clinics for injection into arms. Hence why all of that had to be vitiated by the EUA waiver of all inspection and other normal regulatory safety protocols.)
ARR is also used to derive an estimate of vaccine effectiveness, which is the number needed to vaccinate (NNV) to prevent one more case of COVID-19 as 1/ARR. NNVs bring a different perspective: 81 for the Moderna–NIH, 78 for the AstraZeneca– Oxford, 108 for the Gamaleya, 84 for the J&J, and 119 for the Pfizer–BioNTech vaccines. The explanation lies in the combination of vaccine efficacy and different background risks of COVID-19 across studies: 0·9% for the Pfizer–BioNTech, 1% for the Gamaleya, 1·4% for the Moderna–NIH, 1·8% for the J&J, and 1·9% for the AstraZeneca–Oxford vaccines.
ARR (and NNV) are sensitive to background risk— the higher the risk, the higher the effectiveness—as exemplified by the analyses of the J&J’s vaccine on centrally confirmed cases compared with all cases: both the numerator and denominator change, RRR does not change (66–67%), but the one-third increase in attack rates in the unvaccinated group (from 1·8% to 2·4%) translates in a one-fourth decrease in NNV (from 84 to 64).6
For every 1 person that received a benefit from the Pfizer BNT162b2, roughly 142 did not, depending upon data and confidence interval. The data for the Moderna experimental gene therapy is roughly the same, with roughly 1 in 100 people receiving a benefit from the shots (which is to say, 99 would not receive any benefit at all) – while in both cases, the people receiving the shot – the 99 or 141, would also at the same time be exposing themselves to some risk associated with receiving an unlicensed gene therapy product.
These experimental gene therapies also come with their own concomitant risk. For the adult recipients (age 16 and older), the Pfizer COVID-19 clinical trial found the overall incidence of severe adverse events during the two-month observation period to be 1.1%, or 1 in 91, which is larger than the ARR for the Pfizer experimental gene therapy. [FN76] When this phenomenon was further studied after the EUA was granted and injections were performed on the general public, it was found the rate of severe adverse events [FN77] went from 1:91 to 1:43, over double the trial rate.[FN78] This means that as a matter of relatively straightforward mathematics, the Pfizer “vaccine” is more than three times as likely to result in a harm to a recipient as it is to result in a benefit, which (as noted infra) requires 142 people to be vaccinated, before the 143rd person will obtain that benefit. According to the numbers, we should expect at least three people out of that same 143 to have had a serious adverse event by from being injected with the Pfizer shot.7
This is the other part that proves scienter by our technocrats: the omission of NNV’s could perhaps be chalked up to negligence, but the simultaneous willful suppression, manipulation, change in reporting criteria, etc., and willful ignorance regarding adverse events was designed to hide what Bayes’ Theorem’s use above was saying right from the beginning: the Covid-19 vaccines NEVER made any sense at all because they never passed their own risk-benefit analysis… you could reasonably expect three people to be harmed by some kind of adverse reaction before even one person would see any benefit. They simply ignored this, pretended it was all fine, even when their own numbers showed that it was all a lie. They were never “safe” and “effective” by any sane definition of those words.
A critical appraisal of phase III clinical trial data for the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine BNT162b2 and Moderna vaccine mRNA-1273 shows that absolute risk reduction measures are very much lower than the reported relative risk reduction measures. Yet, the manufacturers failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in publicly released documents. As well, the U.S FDA Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) did not follow FDA published guidelines for communicating risks and benefits to the public, and the committee failed to report absolute risk reduction measures in authorizing the BNT162b2 and mRNA-1273 vaccines for emergency use. Such examples of outcome reporting bias mislead and distort the public’s interpretation of COVID-19 mRNA vaccine efficacy and violate the ethical and legal obligations of informed consent.8
A final note on just how insidious frequentists statistics can be in the law: in PR 9, regarding the Prosecutor’s Fallacy and Sally Clark’s wrongful conviction, using bad math to send a grieving mother to prison for a term of years, a reader of that article correctly pointed out that I had missed one of the greatest examples ever, and it even has its own Wikipedia entry, but the California Supreme Court opinion does the job well enough to illustrate the problem, and it’s not a long or difficult read.
