Jon Letendre

Reason and investigation of the facts. Also, the context that my grandfather had just died of it a couple months before and to protect my mom who I was staying with at the time who has COPD. Just because there is a standard time for testing doesn't mean in context of a disease that nobody has natural immunity to that individuals such as myself can't take vaccines or medical drugs that have not went through the full process of testing outside of that context as it would be a potential sacrifice of one's life to do otherwise. It would be similar to someone with cancer taking an experimental treatment. Also,  why is any of this important as it's a personal choice. I don't even fully understand the full purpose of this entire thread about denying the existence of a disease where essentially every fact of evidence and perception proves the existence of while no evidence exists that shows that it doesn't.  It's just arbitrary although I have some ideas why someone would claim this against the overwhelming facts of reality. This is just a very strange discussion. 

No, that would be secondhanded, I did it to prevent myself from getting Covid and studied mRNA vaccines before taking the vaccines. This is ridiculous and I'm not taking part in this strange discussion anymore and will read to moderate it against arbitrary conspiracy theories and from those seeking to ignore reason,  evidence, and proper epistemology. 

Monart, here's a link to Brownstone Institute and their many articles
https://brownstone.org/
the gold standard for all things pandemic, good science, optimal health and freedom-orientated, fronted by the heroic Jeffrey Tucker ("Liberty or Lockdown?"). They have been my bright reference point

Can you give some examples of the CDC saying that?
 

@necrovore That would mean those people would have to had advanced knowledge years prior to the pandemic of the existence of the covid virus which is a big leap implying a planned conspiracy when it is much more likely that it was simply a coincidence involving passive attacks from the Left on the religious Right. While there likely are occasional side effects of childhood vaccines (like watching a commercial for any medicine or vaccine shows in detail) we've essentially all had them and they have been scientifically proven to be extremely rare with the benefits outweighing the slight risk. Obviously, that doesn't imply forced vaccinations are moral or should be legal outside of maybe an extremely lethal and highly contagious novel disease, covid doesn't qualify, although I personally got the vaccine the week it was allowed.  (J&J which to prove the above point of risk was soon taken off the market due to the blood clot risk). The main principle involves the fact that the government should not be involved in education as it should be private or funded via charity as like most things current governments are improperly involved in when their only valid jobs are the protection of individual rights. 

How were mRNA vaccines against the covid virus created and developed if the DNA sequence of the virus was never "purified and isolated" (concepts that do not apply to DNA sequencing btw), or are they also non-existent conspiracies?

Why you keep going…

…Because you seek to know truth, to show it, to let it be known and shown. You resist and defend against the truth being denied, distorted, or defiled. And more so with fundamental, radical axiomatic truths. Objectivism is such a fundamental truth.

Objectivism is an integrated system of philosophy you come to know as truth by way of looking at reality by your own mind and reason. You did not give trust to experts, not to professors or priests, as to whether Objectivism was true or false. You know for yourself that Objectivism is true.

In the same independently thinking way, you come to know and defend the truth of covid. Or not?

We have a better chance of surviving four years of Biden than of surviving four years of Trump.
 

A Friday Hodgepodge

1. "Why Can't Professional Philosophers Get Rand Right?," by Mike Mazza (New Ideal):Mazza indicates that parochialism, of which the above is only a type, is a problem even for those few non-Objectivist academics who have been sympathetic to Rand, and is right to call out professional philosophers, of all people, for falling into it.

2. "Selfish Randsday to All," by Harry Binswanger (Value for Value):I especially recommend visiting this post for the excerpt from Rand's The Fountainhead, which powerfully demolishes the trite, but deadly and wrong sentiment that it's easy to be selfish.

3. "Portraying CEOs as Cartoon Villains," by Jaana Woiceshyn (How to Be Profitable and Moral):This dishonest practice has always been a hallmark of the left, but the right has moved from failing to even pretend to stand up for business to joining in.

Indeed, such phrases as corporate media -- once a shibboleth of the left -- now get bandied about as if we're all communists now.

4. "Has the Right Been Eviscerated by Trump?," by Peter Schwartz (PeterSchwartz.com, 2019):This post is even more relevant now than when I read it in 2019.

And if the above isn't disturbing enough, news from the latest CPAC will more than underscore Schwartz's point.

-- CAVLink to Original

No, it doesn't follow that it's a bogus award, just because Mr. Eckert wants proof of virus isolation from Dr. Kammerer first, while Dr. Kammerer want proof of the award first.  Consider the flip side, since Dr. Kammerer doesn’t want to show her proof first, does it follow from that alone that she doesn’t have it?  No.

