What is Death?

In which I answer Cicero.

Someone pointed out on last night’s Darkstream that they’d like to see more veriphysics, and as I just happened to be casually reading a little from The Tusculan Disputations after finishing Stanley Payne’s excellent biography of Francisco Paulino Hermenegildo Teódulo Franco Bahamonde, I thought some of you might be interested in my instinctive reaction to the following paragraphy.

And yes, I am aware of how lah-di-dah that sounded, but it happens to be the truth. If it makes you feel any better, that was probably just a subconscious response to a recent binge of the underrated Nancy Varian Berberick and her forays into Dragonlance.

The first thing, then, is to inquire what death, which seems to be so well understood, really is; for some imagine death to be the departure of the soul from the body; others think that there is no such departure, but that soul and body perish together, and that, the soul is extinguished with the body. Of those who think that the soul does depart from the body, some believe in its immediate dissolution; others fancy that it continues to exist for a time; and others believe that it lasts for ever. There is great dispute even what the soul is, where it is, and whence it is derived: with some, the heart itself (cor) seems to be the soul, hence the expressions, excordes, vecordes, concordes; and that prudent Nasica, who was twice consul, was called Corculus, i.e. wise-heart; and Ælius Sextus is described as Egregie cordatus homo, catus Æliu’ Sextus—that great wise-hearted man, sage Ælius. Empedocles imagines the blood, which is suffused over the heart, to be the soul; to others, a certain part of the brain seems to be the throne of the soul; others neither allow the heart itself, nor any portion of the brain, to be the soul; but think either that the heart is the seat and abode of the soul; or else that the brain is so. Some would have the soul, or spirit, to be the anima, as our schools generally agree; and indeed the name signifies as much, for we use the expressions animam agere, to live; animam efflare, to expire; animosi, men of spirit; bene animati, men of right feeling; exanimi sententia, according to our real opinion—and the very word animus is derived from anima. Again, the soul seems to Zeno the Stoic to be fire.

The Tusculan Disputations, Marcus Tullius Cicero

It’s always both amusing and frustrating that the ancient philosophers so seldom managed to actually stay on their own stated topic for more than a sentence or two.

This is, in my opinion, what death observably and undeniably is:

A cessation of an intelligence’s interaction with a material plane of reality, as observed by intelligences still inhabiting that plane. This cessation of interaction occurs in company with various quantifiable changes in the physical body of the recently transformed intelligence and is subsequently followed by the decomposition of the body.

There is no need to delve into definitions of the soul, its purported existence, or its subsequent fate, in order to understand what death is. Indeed, before one delves into those complicated and potentially ineffable things, one would do well to first complete the original task one has set oneself.

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Scott Adams Melts Down

Scott Adams goes full Gamma and it is glorious.

Compare my actual Covid prediction record (the best in the nation): http://shorturl.at/dotC3 with the interpretation below and spot the cognitive dissonance tells.

It’s weirdly fascinating to see how easily people hallucinate entirely different lives for me.

Not only does his “actual Covid prediction record” not come anywhere close to Karl Denninger’s, but he was actually dumb enough to get injected with a substance that was already known to be unsafe and ineffective at both times he submitted to the vaccine regime. According to AC and others who watch his streams, he’s psychologically breaking down over the cognitive dissonance of a) needing to believe that he is a Very Smart Boy and b) knowing that he was dumb enough to voluntarily take the killshot when tens of millions of Americans were smart enough to avoid following the health care recommendations of global depopulationists.

This vulgar, eye-twitching rant in response to a viewer telling him that he should simply admit that he was wrong tells you everything you need to know about the man’s mental state.

Scott Adams is freaking out. The eye blinking in the video is the tell. Here is one decent probability, in the range of possibilities in the probability matrix of what is going on with him. Scott has some inflammatory issues, mostly producing nerve dysfunction, and those things are impacting his ability to draw and do the things he wants to do, according to some accounts. It is a shame, and people should feel bad about that, as little is as irritating as the spirit having the drive and the body breaking down and holding it back. I think the jab increases the probabilities of those issues getting worse, and he may have begun to feel as if some of his symptoms might have been getting worse. Probably just enough that he began to worry the jab was a mistake, which produced his initial ambivalent, quasi-walk-back on it. People however pounced on him, as he was a convenient outlet for their rage at all the other people knowingly lying to them, and because he has a very defensive reflex, he began fighting. Now he is getting frustrated, because his health may be fucked, which means his life may be fucked, it may be getting worse and he is suffering mentally and physically, and on the other side are people who he feels in conflict with, who will “win” if his body begins failing – and in his head they want to win.

On last night’s Darkstream 803, I went through and examined Adams’s Pandemic Prediction Audit, in which the self-appointed “best predictor of the pandemic, at least among public figures” attempted to fold, spindle, and mutilate his past statements in order to make them less obviously wrong to the casual observer. Here is a brief summary of my point-by-point review of his nominal predictions.

