Not just an open-source treasure hunt, but a COVID vaccine problem supersource

 

By now I'm sure readers are aware that last weekend, the Department of Health and Human Services released an open-source 11GB file containing every single Medicare claim from 2018 to 2024 - not individual patient diagnoses and private information, but every charge claimed against Medicare for every procedure by every provider.  It's a gold mine of information that may lead to literal gold mines for those who find evidence of fraud and abuse in the data.  As Jeff Childers pointed out:

This is clearly not just a DOGE project. It is a coordinated effort across the Trump Administration. For example, timed with the release of the data, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a related new program. Not only have they open-sourced the research, but they have gamified it. Bessent said Treasury was setting up a website for people to report Medicare fraud— and they’ll get up to 30% of whatever’s fined and recovered.

If the $1 trillion fraud estimate is even half right, the government just turned fraud detection into the world’s largest treasure hunt. Some kid in a bedroom with a laptop, a chatbot, and a case of energy drinks might make more money this year than most hedge fund managers. Dog the Bounty Hunter: Fraud Edition is coming soon, to a laptop near you.

Social media quickly began lighting up across the board. Within hours of the data release, citizen analysts had started flagging facilities billing for physically impossible numbers of procedures, clinics with addresses at residential apartments diagnosing hundreds of children with autism per month, and at least one provider that seems to have performed more Medicaid services than there are actual humans in its zip code.

However, the biggest aspect of this data treasure trove might be the unveiling, at long last, of the problems caused by COVID vaccines.

While most folks were off and running hunting for fraud bounties, the covid warriors instantly saw the other, riper fruit hanging higher up in the HHS data’s branches ... And now they have AI to help crunch the numbers, build spreadsheets, put up websites, and suggest, “Would you like me to draft the lawsuit?”

Since the agency was birthed by progressive geniuses in the Carter Administration, HHS has diligently protected the privacy of Big Pharma by keeping a death-grip on Americans’ health data. Even though, during the exact same period, we got fatter by the minute, our health got worse and worse, and we spent more and more trillions on healthcare. It’s none of your business because privacy. Science! Trust the experts! Shut up!

Now, taking the corporate media, pharma, and the political establishment completely by surprise, the data is suddenly out there. The VAERS data looked awful, but they wriggled out of that trap by sneering that the adverse event-reporting system —the system they created— was unreliable. But now we have a second data set— and it includes vaccination records.

What happens when the HHS data confirms the VAERS data? What will they say then?

I don’t say this lightly: this historic HHS data release could be even bigger than the Epstein files.

There's more at the link.

I think he's spot on.  Anyone and everyone who's been affected by problems after receiving the COVID vaccine, or who's lost a relative or friend to vaccine-related issues, can now find out for certain whether there's any correlation between that vaccination and subsequent medical issues, as revealed by what care was billed, when, and for how long.  With that information on hand, lawsuits for medical negligence and/or malfeasance of any kind by the vaccine manufacturers become more than just a theoretical possibility.  They become almost a certainty.

Cue the vaccine manufacturers suddenly lobbying Congress to pass a law granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits over negligence and malfeasance - immunity they do not have under the existing vaccine legislation.

I wonder how many ambulance chasers lawyers are suddenly rubbing their hands together with glee as they cue up their legal AI systems and turn them loose on the new data?

Peter

The recoil must have been spectacular!!!

 

I've known of the Colt 1855 Sidehammer revolver shotgun for years.  It was used (in the rifle version) by some sharpshooter units early in the Civil War, and sold reasonably well on the frontier and out West.  What I didn't know is that some unknown pioneer or trooper decided he wanted his Sidehammer to be somewhat more portable and accessible.  Well, "portable" is relative for a gun well over a foot long and weighing more than 6 pounds . . . but I'd say he succeeded.

If he tried to fire that beast one-handed from the back of a galloping horse, I suspect it would have been really hard to hold onto it.  The recoil must have been pretty snappy, to put it mildly!  Nevertheless, given the opportunity to modify a modern replica Sidehammer into that configuration, I'd kinda like to try it.  Typical 10ga. shotguns of the period used up to 1.5 to 2 drams of powder behind up to 1.5 ounces of lead shot.  The Sidehammer's chambers were shorter than sporting guns, so I daresay it wouldn't have used the top end of those ranges, but even so, I suspect it had a real kick on both ends.

Peter

The algorithm is manipulating you

 

We've all read warnings and horror stories about how algorithms are analyzing our online behavior and trying to steer us to their products, their channels, their platforms.  Thing is, it's a very real danger, and it's getting worse.  EKO provides this perspective.  I highly recommend reading the whole of the excerpt below, and watching both video clips.

let’s start here with something seemingly innocent, the budweiser ad from the superbowl.

in the primary signalling sphere of “positioning and product” this represents a profound volte face from the recent bud light echo chamber brand self-immolation fiascos, a return to images of growth and aspiration and rippling pride.

it’s a great ad. if you have not encountered it, see for yourself. experience it.

ok. got that?

it’s practically cinema, right? a story of friendship and coming of age and of becoming.

it’s got it all.

it’s moving stuff.

but it also has something you probably did not see, a meta game beneath the game where the real magic trick is taking place at a deeper neurological level, a firmware level cheat code to which the human mind has very little access.

let’s explore:

now watch this video.  [The critical bit comes from about 1m. 40sec. onward;  skip ahead to that point if you wish.]

now watch the budweiser ad again. see how they took this exact fractionation strategy and amplified and optimized it took you up, down, up, down, rain, protect, strive, fail, leap, fly, power chords, free bird, aaaaaaaand beer ad.

they boiled this whole concatenation down to its most bare bones, essential elements and ran a whole suggestability enhancement procession in a one minute experience.