In an article reporting Dr. Kammerer's side of the dispute:
"In a letter from a lawyer dated October 17, 2022, the law firm Rogert & Ulbrich informed SaMiraFamily AG and Mr. Samuel Eckert that Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer complied with the request and will present proof of the existence of the SARS-Cov-2 virus with proof of the existence of the amount of the request."
In an article reporting Mr. Eckert's side of the debate:
"In view of the expressed "suspicion of fraud", the accusation of "cheating" and the fact that Kämmerer announced more than once to the public that she had the evidence necessary to fulfill the promise, but she did not want to "give it away" and obviously still doesn't want to, Transition News sent her and her lawyers several questions."
So, it's at least a stand-off: each side wanting the other to provide the proof first.
But the fundamental question remains. If the proof exists that SC2 has been isolated, purified, and distinctly identified, and that this proof is so widely available that asking for it is absurd, then where are the documents for it? If the proof is so obvious and publicly available as to be unquestionable and unchallengeable, then why does Dr. Kammerer not want to "give it away"?
Is it like someone claiming they have proof that Objectivism is false, but doesn't want to "give it away"?
 
 

I'd think "perception" contains the idea of awareness, and is not helpful in a statement of what is awareness or how it comes about. But perhaps you just mean by "perception" here inputs from sensors bring information of things to the processing plant. That is OK.
What is the relationship of information processing in neural networks and my information processing in awareness that I am typing a question ending at the question mark? If the information processing of the neural-network activity underlying my information processing in conscious awareness just is that conscious information processing, that identity needs to be established by argument and research results. On the face of it, it appears that when we are consciously taking in information and making it integral to our actions, we are not thinking about those underlying neuronal information processes (firing patterns of neural networks), but of things like what marks we are making on the computer screen and what worthwhile thoughts of worldly entities, characters, passages, and situations in topic (or tangentially) we are striving to attain and share.
Perhaps you could show us where you think is the cutting edge of research on that question is today. (Please don't say "I'm the cutting edge". That is not credible nor informative, what one is aiming for is not what one has in hand, and it bespeaks a failure to look and assess beyond ones own thought in the enterprise of human knowledge.) I'm not aware that any well-founded right answer to my question has been reached, but I'm not really up to date on latest research. I've noticed the following works tackling the question or issues pertinent to it through some years now. Of any you have studied, do you find any to be getting somewhere (or for that matter, of any interest to you)?
Artificial Intelligence – The Very Idea (Haugeland 1985)
The Remembered Present – A Biological Theory of Consciousness (Edelman 1989)
Consciousness Explained (Dennett 1991)
The Race for Consciousness (Taylor 1999)
The Quest for Consciousness – A Neurobiological Approach (Koch 2004)
Consciousness (Hill 2009)
Mind: Your Consciousness is What and Where? (Honderich 2017)
The Feeling of Life Itself – Why Consciousness is Widespread but Cannot Be Computed (Koch 2019)
Conscious Mind / Resonant Brain – How Each Brain Makes a Mind (Grossberg 2021). 
 
 
 
 

Yes, indeed,  it would be an easy award to win if SARS-CoV-2 has already been isolated. You suggest that, as nobody took up the challenge, SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated.
If you have given it a serious look, you would have seen that the offer is not quite serious:
From the site and the video linked to, I saw that the person who initiated the challenge and offers the reward is a certain Mr. Samuel Eckert.
On October 17, 2022, Fr. Prof. Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg contacted this Samuel Eckert through her lawyers. She accepts the challenge. She will provide the required proof. For the fact that she, as you requested, is indeed a virologist, she sent attached her publications.
She then asked Mr. Eckert to prove that he does possess the amount of the award, e.g. by depositing it in an escrow account.
Now this Mr. Eckert answers something like: wait a minute, the objective of this challenge is not to pay 1.5 million, but to open a debate etc. !
In another video (this one, minute 15:43), Mr. Eckert explains that first should Dr. Ulrike Kämmerer provide the required proof for existence of SARS-CoV-2, and only then will Mr. Eckert prove that he has the money ! A bogus award, in other words.
It would have been better if, before suggesting that nobody accepted the challenge and implying that this is an additional indication that  SARS-CoV-2 doesn't exist, you would have given this challenge a serious look.☹️
His site indicates that this Mr. Eckert is a conspiracy theorist (no viruses exist etc.).
This is not the first conspiracist you are approvingly citing on this Objectivism forum: it was also Christine Massey (from YogaEsoteric and FluorideFreePeel), then the book Virus Mania: Corona/COVID-19, Measles, Swine Flu, Cervical Cancer, Avian Flu, SARS, BSE, Hepatitis C, AIDS, Polio. How the Medical Industry Invents Epidemics, Making Billion-Dollar Profits At Our Expense.☹️☹️

Isn't it proven that there was a big spike in respiratory deaths starting in 2020, which must have had some cause or causes?
 