CLOSING TRAVEL WITH CHINA

Not exactly much of a prediction, and ultimately irrelevant, but we’ll give it to him. 1/1.

FAUCI AND FACEMASKS

Adams called out Fauci for lying when he said masks would NOT help the general public. Masks didn’t stop or even slow down the spread of Covid. This was one of the few times when Fauci was actually telling the truth and the fact that Fauci later lied and supported face-masking doesn’t make Scott’s prediction “that masks probably work” correct. He was flat-out wrong. 1/2.

LEADERSHIP AS A SUCCESS VARIABLE

Adams predicted we would not see “leadership” as a variable that caused one country or state to do better than any other in terms of controlling Covid death rates. Whether one compares New York to Florida or the USA to Sweden, that was completely wrong. 1/3.

LAB LEAK THEORY

This wasn’t really a prediction, but because Adams did not toe the official line and endorse the media narrative that merely discussing the possibility of the virus being engineered was conspiracy theory, we’ll give him half a point. 1.5/4.

VACCINE “SUCCESS”

He predicted Project Warp speed would NOT succeed in creating a vaccine in time. He was not only wrong, he was foolish enough to take one of the vaccines that was created twice. And to say that he “never trusted Big Pharma” when he is literally trusting it with his life and his health is simply bizarre and potentially indicative of cognitive vaccine damage. 1.5/5.

HCQ

Adams attempted to have it both ways with HCQ. But he was open to it, and it wasn’t the gamechanger that Ivermectin turned out to be. So, another half-point. 2/6.

IVERMECTIN

Ivermectin has turned out to be as effective as advertised despite the entire media-medical complex attempting to turn public opinion against it, and vastly more effective than the vaccines. A comparable government effort based on Ivermectin rather than the fraudulent vaccines would have crushed the pandemic, instead, pharmacies, doctors, and hospitals have been actively preventing patients from being treated with it. Adams was flat-out wrong. 2/7.

BIG PHARMA CONTROL

Adams doesn’t entirey reject “the hypothesis that big Pharma can control the entire world’s medical opinions on HCQ and Ivermectin by buying off a handful of experts in America” but then turns around and says some politician would have exposed it if there was. But his prediction – and his choice to get vaccinated twice – make it clear that he didn’t believe in or predict the actual Big Pharma conspiracy or the level of control of the global media it demonstrated over the last two years. 2/8.

VACCINE RISKS AND BENEFITS

Adams incorrectly stated we didn’t know enough — and couldn’t know enough in time — about the confirmed risks or benefits of the vaccines. He got vaccinated in order to travel, then vacillated on the booster shot before finally rejecting it. He was obviously wrong. 2/9.

THE TWEET THAT TRIGGERED MY CRITICS

I’ll present this in its entirety, because it is a beautiful example of the Secret King at his most triumphant in complete defeat. He was totally wrong, and yet, still insists that he was phenomenonically correct inside his skull. 2/10

I colorfully tweeted after my vaccinations in the summer of 2021 that for the vaccinated, the pandemic was over, but not so much for the unvaccinated. That tweet was based on my personal feelings which I often proclaim to have no basis in fact. I include this example for completeness, but it wasn’t a prediction. It was a psychological phenomenon inside my skull. You don’t need to fact-check it. And for me, it’s still true, subjectively speaking.

DEATH PREDICTION

He predicted that lockdowns would save substantial lives and that only 5,000 people would die. 2/11.

ROGUE DOCTORS PREDICTION

I predicted the “rogue doctors” were not credible and notes that “most of the rogues have been banned by social media for spreading obvious false information”. By rights, he should get minus two points for this, because the rogue doctors’ various predictions about the vaccines have been generally correct and because he’s dumb enough to assume that social media is a reasonable arbiter of false information. But we’ll just count it as one prediction. 2/12.

MANDATES

He has never favored mandates. Which is good. But this is also not a prediction. 2/12.

SOCIAL AND HEALTH IMPACT OF THE LOCKDOWNS

He correctly notes that everyone knew the lockdowns would be hard on people. Not a prediction. 2/12.

WEIGHT, FITNESS, AND VITAMIN D

He did advise people to get fit, lose weight, and take Vitamin D. Not exactly a prediction, but since Vitamin D supplementation has turned out to be so important in helping people fight off Covid and other diseases, we’ll be generous and give him a full point. 3/13.

CDC QUARANTINE GUIDELINES

He never made any prediction about quarantines beginning or ending. Not a prediction. 3/13.

WHY “ONE SIDE” GETS BANNED FROM SOCIAL MEDIA

He claims to have predicted Twitter and YouTube would not ban him for “violating the narrative” on vaccination safety. He didn’t ever violate the narrative, and he clearly doesn’t understand what the vaccine narrative or “false information” are. 3/14.

