Bassmaster said:

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Proposition Joe said:

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He's a guy that used to shill for third-rate online sportsbooks. He gained an audience by pandering to a specific college football demographic, then found he could gain 100x the audience (and $$$) by pandering to a political demographic. Some of his tweets early in the pandemic were downright embarrassing how wrong they ended up being. As another poster said, he's a guy that doesn't believe half the **** he writes but he knows what gets likes/clicks.

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So, basically he was just like everybody else on both sides. Interesting.

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I'm not much of a fan of clay Travis and that dates to way before corona virus. My guess is if he is somewhat aligned with your opinions you believe he's pretty reasonable. If not you probably think he's just a talking head pandering to an audience.

Clay Travis is like a musician writing the same schmaltzy pop song over and over while raking in cash hand over fist.


Sometimes I cringe at what he writes/says, sometimes I laugh but mostly its just white noise in the background. I would never utilize his takes for any real life event.

Bassmaster said:

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Proposition Joe said:

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He's a guy that used to shill for third-rate online sportsbooks. He gained an audience by pandering to a specific college football demographic, then found he could gain 100x the audience (and $$$) by pandering to a political demographic. Some of his tweets early in the pandemic were downright embarrassing how wrong they ended up being. As another poster said, he's a guy that doesn't believe half the **** he writes but he knows what gets likes/clicks.

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So, basically he was just like everybody else on both sides. Interesting.

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I'm not sure how that changes anything? Because "everybody was wrong on both sides", somehow the guy that had a vested financial interest in pushing a narrative shouldn't be called out?

He's an entertainer and he's found a niche where he has made a crap-ton of money. Kudos to him. Hopefully most people can see through the crap though.

This is literally a guy who would contact an online sportsbook, tell them to post low-limit odds up on something ridiculous like "who will be Team X's next hire" - complete with provided names including some ridiculous names that will get the most talk - then go and pen a "news" article on his website announcing that "XYZ Sportsbook just posted odds on the next Arkansas head coach and could it be Obama!?" with a link that when readers clicked it kicked him back money per signup or net loss... He literally made money off of his readers reading what was purported as "news" and then losing their money gambling.

If you like what he has to say, great. If he entertains you, great. There's been far more unsavory characters that have carved out far more larger pieces of the social media money-pie.

But the guy is a shill through and through.

I saw some of this Berenson guy's tweets a while back and it seemed like he was someone that came up with a conclusion first and then looked for evidence to match it and never wavered on his conclusion.

He shouldn't use "truth" in his title because he is not really looking for it.

The people that are honest have changed an opinion on one thing or another because nothing has gone as it was predicted and the facts keep changing.

Mostly Peaceful said:

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Berenson is wrong about all sorts of little things when it comes to Israel, but I want to emphasize how straightforward and obvious the big picture is here. Israel is a world leader in vaccinations. Its COVID-19 cases have plunged, and its economy is roaring back to life.

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Fast forward - Israel is now having their highest case counts ever, and have posted their highest death counts since January.

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They're averaging 27 deaths per day, less than half their January peak. I'm sure it will increase, but it's still extremely low.

DFWTLR said:

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Mostly Peaceful said:

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Berenson is wrong about all sorts of little things when it comes to Israel, but I want to emphasize how straightforward and obvious the big picture is here. Israel is a world leader in vaccinations. Its COVID-19 cases have plunged, and its economy is roaring back to life.

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Fast forward - Israel is now having their highest case counts ever, and have posted their highest death counts since January.

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They're averaging 27 deaths per day, less than half their January peak. I'm sure it will increase, but it's still extremely low.

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It's amazing what these anti vax morons tell themselves and want to be true so bad and just get shot down. You'd think they might try to grow and learn but I'm guessing that guy will just double down and look even more ridiculous when his statements prove false. They then spin the data to say hey look cases are up in vaccinated that means they don't work and make things worse. I don't get it but they just keep doing it.

Here is a LINK to a good article that addresses some of the vaccine/ Israel/Delta stuff pretty fairly.


The simplest explanation for the Delta surge is still the best one

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Consider the situation in Israel, where on its face the data suggest a marked reduction in the effectiveness of vaccines, either because Delta is successfully evading our immune system or because the vaccines' effectiveness is waning more quickly than originally expected. But the summary data may be a statistical artifact known as a Simpson's Paradox, where you need to discompose the data into more homogeneous cohorts to eliminate the effect of an exogenous variable and see what's really going on.

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In this case, and frequently with COVID, what you need to do is break down aggregate results by age. If you look at the amalgamated data from Israel, as of Aug. 7, it showed that roughly comparable percentages of the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations came down with serious illness (frequently requiring hospitalization) due to COVID. But when you break down that result by age cohort, as the statistician Alan Salzberg did, the effect disappears; in any given cohort, the vaccines are still over 90 percent effective at preventing serious illness.

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How can that be? Because the vaccine uptake in Israel has been much higher among older cohorts (as it has been in other countries as well, including the U.S.), the unvaccinated population skews much younger. So comparing the unvaccinated with the vaccinated is, in part, comparing the young and the old. And because the elderly are far more vulnerable to serious illness from COVID than the young, if you compare a younger population with less vaccine-uptake with an older population with higher vaccine uptake, the rates of serious illness due to COVID are similar which makes it look like the vaccines aren't working even though they are. If that analysis is correct, then the surge in hospitalizations in Israel may well be adequately explained by Delta's extreme contagiousness alone, since much higher numbers of cases will inevitably mean more hospitalizations and more deaths, even if the percentage is much lower than it would have been in the absence of widespread vaccinaton.

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He was 100% correct about the idiocy, collateral damage and overall pointlessness of lockdowns, masks, etc. so it was frustrating to see him go full anti-vaxxer too. Unfortunately not much room for middle ground in today's world I guess.