Again, papers like “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” appear to have identified SARS-CoV-2 definitively and independently, but a reading of the documentation shows otherwise. Yes, as I've said before, I've read the paper you named (along with several others over the years, including the progenitor paper from Wuhan, "A Novel Coronavirus from Patients with Pneumonia in China, 2019".)
The purpose of the paper is to offer a new, better method of purification that can be applied to SARS-CoV-2 (SC2). The method was developed using an SC2 sample that the authors did not acquire themselves directly from a patient, but from another, outside source, "SARS-CoV2 isolate Finland/1/2020". They cultured and re-purified it, then compared it with "the SARS-CoV-2 Wuhan (NC_045512.2) reference genome" for validation of their new purification method. So the paper is actually a description of how the authors (re)purified what they assumed to be SC2 (from Finland) and then compared it with the originally alleged SC2 genome (from Wuhan).
The first study from Wuhan that reported a "novel coronavirus" is the primary reference study to which all subsequent studies. As I pointed out before, and as close reading would show, the Wuhan study is biased, flawed, and suspect, in ways that include the authors' not taking into account the pre-existing respiratory disease epidemic from the severe air pollution in Wuhan.

I enjoy your posts.  It's like you take my own thoughts on subjects and then express them much more eloquently than I can currently due to constantly being in a relatively stressful situation mostly outside of my control and essentially uncaused by myself that no matter what I do to attempt to thwart it keeps getting continually sabatoged via outside sources. 

As I mentioned at least twice above, “SARS-CoV-2 Production, Purification Methods and UV Inactivation for Proteomics and Structural Studies” provides the proof that you have demanded, which incidentally is an unreasonable demand (evidence is evidence, you don’t get to arbitrarily stipulate what constitutes evidence). You have not addressed the facts, instead you retreat behind automatic denial as a means of evading the science. In the face of evidence having been presented, it is incumbent on you to disprove that evidence. Indeed, I have no evidence that you have even looked at that article, and I can think of no rational reason for your refusal to directly address the science. You offer no alternative conclusion regarding the axiomatic (the myriad scientific observations of covid), instead you just repeat your denial without evidence to support an alternative, nor do you even state what such an alternative is. In other words, you are engaging in selective epistemological nihilism.
My current counter-offer is that you should provide evidence that malaria exists: I will take the position that you have taken, which is to just deny that malaria exists. I sincerely hope that you do not hold a political-consequences theory of epistemology, that the standards of proof depends not on the logic of the claim and the objective nature of the existent, but are determined by whether the existent has been misused to support initiation of force. Under which logic, I substitute measles, smallpox or Spanish flu in my challenge to you, all of which triggered tyrannical governmental responses. I would like to see what you consider to be acceptable proof that malaria exists, and see some reasoning as to why you find that evidence to be sufficient (unless, of course, you are also a malaria-denier).

"Prevarication" = non-stop lying and distraction
It's your minds they own.
 
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-ukraine-war-runs-on-lies/

Yes, to some, psycho-epistemological barriers to autonomous discovery of the truth are difficult to detect and acknowledge, especially when faced with the potential feelings of fear and guilt.

Many tips and clues are posted by the participants here. The fundamental question is: Has the alleged cause of covid, the "novel SARS-CoV-2", been scientifically proven to exist and be identifiable by a process of isolation and purification? In answering this question, there may be distractions and diversions from its primacy and the controversy that, after 4 years,  the answer may still be in the negative.
Note that there is an as-yet unclaimed 1.5 million Euros award to any “virologist who presents scientific proof of the existence of a corona virus, including documented control experiments of all steps taken in the proof.”

Belief in all things covid is more complicated, I think, than whether or not one believes there was a specific viron spreading through the human population.
One reason to defend one's belief 'in it' is to rationalize the relinquishing of autonomy and especially among those who are cognizant of the level of prize they allot to individualism and productivity and the associated emotional responses that are tied into that relinquishment.  

What's different is that the belief in covid is based on science, so say the covid believers. Our belief is based on observation, experimentation, evidence, logic, and all the methods of reason; whereas, the belief in God is based on revelation, authority, testimonials, intuition, faith.
So, do you, the covid believers, know that covid exists by your own reason? Or, do you know it by reliance on the authority of (some of the) experts in virology and epidemiology?
For most of us, of course, we have to trust the consensus of experts; we don't have the knowledge or time to learn and know it for ourselves, which is normal and to be expected, for all knowledge outside our own fields.
Isn't your trust in covid experts is similar to that of the God believers' trust in their pastors, priests, popes, and theologians?
Not at all. Our trust is based on science and the science of the experts.
So it's rational for you to trust the covid experts, but not rational for the God believers to trust their God experts.  Yet you both don't know for yourself the existence of covid/God. What if belief in either is unjustified because the experts haven't told the whole truth? How do you find out?
 

