starting strength gym
Page 1850 of 3004 FirstFirst ... 85013501750180018401848184918501851185218601900195023502850 ... LastLast
Results 18,491 to 18,500 of 30035

Thread: COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

  1. #18491
    Join Date
    Feb 2021
    Posts
    535

    Default

    • starting strength seminar april 2024
    • starting strength seminar jume 2024
    • starting strength seminar august 2024
    To Mark's point, perhaps the 2nd Amendment has not prevented a noticable difference between the US and Europe/Australia/Canada... yet. Perhaps things haven't gotten bad enough... yet.

    The Masters, the people who have made the Big Plan, are doing everything they can to win by demographics vs direct conflict. And I don't mean ethnically, I mean ideologically. There's a reason that they are socially engineering men to become less so. The food, the drugs, the promotion of sedentary, indoor lifestyles, are all driving testosterone levels down and creating this bloc of androgynous blob creatures who exist more in digital space than they do in their actual communities.

    They are creating this population of impotent, hormonal chimeras who lack any agency or sense of self-determination, precisely to avoid direct conflict, because they know they'd lose otherwise.

    I remain optimistic however, as history has proven that small, smart groups working together can overcome.

  2. #18492
    Join Date
    Sep 2010
    Location
    St. Joseph, MO
    Posts
    433

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Shiva Kaul View Post
    Grantham, I'm okay with your post, except...



    You think scientists were compelled to sign Daszak's letter because the public "wanted answers"? No, they prematurely shut down debate on an issue where the public was divided.
    I agree with you here.

    Give me a single example of a scientist misstating COVID-19 research because the public demanded "answers" as opposed to uncertainty. The public complains primarily about overconfidence.
    I believe that the source of this complaint is our reluctance with communicating uncertainty, and it could be just my perception of the situation. Hell it could even just be me, specifically. For example, early on we should have not unequivocally said 'masks prevent transmission'. The data were not strong enough. What we did have was mechanistic laboratory data that suggest that masks may be effective at reducing transmission, and the real world effect on transmission had not been demonstrated. We should have said that instead. What we did was set up a situation for factions to form in an area that was uncertain, and because we did not communicate that uncertainty, we did not leave room for or tolerate discussion. Obviously this is not the only way we screwed up communication.

    You seem unacquainted with the ways that public trust has been repeatedly breached - which is strange, since many examples have been posted here.
    My post wasn't intended to be comprehensive (and neither is this one). I just picked out a few issues to discuss. If you want to discuss others, feel free to point me in that direction.

  3. #18493
    Join Date
    Jan 2011
    Posts
    2,099

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    I don't know what you're asking. Look up the definitions of "nominally" and "normally" and get those straight.
    Nominally meaning in name only where as normally meaning expected or accepted. The US constitution I am guessing is equally applicable in all US states including the 2nd amendment which gives US citizens the right to bear arms, but due to the number of states in the US this part (the 2nd amendment) which would be a true test of freedom in a US state is not equally applied. CA has a different application of this amendment then does Texas where gun laws which have been recently changed to allow for open carry without a permit which is not allowed in other states for example like New York State or Massachusetts . So Texas has a more liberal approach to gun ownership than most other states under the same constitution.

    Freedom (gun wise) then is variegated in the US even though the US constitution applies to all. That part is hard to understand.


    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    Only if they want to get shot. You Southern Hemisphere Europeans just don't understand this. There are lots of us here that will not live as slaves. Seriously.
    The FEMA (already in place) thing has the potential to remove those freedoms as a moment's notice as soon as your state capitulates and requests federal help say for example when Texas when dark last winter, but yes it is difficult for us to understand.


    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post
    This is true of the military, but not the Police, who live with us. In the US, the military is prevented from conducting police activities on US soil, by a statute passed in 1878 called the Posse Comitatus Act.
    Does not the Insurrection act bypass this like FEMA in a emergency?