VAERS DATABASE

He expected the vaccine side effects were overreported by VAERS. He’s wrong. 3/15.

MASS FORMATION PSYCHOSIS

He thinks the massive global propaganda we have all endured is “a diversion tactic so we stop looking at fake news and social media as the cause of our problems.” This is wrong, stupid, and ignorant. But it’s not a prediction. 3/15

AUDIT TOTAL: 3 of 15

Not a very impressive performance by Mr. Adams, especially when compared to the likes of Karl Denninger, who has been very, very good with his predictions ever since observing that 80 percent of the passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship never came down with Covid in early 2020.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Gun, She Smokes

Of all the words we recollect,
The most frightening are these:
Denninger was correct!

Project Veritas publishes DARPA papers that confirm what Karl Denninger has been repeatedly telling everyone about Covid-19 and the fraudulent vaccines since February 2020.

What I’ve maintained all along is in in official government-documented form:

The virus was man-made. Ecohealth tried to get funding through DARPA and was told to go to Hell because it violated the constraint on gain-of-function research. Fauci didn’t give a **** and his part of the NIH funded it.

There were people in both China and here in the US (along with presumably other nations) who were involved. They all knew damn well what happened and all of them have lied for the last 2+ years about it.

The governments involved all knew before the shots were released that they were dangerous and would become worthless. They knew that natural infection did not, in most cases, carry the same risk because the virus never gets into the bloodstream but there is no way to avoid that risk with an injection. We now know this factually from clinical experience (and in fact knew in the early part of 2020) — viremia does not happen in other than severe and fatal cases.

The governments also knew that Covid-19 itself was not dangerous most of the time to healthy individuals and they knew why. It was deliberately engineered that way in an attempt, this paper alleges, as an experiment to be inoculated intentionally into bats in an attempt to see whether doing so could cut off future zoonotic events. Whether the experiment went wrong by accident or intent is not known, but that it was taking place and both our government and China knew about it, along with knowing that it should not be very dangerous to most people is now established as fact. So why all the histrionics ginned up worldwide continuing to this day?

The experiment went bad and if you knew why it went bad and who was involved in it you might conclude there really is a valid reason to get rid of every single government agency and individual involved. Unlike “conspiracy theories” that are flat-out crap its not crazy to contemplate doing that either, especially given the death toll. It was evident within weeks that medically frail people were going to get buttraped by this thing and thus if the government told the truth the pitchforks might well come out since they actually created this ****ing monster and it wasn’t just China – it was also the United States Government that did it and several institutions within this nation were intimately involved as well.

Oh by the way the same documents also contain evidence that the Government knew both HCQ and Ivermectin were effective against the virus by April of 2020. How many people died that were denied access to safe drugs that our government had every reason to believe worked?

The propaganda machine hasn’t been shut down yet, but the Narrative is officially shattered.

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Partygate Sinks Boris

The British Prime Minister is at risk of being thrown out of office due to an ill-considered lockdown party:

‘WTF were they thinking?’ Tories turn on Boris as he faces police probe threat after bombshell leaked email shows his top civil servant invited 100 staff to ‘BYOB’ bash in Downing St at height of Covid lockdown in May 2020 – and PM and Carrie ‘joined in’

Downing Street staff were invited to garden party at No10 during the first lockdown, according to email. An invite from the PM’s principal private secretary Martin Reynolds told staff to bring their own drinks. He urged them to attend No10’s lavish grounds ‘to make the most of the lovely weather’ on May 20, 2020. At the time England was in the middle of the first lockdown, with social gatherings banned, even outside. Boris Johnson has dodged saying if he attended the event in the Downing Street garden along with Carrie.

One rule for thee, another for me. Not a good look. Of course, Boris well deserves to get thrown out on his ample posterior for pushing the killshots on the British people, but this is a particularly stupid way to go.

UPDATE: He’s a goner. Good riddance. He should have leaned into Brexit rather than Globohomo.

TWO-THIRDS of Brits say ‘serial liar’ Boris should QUIT over ‘Partygate’: PM ducks highly-charged Commons showdown with bereaved MPs and top Tories turn on him over Downing St ‘BYOB’ bash during May 2020 lockdown that ‘he attended’

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Color Revolution Fail

Vladimir Putin confirms that the unrest in Kazakhstan was another attempted color revolution by the Promethean neocons. Unlike Ukraine, this attempted coup failed thanks to the prompt action by the Russian Federation and the other CSTO states:

Violent and bloody clashes in Kazakhstan are a form of aggression leveled against the country, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said, claiming the same tactics used in Ukraine in 2014 were deployed to coordinate protests.