The conclusion of this whole effort could be summed up by observing that our entire experience is contingent and tentative: memento mori is a good place to start, but that we can leave behind no small or unimportant legacy through our own contributions to the objective branch of knowledge – science – by our understanding of what that means. Our models about how the Universe works are judged by their predictive power alone; maintain sufficient humility to appreciate that
- …All that we have are models. The Universe does not have any concerns about such things as “distance” or “light years” or maps or mathematics or “strings” or “membranes” or “Copenhagen interpretations” or limit functions or even “the backs of turtles.” The Universe is far more complex than we can ever project onto it and it does not OBEY “our “laws” at all; rather, we make models that attempt to describe the Universe and the best ones have the best predictive strength. Notwithstanding all of that…
- ….We need not grope blindly in the darkness, but instead can use probability theory to precisely measure our ignorance and search for answers there, as Laplace advised and taught, but now we can do so using enhanced tools and understanding through E.T. Jaynes’s distillation of this inductive process into the “optimal processing of incomplete information.”
…which is another way of saying, it’s the fastest way to Learn, and you increase your chances of stumbling upon something that passes for genuine Wisdom – in either the Law or Science.
- With a tip o’ the cap to David Stove. ↩︎
- And the inestimable (Dr.) Jeff Glassman, as one example. ↩︎
- Notwithstanding that I do have a Heading entitled “Why,” I really answered the “How” question, something I am wont to do by bent of personality. The how is very often the practical person’s interpretation of the answer to the why question. Why questions can be interpreted both ways, functionally and causally, particularly when dealing with the spread of ideas. ↩︎
- “It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.” ― C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology (Making of Modern Theology). ↩︎
- This is a variation on the same problem we tackled previously in Plausible Reasoning 8, regarding medical testing and the base rate fallacy. ↩︎
- Comment: COVID-19 vaccine efficacy and effectiveness—the elephant (not) in the room, www.thelancet.com/microbe Vol 2, July 2021. Originally published April 2021, then corrected, and republished online https://doi.org/10.1016/ S2666-5247(21)00069-0 ↩︎
- Wilson, et al v. Austin, et al, 22-cv-438 ECF 1, Complt. ¶114, (May 25, 2022). ↩︎
- Brown RB. Outcome Reporting Bias in COVID-19 mRNA Vaccine Clinical Trials. Medicina (Kaunas). 2021 Feb 26;57(3):199. doi: 10.3390/medicina57030199. PMID: 33652582; PMCID: PMC7996517. ↩︎
And I’m not even talking about the “getting caught unmasked” breaking of kayfabe that we all lived through.
The memories
More memories
lol
2nd one is paywalled
The local Sonic still has a masking sign up at their drive through window.
They intentionally omitted the ARRs for a reason – because it showed that the gene therapy products sucked – even as against the original strain for which they were designed
But they were good enough for government work.
A year ago, I was on a small team of people trying to launch a new project. We were having a coordination meeting before briefing leadership about our progress. At one point, the project manager expressed some concern about all the things we didn’t have answers for yet. So I asked her . . “What’s the problem? Don’t you thrive on uncertainty?” That got a gasp from almost everyone in the room.
I have no issues working with uncertainty. It’s all a puzzle that didn’t come with instructions. You figure it out as you go.
Yeah, I’ve been at the software rodeo long enough to know it’s all uncertainty, all the time. Only a complete newb thinks otherwise. We all bitch about it endlessly, of course.
So that’s why software never works properly. :-p
I would venture that most humans hate uncertainty. From our earliest beseeching of the gods to deliver us just enough rain and plenty of sun and no pestilence so that our crops were bountiful. We for the most part, haven’t moved on much from that.
Humans have by and large always picked the wrong gods. For there is only one true Great Firster and he offers complete certainty. You First in his name and you are First.
Great Firster, I have never prayed to you before. I have no tongue for it. No one, not even you, will remember if we were good men or bad. Why we fought, or why we died. All that matters is that one stood against many. That’s what’s important! Firsting pleases you, Great Firster… so grant me one request. Grant me to be First! And if you do not listen, then the HELL with you!
Bro- why are you so gay?
And a Jew hater?
Firsters do not fit into your normie categories of sexual orientation you seconding scum.
I’m pretty sure 80% of this series was over my head. But I enjoyed it anyway.
“Lithium batteries were involved in the fire’s spread”
Ah, so one of those electric bike menaces. I was speculating either meth lab or arson. The last couple fires there were arson. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(The orange building on the right is my lucky abode.)
Totally dox’d yourself.
Now I know where to send the Jehavahs.
Doxxing is for celebs, politicians and kiddy diddling authors.
Send your hate mail.
I’m old enough to remember phone books.
Mr Threedoor
19095 Clydesdale Dr
Lewiston ID 83501
One of the pleasures of apartment living is none of that bother.
I’m going to send you dick pics.
A real address
Now a real dick pick would be amazing.
Have to take a picture of it and print it out.
That shows dedication.
I like it.