i would wager they knew that.

i will also bet you that it has sold absolute truckloads of beer.

but this is not the scary part.

we, as humans, are used to ads. we know what they are for and embed a certain skepticism. OK, so maybe we buy a few more brewskis, but whatever, this is hardly the stuff of civilizational threat.

but you have to start stepping back to see the rest of the picture.

social media has become a barrage of short form information, increasingly video driven and increasingly exposed to savagely intense evolutionary stressors. the currency of online is attention. it’s time. twitter speaks of "maximizing unregretted user-seconds." this is what that means. it means “how can i get you to watch more of this and to want to watch more of this?”

keep in mind that algorithms are psychopaths. they have no theory of your well being that factors into this sort of optimization. it’s just “keep the typewriter monkey happy and online.” and every outlet is locked in the same arms race so no one gets to opt out. those who do not play this way get left behind and the user seconds go somewhere else.

there’s a worrying parallel to what happened with US food companies. they did not set out to create travesties of sugar and salt and over-amped artificiality, but as they experimented with it, they saw that people bought more. the feedback loop of “people will eat more froot loops than fruit” was obvious on revenue lines and if you do that for too long, pretty soon customers basically cannot even taste wholesome food anymore. it’s not enough of a dopamine hit.

media is the same.

what started as an inevitable game to maximize user time and click through rates has becomes somehting altogether other, a monster in the depths that cannot be seen, only felt as its machinations twist minds and demolish perspective.

There's more at the link.

It's almost diabolically clever, isn't it?  The thing is, it works.  It works so well that every single major player in the news media, social media, advertising and the entertainment industry is using it against us every single day.  So are politicians, from both sides of the aisle and everywhere else in the public sector.  We aren't being respected as individuals.  We're sheep to be shorn, votes to be manipulated, suckers to be fed pablum in exchange for our dollars and unthinking loyalty.

Remember that.  We're all being manipulated daily.  It takes sustained effort and really hard work to break free from that cycle and recognize it for what it is.

Peter

Heh

 

From Matt, editorial cartoonist at the Telegraph in the UK:

I would say "Transgender aliens next!", but that's already been done...

Peter

Rescuing a kidnapped girl from her predator captors

 

The BBC has the fascinating story of how a girl who'd been missing for six years was finally traced and rescued.  It's too long to cite everything here, but this excerpt gives you some idea of the care and attention to detail involved.

Squire and his team could see, from the type of light sockets and electrical outlets visible in the images, that Lucy was in North America. But that was about it.

They contacted Facebook, which at the time dominated the social media landscape, asking for help scouring uploaded family photos - to see if Lucy was in any of them. But Facebook, despite having facial recognition technology, said it "did not have the tools" to help.

So Squire and his colleagues analysed everything they could see in Lucy's room: the bedspread, her outfits, her stuffed toys. Looking for any element which might help.

And then they had a minor breakthrough. The team discovered that a sofa seen in some of the images was only sold regionally, not nationally, and therefore had a more limited customer base.

But that still amounted to about 40,000 people.

"At that point in the investigation, we're [still] looking at 29 states here in the US. I mean, you're talking about tens of thousands of addresses, and that's a very, very daunting task," says Squire.

The team looked for more clues. And that is when they realised something as mundane as the exposed brick wall in Lucy's bedroom could give them a lead.

"So, I started just Googling bricks and it wasn't too many searches [before] I found the Brick Industry Association," says Squire.

"And the woman on the phone was awesome. She was like, 'how can the brick industry help?'"

She offered to share the photo with brick experts all over the country. The response was almost immediate, he says.

One of the people who got in touch was John Harp, who had been working in brick sales since 1981.

"I noticed that the brick was a very pink-cast brick, and it had a little bit of a charcoal overlay on it. It was a modular eight-inch brick and it was square-edged," he says. "When I saw that, I knew exactly what the brick was," he adds.

It was, he told Squire, a "Flaming Alamo".

"[Our company] made that brick from the late 60s through about the middle part of the 80s, and I had sold millions of bricks from that plant."

Initially Squire was ecstatic, expecting they could access a digitised customer list. But Harp broke the news that the sales records were just a "pile of notes" that went back decades.

He did however reveal a key detail about bricks, Squire says.

"He goes: 'Bricks are heavy.' And he said: 'So heavy bricks don't go very far.'"

This changed everything. The team returned to the sofa customer list and narrowed that down to just those clients who lived within a 100-mile radius of Harp's brick factory in the US south-west.

There's much more at the link.  It's well worth reading in full, to give you some idea of the difficulties involved in tracing missing children.

The horrifying part of the story, to me at any rate, is that when police finally raided the house and rescued the girl, they learned she'd been raped by a sexual predator for six years.  Six years - and she was 12 years old when rescued.  That means she'd been missing and abused for half her life.  She was a child, with no resources to call on, no parent to lean on, nobody to help at all.  How she survived such abuse is something I can't comprehend.  Now in her 20's, she has a few things to say in the article about her experiences.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of missing children in our country.  Many of them were sent here by human traffickers, sold on to predators and abusers across the country.  It's heartbreaking to think that Lucy is only one such person.  If only we were all more alert to the warning signs, we might be able to help so many more . . .

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 299

 

Gathered from around the Internet over the past week.  Click any image for a larger view.

Sunday morning music

 

I had no idea that one of my favorite Jethro Tull songs - "Wond'ring Aloud", from their 1971 album "Aqualung" - had an extended version.  I'd only heard the abbreviated version from the album.  However, there was a longer edit, on the 40th anniversary re-issue of the album.

That made my week to hear that.  After 55 years, an old favorite lives again!

Peter