  4. #18494
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Posts
    2,377

    Default

    Video: Conservative Ezra Levant Denied Mortgage Due to Political Views

    RW Robert Malone MD
    Zerohedge weighs in on the actuarial data. For the uninitiated, Zerohedge is a favorite of both Wallstreet and the bitcoin financial communities. If legacy media and the Biden administration lose the street, then we are looking at a major dumpster fire.

    Welcome to 2022. Assymetric global information, media and political warfare is where it is at. Defeating totalitarian globalism is the mission.

    Life Insurance CEO Says Deaths Up 40% Among Those Aged 18-64 | ZeroHedge

    Ouch!
    Very possible this was due to Rogan revealing to his audience that Malone was kicked off Twit.
    Screen Shot 2022-01-05 at 15.13.59.jpg

    TPC #653 is with Dr. Mattias Desmet, teacher of Mass Formation Psychosis; Dr. Robert Malone, the inventor of the mRNA vaccine; and Dr. Peter McCullough, the most published cardio-renal physician in world history.
    TPC #653: Dr. Mattias Desmet, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough (Mass Formation Psychosis)

  5. #18495
    Join Date
    Feb 2020
    Posts
    2,422

    Default

    Briggs seems to also concurr that the relative rise in mortality thing is probably hot air, but he's got numbers: The Massively Stupid Idea Of Weekly Testing Of The Unvaxxed — Coronadoom Update CXIII – William M. Briggs

  6. #18496
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Location
    North Carolina
    Posts
    62

    Default

    Quote Originally Posted by Mark Rippetoe View Post

    I did see it. There's a video of Davison floating around where he discusses this. Kinda looks like it was a webinar of some kind. I'm still waiting on some info about mortality experience on the individual side of the business.

    Quote Originally Posted by gilead View Post
    Kirsch jumps to the conclusion that the 40% increase is due to the vaccine. There's no evidence of this either. One America is mostly a group benefits company. It owns a teeny tiny life insurance division, which some have blown up to legendary proportion by calling OA a "major life insurance company". They're not. Northwestern Mutual is a major life insurance company, but they haven't made any public statements about an increase in mortality yet. I believe MetLife has made an offhand comment about it, and the need to reprice their group plans to offset the rise in mortality.

    The other thing is, this seems to be occurring only in their group life plans, but not on their individual life blocks? That's odd. I'm sure more of the story will emerge over time. But, I do know on the individual side, hardly any insurer has repriced their individual life products in response to higher mortality. And, the insurers I am familiar with have said excess mortality isn't a big issue. There's a disconnect there that hasn't been explained yet...

    Quote Originally Posted by Barry Charles View Post
    The readers here appreciate your input!

    In the spirt of asking stupid questions, here are mine: Many companies that offer group life insurance also package it with short and long term disability insurance. Some of the articles mention increases in disability claims too. From a payoff point of view, they are different in that life insurance is all or nothing where disability requires a lot more judgement (and other complications like fraud).

    But medically, many illnesses are a continuum from short term to long term to death. E.g. cancer. But others , especially inflicting younger, skip the disability phases and go straight to life insurance. E.g. car accident.

    Is this progression (or lack of) a big clue into the cause of such an astronomical increase in death rate?
    I'm not sure exactly what you're asking? I'm not sure what the cause for increase in mortality is at this point.

  7. #18497
    Join Date
    May 2021
    Location
    DFW
    Posts
    72

    Exclamation

    Quote Originally Posted by Subby View Post

    True, it wasn’t a PR win, but Hiroshima wasn’t a PR win for the US either, nor was Dresden a PR win for the allies.
    What consequences were suffered as a result of this bad PR though? And are they going to deter future events?
    This is inherently false, even if it's a terrible comparison.

    The bombing of Hiroshima was much more popular with the American people than the alternative. US troops had just experienced 75K+ casualties during the invasion of Okinawa and wanted the war, rationing at home, and deaths to be done with.

    I don't know if there was a popular opinion about Dresden. I would assume nobody batted an eye about it considering they firebombed major Japanese cities for weeks before dropping the first bomb.