Speaking as part of a meeting of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) on Monday, Putin said that the mutual defense pact’s troops were working to secure the Central Asian nation after armed groups captured a number of key facilities and effectively took control of its largest city, Almaty. Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev requested military support last week, insisting that the country was under attack from foreign terrorists.

“Well-organized and well-controlled groups of militants were used,” President Putin alleged, “including those who had apparently been trained in terrorist camps abroad.” At the same time, he went on, “Maidan technologies” were used to support the rioters and share information, akin to those that led to the ousting of the Ukrainian government.

This is a serious casus belli, and if the Fake Biden administration refuses to accede to Russia’s reasonable demands for security and non-interference in the states that border it in the current Geneva talks, don’t be surprised if the Iran-Russia-China alliance does not pass Go, does not collect $200, but proceeds directly to war.

DISCUSS ON SG

Scott Adams and the Limits of Boomer

A contemplation of why an intelligent observer such as Scott Adams should prove to be so astonishingly retarded when it came to the vaxxes:

It has been interesting over the last month to watch the curious saga of Scott Adams on Twitter. He has gone from being a bog standard normie to very nearly crossing the bridge to covid enlightenment, only to draw back from the brink and instead go full on Branch Covidian. Of course, to save face for how he and others have been so wrong so often while a bunch of anonymous right wingers on social media have been right, Scott has taken to portraying himself as merely “doubting the doubters,” casting their correct predictions as mere luck, a case of the crowd occasionally getting something right entirely by accident.

Underlying all of this is Scott’s abiding faith in “experts,” and his corresponding incredulousness that non-experts, social media anons and the like, could have been right when the experts were wrong. It must be a fluke. Those who don’t think so are just engaging in confirmation bias, just”coping” (with what, being right when the experts were wrong?). Surely their rightness isn’t because they had access to better information or had better instincts than the experts, that’s impossible! All of this is even more ironic because Scott’s whole brand as expressed in his books and in his Dilbert comic strip is that those in positions of authority rarely know what is going on and the little guy drones in the trenches are the ones who really make things work.

What this unmasks, I suspect, is ultimately that he is a product of his generation and cannot escape its assumptions, even when he tries to. The intellectual underpinnings for Boomers were formed when most of America’s institutions still actually worked as advertised. Their generation is used to assuming that things like government agencies and large corporations fundamentally operate for the good of those who they supposedly serve. This creates a normalcy bias that leads to undue trust being granted to them. Boomers have a great deal of difficulty coming to grips with the increasing institutional decay and dysfunctionality that characterises modern America.

Every generation has its shortcomings. Generation X may not suffer from an excess of trust in experts, but we are prone to apathy and despair. And while it is satisfying – and even necessary at times – to relentlessly mock the flaws of influential members of other generations, it’s more important to focus on successfully addressing our own.

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Avoiding the Obvious

Peter King, like a good little SJW, avoids the obvious observation in contemplating the crash in attendance at home games for the former Washington Redskins:

I sincerely hope Daniel Snyder comes to his senses in 2022 and sells the franchise. It’s over, Dan. Or, rather, Mister Snyder. Beyond the over-protectionism of the NFL in the past year (the morally bankrupt over-protectionism, I might add), there is the simple fact that fans have long since surrendered their loyalty to the team, and won’t be back as long as Snyder is the owner.

Some grist for that mill: WFT won the NFC East last year (albeit with a 6-10 record), made the playoffs and played respectfully in an exciting wild-card home loss to eventual Super Bowl champ Tampa Bay last year, and entered this year picked by some to contend for the division title again. The Jacksonville Jaguars, on the other hand, have lost 75 percent of their games over the past decade, went 1-15 last year, hired a new coach and quarterback last offseason, and watched the promise of yet another expensive rebuild go down the toilet with the unceremonious firing of savior coach Urban Meyer. Entering Week 18, savior QB Trevor Lawrence was the lowest-rated passer, among qualifiers, in the league. The Jags are 4-29 in the last two years, 9 wins fewer than WFT. And yet:

Jacksonville drew 7,217 more fans to home games this season than Washington did.

Only one team in the NFL played to less than 75 percent capacity this year, Washington, which sold 64.3 percent of its seats for eight home games. Those at the last two games, versus Dallas and Philadelphia, are certain more than half the crowd at each game rooted for the visitors. This is the team, and the ownership, that the league office has spent so much time defending in the wake of the sex-harassment scandal that shook the franchise in 2021.

No one cares about the owner. They might hate him, they might think he’s an idiot, and they probably prefer to get rid of him because of the team’s underperformance during his tenure. But they don’t really care about him.

What they do care about is the Redskins. They were – they are – Redskins fans. And WFT is no longer the Redskins. That’s why they don’t buy tickets or attend the games anymore. While the Redskins were once among the top merchandise-selling teams in the league, I’ll bet they are at the very bottom of the 32 teams now.

Brands matter, and the NFL killed the Redskins brand.

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