Now you guys can get on Google and check out my junk pile from space.
And yeah that’s a 10’ merrygoround in my backyard.
That Zestimate®️ is nuts. (Speaking of real estate bubbles.)
Old satellite picture. At least three years. That the Miracle Rec Ten Spin. Glibs welcome in the playground. https://www.miracle-recreation.com/product/ten-spin-2/
Rwy, paid 172,500 for it in 2012. Another 80k for the well. Shop is unfinished.
Idaho property prices have tripled.
Thanks Seattle and CA.
Nate lots in my neighborhood have sold for 270k for five acres.
Even farm ground is selling for $5000 an acre in the area. It’s insane.
As are the property taxes.
That’s probably triple the price for something similar in (most) parts of upstate NY that aren’t college towns.
All the west side wants to come to Idaho.
Neighbors place sold three years ago for a million.
They have a bigger shop than mine and a barn. But it’s a triangular 5 acre lot. Mine is a rectangle. Bought the neighboring 5 acres for $75k right before prices went insane. I still overpaid by $15000
Same with the real estate prices here.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/37353-Darsnek-Rd-Emily-MN-56447/448745817_zpid/
I’m going to be rich, in green paper.
Thanks for the series, was very good reading.
One thing that has bothered me throughout is your clear animosity towards what you label as frequentist statistics, laying much of the blame at the feet of the tool rather than individuals and groups intentional and unintentional misuse of the tool. Now how easy a tool might be to misuse relative to another may be an issue, but not *necessarily* the tool itself. Bayesian statistics can definitely be misused – I’m in a field where Bayesian is the ‘new’ (for some value of new) hotness, and believe me, it can and will be misused as well.
I think your final example is a case in point. I agree 100% on the relative vs absolute risk reduction point with regard to the efficacy of the COVID – any treatment really, see e.g. statins the claimed 38% risk reduction (not to mention primary vs secondary prevention) – gene therapy. However, I fail to grok how that is a failure of frequentist analysis. There’s nothing in a frequentist approach that says you must report relative risk instead of absolute risk and NNT. A very similar trick is used in reporting case fatalities vs infection fatalities. Both are egregious manipulation of data, but neither are, near as I can tell, a necessary (and sole) product of frequentist statistics. All these examples are manifestations of misuse whether intentional or through ignorance (mostly the former in these cases) of statistical tools, not of an inherent fault of the tool being misused.
People with specialized math, science, or tech knowledge sometimes outsmart their common sense. Grace Hopper said that people have been moving big heavy things long before steam and diesel power. If people 1700 wanted to move a big log, and the ox they had wasn’t strong enough, they didn’t try to breed a stronger ox, they just yoked another one.
It’s kind of like that with science and engineering problems. Yeah, you can try to “breed a better ox” with fancy math, but there are often simpler, more efficient solutions.
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive and what they conceal is vital.
If you torture the data enough, it will confess.
There was a British bureaucrat in Hong Kong known for his policy of benign neglect. He banned the collection of statistics because they were always used as an excuse to implement some half-baked policy.
***
He refused to compile GDP statistics arguing that such data was not useful to managing an economy and would lead to officials meddling in the economy.[5] He was once asked what the key thing that poor countries could do to improve their growth. Cowperthwaite replied:
They should abolish the office of national statistics.[6]
***
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_James_Cowperthwaite
If people 1700 wanted to move a big log, and the ox they had wasn’t strong enough, they didn’t try to breed a stronger ox, they just yoked another one.
I’ve heard about a lot of things like that when reading about old American timber frame structures. They weren’t typically “engineered” as we would call it, but they were built to stand, and some of them have done exactly that since the 1600s. Some in Asia date to the 1000s. And timber frames almost always fail due to the effects of neglect, not because they have reached the end of their servicable life.
Some timber frame homes in the New England area were found to have 12×12 inch floor joists spaced 12 inches apart, meaning that 50% of the floor area was on a joist. This was probably done because of:
A) Not wanting to try fancy math that, if done even slightly wrong, could result in a floor that is not strong enough to bear the loads that will be placed on it
B) The seemingly endless amounts of old-growth timber that the early settlers found in ‘Murica. In England, such trees had been depleted a century or two before that.
Anyone else leave work to find their car had a flat tire?
Nope… but work is like ten feet from here.
You have an awesome commute.
The problem is there’s a wall in the way and he had to drive three hours out of his way to get to the other side.
For over two decades I had a 50 foot commute down a flight of stairs. It was nice.
And then Winston’s Mom fired you?
Better than leaving work and then suddenly developing a flat tire – or rather, a ruptured tire – while going down the interstate. Scary shit.