    Quote Originally Posted by Subby View Post
    Where they are used passively, such as in the Bundy standoff, they do not result in change beyond the individual level. Did the actions of Cliven Bundy stop the federal government from taking grazing fees, or change it's behaviour in any way? Passive use of guns, at best, results in conserving a small island, whether physical or ideological. Government cannot be constrained by specific scenarios such as this, it must be constrained conceptually. In this instance prevented from taking grazing fees or seizing private property in all instances. Aka the constitution and bill of rights.
    I'm not sure we live in the same reality, Subby. You claim that an individual interaction with the government doesn't change the behavior of the government in any way.

    Please explain the George Floyd situation and the entire reaction that followed.

    For better or worse, the US federal government hinges 95% (probably more) of the time on how their decisions and policy impact their reelection chances and popular opinion. Do you think anyone in their right mind (excluding the rabid socialist left) would have put forward "Defund the Police" before George Floyd was arrested and passed?

  8. #18498
    Join Date
    Jan 2019
    Posts
    2,377

  9. #18499
    Join Date
    Nov 2013
    Location
    North Carolina
    Posts
    62

    Default

    OK, so to follow up some previous posts on the group life insurance story...

    I have it on good authority that there’s a story behind the story. A product dev who works closely with OneAmerica, and who I personally trust, has told me that this news story is way overblown. The video and stories written about it are taken out of context.

    The real story is…

    The actuaries have been on this for over a year, and have seen the trend rise. Davison refers to an increase over pre-pandemic levels. This was rewritten by a lot of folks to mean “up 40% for Q4”. This is false. It is the total increase, not quarterly or annual increase.

    Industrywide, the rise in mortality is closer to 30% compared to pre-pandemic, which is still huge, but is confined to the group market. Right now, the thought is (as I suspected in a previous post) group life and disability introduces adverse risk selection—people who are the highest risk seek out more insurance than those who are the lowest risk. Group plans skew towards “blue collar”, people with co-morbidities, and also invites those who cannot get underwritten for an individual policy where there is real risk assessment.

    Excess mortality in the individual market remains low to non-existent, which explains the falling COI numbers. This also makes the insurance picture a little more clear. People who buy individual life insurance sort of self-select. People know when they’re not healthy, and they won’t pay the rates charged by insurers. And, if they somehow are completely ignorant about their health, they’ll know when they get an offer from the life insurer with a flat-extra premium for being diabetic and 50lbs overweight. Those obese diabetics can easily get life insurance through a group plan, which is almost certainly what they’ve done here, especially as the fear porn escalated and made everyone afraid of dying. And, apparently, they are now dying at a rate never before seen. Conversely, a healthy person who wants life insurance will find better rates by being fully underwritten for an individual policy. They will willingly pay the premiums and keep their policy. Healthy folks aren't dying from COVID, or anything else, in large numbers. I guess the big picture here is sick people die at a much higher rate than healthy people.

    This will probably kill the group benefits sector. They’re “picking up pennies in front of a steamroller” is how it was described to me.

    Also... something I've mentioned before on this forum, but is worth mentioning again.

    You are going to start seeing more of this type of stuff about Mass Formation and related "groupthink" theories:
    What is Mass Formation?. And why it’s important to understand it | by Dina Osman, CBAP, CAPM | Dec, 2021 | Medium

    Not taking away from the valid parts of these ideas, it is part of a larger psychological phenomenon that is fully explained in Julian Jaynes', The Origins of Consciousness In the Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind", wherein Jaynes thoroughly and painstakingly explains the root cause of people's urge to seek out external authorities. It is a deeply-rooted psychological phenomenon that was part of human evolution. The gist of his theory is that up until maybe 1,000 years ago, all humans operated on a—more or less—unconscious level. They were guided largely by audio hallucinations (similar to how schizophrenics and ~1/3rd of children today hear voices), heard as the voices of gods. Man was incapable of introspection or self-reflection and instead relied entirely on these external authorities. As the bicameral mind broke down, people evolved away from authorities to various degrees. But, there was also an urge to replace the lost voices with other forms of authorities, whether that be religion or government.