Starting from the fact that lawsuits and criminal prosecutions are (ideally) seeking redress for violation of a person’s rights, justice is not served by an arbitrary time-based curtailment of the right to justice. Any time limit on justice demands proper justification, and “it has been a long time since the wrong was done” is not valid justification. The basic rationale for statutes of limitation is that miscarriage of justice is more-possible because of the unavailability or unreliability of witnesses after a certain number of years. A crucial presumption of SOL is that a person who has suffered a wrong will diligently seek justice, which of course requires that they have discovered the wrong, where for instance a surgeon who fails to remove an internal tumor can be sued for malpractice longer than the standard 3 years for personal injury, owing to the fact that the surgeon’s wrong is effectively un-discoverable.
The proper political question (not constitutional) is, at what point should a person’s right to justice be terminated by the state? The primary limit should be based on the miscarriage of justice problem of litigating stale cases, where the witnesses are dead or cannot be trusted to remember: and we need an objective rule governing that limit, it should not be treated on a subjective case-by-case basis. Victim awareness of the wrong (the discovery rule) is also a valid reason for exceptionally extending the limit backwards, but this backwards extension should not provide an easy excuse for indiligence in protecting one’s rights.
In the particular case, the New York Legislature simply abandoned the rational underpinnings of SOL law, by picking out an arbitrary subset of wrongs deserving of a longer limit on justice. It is not as though the victim was unaware of what purportedly happened, she simply chose to not care until she found a reason to care. So then why can’t I sue a contractor for defective workmanship 20 years ago?

The Legal Concept of Evidence
Necovore, I don't know if the preponderance-of-the-evidence rule for civil suits is itself from the Common Law Mr. Brooks purports he would like to be maintained, but most tort law is developed by the Common Law. So he might well need to blame the Common Law for that standard of proof in a charge such as that brought by Ms. Carroll; I don't know. What was the evidence for her claims rated by the jury as having more than 50% likelihood of being true? (I'd imagine Mr. Trump's former boast that you can grab 'em by the pussy if you are a star [entered as pertinent evidence in the present case] probably added some weight against his claim of innocence in the present case.)
Mr. Brooks provided no specifics to his claim that "over several generations Marxist intellectuals have been transforming the American justice system" to their political ends. Which intellectuals of any stripe transform the American justice system. Did Posner's economic analysis of law? Did Epstein's writings on the takings clause in the Constitution? (No on Epstein's, though I wish that they do, and I've still hope they will.) Where in Mr. Brooks's article are specified the law review articles by and names of these alleged Marxist intellectuals who have transformed the American justice system? Surely he knows that such Marxist intellectuals would have to be specific individuals, not air through which his hand waves, and surely he knows that if he speaks the truth in naming such individuals, he is defended against libel by the truth of his claim (proven by preponderance of the evidence). So far as I know, we've the same old common law in this sector of it, undermine confidence in the legal system day after day by hollering "Marxist", "prejudiced", or "rigged" for your political ends as a Mr. Brooks might.
Are intellectuals who think there is "social justice" over and above "justice" (which is a myopic view of "justice") people who have influence on the American legal system? Specifics are lacking for the sweeping declarations of Mr. Brooks. Are such intellectuals all Marxist? Can't intellectuals have wrong-headed social ideas without being Marxist or brainlessly led by Marxists? Of course they can and do. It's easier to cry "Marxist"—and catchier to an audience stuck in whatever learning they or their elders got of social thought 50 years ago—than relaying Rawl's A Theory of Justice with its Principles, including the Principle of Liberty, or the writer in jurisprudence A. J. David Richards based on Rawls or relaying Nozick's counters to Rawl's theory. Or rendering the illuminating classics: Hart's The Concept of Law and Fuller's The Morality of Law. Of course Mr. Brooks likely has read much from those works at some point and has a fair guess as to what quarters hear which of them sympathetically or with hostility. His piece is the usual for broad public consumption: name-calling and lies for a political cause.

It's completely improper to consider such a thing to be "evidence."
It's like saying Johnny Depp's performance in Sweeney Todd is "evidence" that he cut someone's throat.
Some rap music has lyrics that convey certain attitudes toward women, which would probably not look good if those rappers were accused of rape, but I think it's improper to consider those lyrics as "evidence" that the rappers committed rape. It's entirely arguable that the rappers say that stuff, not because it's true, but because they think it sells more records.
It seems even more improper that such statements should be used against Trump, but similar statements made by his accuser (and cited in the William Brooks piece), which would tend to reduce her credibility, didn't seem to be considered.