Thank you very much for the series. I enjoyed it very much.
I am tempted to send this to my sister regarding the uselessness and danger of the COVID vaccines (she and her family just got vaccinated AGAIN) but I’m afraid it would just bounce off their intellectual certainty that the vaxxes are unquestionably good.
The mRNA vaccines had two purposes: Get Trump Out and make risk-free trillions for the drug companies. It succeeded wildly.
It’s not that hard to convince me that there were in fact far more nefarious purposes behind the vaccines and that the things aren’t ticking time bombs waiting to go off.
⬆️☣️☠️
Related:
https://x.com/JustACineast/status/1887515505000341757
I’m reading a book called The Flaw of Averages by Sam L. Savage that touches on some of this stuff and has dwelt on the point that “uncertainty is a shape or distribution, not a single number like an average”.
The use of averages to stand in for some other uncertain number has always stuck out to me as wrong even before I knew much about statistics.
¡Buenos días!
Happy national filet mignon day.
🤤🐄🍽️
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eNK38nmzw4
🎶🎶
Good morning, Sean, Ted’S., homey, and Suthen!
https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/septa-funding-crisis-pa-state-senate/
Fuck SEPTA.
If you’ve got a deviated SEPTA, there’s certainly a hole to fuck.
Why do you hate children?
https://6abc.com/post/thieves-make-off-least-700k-armored-truck-robbery-cheltenham-pennsylvania/17513184/
One woman with that much cash? Nope, not sus at all. 🙄
Have you seen the price of filet mignon lately?
“Now this is four or five incidents we’ve had, you know, and an AK-style rifle is definitely not something that you’d want to mess with…”
Look fat- that thing’ll blow your lung out.
I’m no expert but does not look like an AK
It’s an AK-style rifle, which means it has a trigger and a barrel and bullets come out of the barrel when you pull the trigger.
Does it have the thing that goes up, too?
It’s an AR design of some sort, ass end has a buffer tube sticking out of it.
So it’s an Arkansas, not an Alaska.
suh’ fam
whats goody
“Our knowledge of the world is uncertain, our place in it is not.”
Time has taught me that if you are uncertain you are probably aimed in the right direction. If you are certain you are probably wrong.
A guy I knew in the Army always cited the “50/50/90” rule:
“If you have a 50-50 chance at something, 90% of the time it wont happen”
You were in the army with Yogi Berra?
“Doctors say that Nordberg has a 50-50 chance of living, though there’s only a ten percent chance of that.”
Sex Panther: 60% of the time, it works every time.
Mornin’, reprobates!
Went to the.lab yesterday for something United Health Care calls “Let’s Get Checked!” There’s do blood work, take BP, measure height, weight, and waist size. The policy holder (Mrs. Patzer) gets a few bucks for every covered individual who does this.
As I sit waiting to be called, I see the sign on the wall. “(Company) requires masks to be worn…”
Of course nobody is wearing one. I wish they’d tear that sign down. I don’t need to get my blood pressure up before being tested.
Why didn’t you do it?
Twenty year old me would have torn it down. Seventy-two year old Patzer, not so much.
Good morning, ‘patzie, ChipP, slummy, and Stinky!
Our doctor’s office is right around the corner. It’s in the back of the building, so you can see the door from our back patio. And yet I usually drive to get there so I don’t raise my BP before they invariably slap the cuff on as soon as you get in the door, 🙄
Heh, Pitch Meeting for Ice Cube’s straight to Amazon Video War of the Worlds new release:
https://youtu.be/2fhLdREPEF4?si=PRTDKbSvPZiH1MqG
How in the hell did did that get greenlighted?
It’s on message?
I didnt really need to see the numbers or details. I had clues.
Clue #1 – Masks. Masks don’t work. We have known this for over 100 years. They. Dont. Work. They slightly increase your chances of getting sick because you inhale particles off of the mask that your body has tried to shed thus slightly increasing your viral load.
*I dont know why we still use them in clinical settings. They dont work.
Clue #2 – The drug companies and the govt said “We are willing to take a chance with your life but we wont be held accountable if something goes wrong.”
At that point I stopped paying attention to anything they had to say.
I checked the mortality tables. Old people were dying but flu deaths had dropped to zero. A coincidence?
GM 🙂
“2 dead, 14 hospitalized after eating tainted sausage and turnip top sandwiches in Italy ”
https://nypost.com/2025/08/12/world-news/2-dead-14-hospitalized-after-eating-tainted-sausage-and-turnip-top-sandwiches-in-italy/
At least they weren’t carrot top sandwiches.