    The theory is utterly fascinating, backed up with near-endless evidence, and is one of those rare gems that probably should be on everyone's bookshelf. Jaynes' ideas have made an enormous impact on how I view the world, and I would be "lost", so to speak, without it.

  10. #18500
    Join Date
    Oct 2021
    Posts
    36

    Default

    starting strength coach development program
    Quote Originally Posted by Subby View Post
    I put forward that the existence of 400 million guns in the USA, by themselves, does not, and has not, resulted in any appreciable difference in the freedoms of citizens in America, compared to Australia since 1997. In this instance I am using "freedoms" as a catch all term for the right of citizens to live free of government interference at a macro level.
    Unbeknownst to you (and this is not meant as an attack), there are varying degrees of personal freedom in the United States according to where one lives. Red states such as TX and FL, where firearms ownership laws as well as self-defense (Castle Doctrine/Stand Your Ground) laws are far more conducive for law-abiding citizens to own and to use weapons in lawful self-defense are generally freer precisely because of very relevant factors such as cultural traditions which prioritize individual freedom.

    States like NY and NJ which are in the north, which are Yankee states, and which have far more restrictive laws are derogatorily called "slave" or "unfree" states by residents of states like TX or FL. Without much detail, I can state that I am a longtime resident of the Yankee north, and that I do feel free overall other than the restrictions imposed by the politicians due to the pandemic. But there are areas where I would indubitably be freer if my entire life: family, home, work, friends, etc. were suddenly and magically transported to a town in Florida or in Texas overnight.

    One of the reasons states like FL and TX offer more freedom in certain areas than Yankee states is that there is a divergence of culture and traditions in this country. America is huge and it is one country, but the traditions of a state like Texas, where people fought Indians and Mexicans and then VOLUNTARILY joined the federation known as the United States of America differ from those of a state like New York. In the U.S. northeast, government intervention was historically seen more favorably. In the south, and not without reason, government intervention has been looked at warily.

    As for the rest of your post, which I am not quoting, a reason the U.S. is blessed is that the Second Amendment still exists. Whenever the mechanisms for the advancement of government control are put into place, they are seldom removed. Several state governors in the U.S. have acted like petty tyrants, and it is not without reason (politics as well as economics) that Democratic Party-governed states have seen, for years now (even before the pandemic) an outflow of residents seeking more affordability, lower taxes, and more rights which are par for the course in Republican Party-governed states.

    The 20th Century has examples aplenty of what happened when totalitarian rule became reality. Once populations were disarmed, they were helpless. And history shows countless examples of what happens when one people group has unrestricted, unlimited, and unconditional power and authority over another people group. No pretty picture has ever been painted from such a situation.

    WeWillProtectYou.jpg

    Furthermore, the entire issue of freedom cannot be separated from weapons for the very reason that gun control is a myth.

    Gun control as civilians who favor it does not exist. These civilians think no one should own guns but the state's actors, and in their naivete, they think the state's actors are all blameless, incorruptible, ethical, moral, and upright to the extent they would never think of using their privilege as the only actors in an entire country with the lawful authorization to wield and to utilize firearms. It escapes them that the enforcement of civilian disarmament would require the use of firearms.

    Every well-meaning but uninformed, innocent, and gullible next-door mom who marches with a "WE DEMAND GUN CONTROL!" picket sign needs to be aware that she and millions like her are manipulated by clever, coercive, cunning, and amoral people who are using her to achieve their goal: a state where only these individuals, and their jackbooted vassals, may employ and deploy firearms. And if such a state were ever to become reality, that mom would not be protected; she'd be given harshly spoken and written orders with the immediate threat of death by gun should she refuse to comply.

    America changed drastically from the time the Second Amendment was written, and many people in the U.S., including many on this thread, decry the gains and advances anti-American elements have made in various sectors of society. Letting go of our right to bear and to keep arms will be one of the greatest victories these subversive agitators will ever achieve. Thankfully, as things are even in 2022, this is a victory they are likely never to enjoy.

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •