Scamdemic
This subsection contains posts I wrote during the Great Covid Scamdemic of the early 2020s. As you will see, I was very angry and sarcastic about what was going on, and wrote about it in a white-hot fury. I’m still angry about what happened (and is still going on), but the fury has died down.
Vermont Cardiac Primary Cause Deaths
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In an earlier post, I described a procedure for importing Vermont death certificate data into a MySQL database. In a subsequent post, I looked at cardiac-related deaths, where heart problems were mentioned in any of the five cause fields. (The SQL query searched for the string “cardi” in Cause A/B/C/D and Other Contributing.) Here is that graph again:
February 9, 2023
Mistakes Were Made
Greetings, propaganda believers! We at the Ministry of Truthiness are alarmed to discover that everything we said about the Worst Disease Ever and the Glorious Goo turned out to be wrong. We know that’s going to cause your brains to hurt from all that cognitive dissonance that you’re going to experience now, after three years in which you regurgitated our incessant (and now discredited) propaganda. But not to worry! You can still make yourself come out looking virtuous and sciency by crafting the appropriately apologetic non-apology, in which you admit that mistakes were made, without actually saying which mistakes, and without actually admitting guilt. Here are three possible strategies for your face-saving social media post or magazine op-ed:
February 7, 2023
Vermont All-Cause, Suicide, and Accident Deaths
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In an earlier post, I described a procedure for importing Vermont death certificate data into a MySQL database. In subsequent posts I looked at Covid-related deaths and cardiac deaths. Now let’s look at all-cause deaths, and also at deaths by suicide and accident. (Note that the data stop at Oct 26, 2022, and there is a delay between death and recording, so the drops for October 2022 are not meaningful.)
January 30, 2023
Vermont Cardiac Deaths
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In an earlier post, I described a procedure for importing Vermont death certificate data into a MySQL database. In a subsequent post, I looked at Covid-related deaths. Now let’s look at cardiac-related deaths: (Bear in mind that this graph includes all causes of death (Cause A/B/C/D plus Other Contributing Conditions) that contain the string “cardi”.) There are some interesting things to note about this graph. First, there seemed to be a dramatic increase in cardiac deaths starting in the last quarter of 2020, before the mRNA shots were available. Things settled down a bit in the summer of 2021, but then spiked up again in the fall and winter, and still haven’t come down to the pre-2020 levels.
January 29, 2023
The Tyranny of Togetherness
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) I’m going to get personal here for a change. Be warned. In the last months of my marriage, when I was struggling to understand why I was feeling traumatized, terrified, and hopeless, I came up with the term “Tyranny of Togetherness” to describe one aspect of that relationship. It’s the idea that “we must do everything together, otherwise our relationship will be harmed.” But it’s not actually a mutually agreed-upon thing, as that formulation would suggest. It’s more of power battle, where the dominant partner says (perhaps not explicitly): “You must do everything with me, otherwise I will hurt you. You must not have a life of your own.”
January 27, 2023
Vermont Covid Deaths
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) In an earlier post, I described a procedure for importing Vermont death certificate data into a MySQL database. Now we can query this database to look at causes of death in Vermont in recent years. For a first example, let’s look at “Covid deaths”: specifically, Covid-related deaths (either “from” or “with”) on a month-by-month basis. I’ve described how to do this in my Gitlab repository; scroll down in the README to the section titled “Plotting Covid deaths by month”. I won’t repeat the procedure here, but let’s look at the resulting plot:
January 26, 2023
Vermont Death Certificate Data
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) Substacker Ashmedai has been writing some valuable articles about mortality in Vermont, using death certificate data that he obtained from the state of Vermont. These data are now available on DailyClout. The data consists of two very large CSV files, containing a total of 46964 records for death certificates in Vermont from 2015 through October 2022. It is tempting to import these CSV files directly into a spreadsheet program, but their large size could cause problems. Ashmedai admitted in one of his articles that Excel crashed at one point during the processing of these data. I’m trying to avoid these problems by importing these data into a MySQL database. Performing queries and calculations on databases will be slower than a spreadsheet, but the tables are stored on disk, so they can be much larger than will fit into memory.
January 25, 2023
Why Masks Will Never Go Away Completely
On one of the evil, no-good, misinformation-dispensing forums on Reddit, someone asked if mask pushers will ever stop trying to mandate their use. The question was raised in response to the LA Public Health department asking workers and students to start the new year wearing masks for ten days.
January 3, 2023
The Piano Camp Mandate
(Sarcasm is OFF for this post.) I’m probably being selfish and whiny when I continue to complain about medical apartheids that affect me personally – in particular, the one implemented by the Sonata Piano Camp. I have not lost my job or my health due to mandates. But music is a big part of my life, and the piano camp was a great experience for me. It was inspiring to be around other amateurs, of all different skill levels. After I attended for the first time in 2005, I returned four more times.
December 28, 2022