Month: March 2021

As I have said often, I do not believe that this disease is at all dangerous for those who are not Vitamin D and/or zinc deficient (as most elderly are in most countries).  The LOGICAL, obvious, first step was and remains to reduce deficiencies as close to zero as possible.  Finland, as one example, has a 1% D deficiency rate, presumably since as far north as they are D deficiency has long been a problem, and in consequence of which they add D to a lot of their foodstuffs, and educate people about its importance.  Finland also has a COVID death rate about 1/10th of ours, or lower.

Logical second step was prioritized trials of safe medications which were getting results per the reports of doctors in the field.  Obviously, Hydroxychloroquine and later Ivermectin were the obvious candidates.  Trials of the former were derailed in most of the developed world by what amounted to a deception operation, one which was CLEARLY endorsed and approved by the WHO and Anthony Fauci, who are both OBVIOUSLY corrupt.

Here is the thing: we could and should have attained Herd Immunity with no vaccines at all.  None.  Still five years out.  Still not ready for human testing.  Still not something a RESPONSIBLE public official can declare reasonably safe as a result of trials lasting at least two years, and on enough patients that the data could be compiled and analyzed by everyone with an interest.

From what I call, even though the governments of the world PAID for the R&D, some of the Big Pharma companies are basically posting bullshit for their clinical data.

Without exaggeration, as a matter of public policy, many of the governments of the world are demanding that untested, perhaps ineffective, perhaps dangerous experimental vaccines–which have NOT received FDA approval, merely emergency authorization for use–be the main element of  our anti-COVID campaign, without making even a token effort at obvious options 1 and 2.

Does that not stink to high heaven?  Can you not smell it?

There are a cascade of larcenous intentions comingled in all this, but the one I wanted to point to–over and above simple greed by Big Pharma, and the desire for Social Credit Scores and perfect surveillance by Big Abusive Government–is that the Left/Deep State/Foreign Actors/All these and others created a response to a pandemic of a disease which has clearly been getting less deadly, and which arguably never WAS more dangerous than the flu for healthy people.

IF people were to REALIZE that all this bullshit has been for NOTHING–that kids have been slitting their wrists, and elderly dying alone because their families were legally prevented from seeing them, and businesses by the tens of thousands forced out of business, the education of our children damaged horribly, our national and State budgets bleeding red, millions around the world going hungry and actually starving to death etc, etc.–then PEOPLE WOULD BE MAD.  At least, in a sane world, they would be mad.

So how to get us to the other side, with all the perks of suppressive, tyrannical government, without the “populist” (which formally means anti-elitist/anti-entrenched and monied special interests, for those keeping score) outrage?  Vaccinate enough people that they can PRETEND it was the vaccines and not time that did it.

Looked at in this way, mass mandated innoculations make a whole lot more sense.  They can’t have Texas reopening and seeing three weeks of dropping COVID tests with only a fraction of the population is vaccinated.  The optics are terrible.

THAT in my view is what is driving the seeming desperation to get us all poked in the arm by nobody actually knows quite what.  As I keep saying, you CANNOT DO TWO YEARS OF TESTING IN SIX MONTHS.

Anyone, right now, who gets poked is literally participating in a clinical trial.  Normally, this is voluntary.  Big Pharma, rolling out a new vaccine, asks for volunteers, who know perfectly well what they are doing.  They trust that in a Beta test, which is what such a thing is, that most of the major problems are gone, and what is left is minor and correctable.  And most of the time they are right.

But REQUIRING people to participate in biological experiments is contrary to the spirit and explicit wording of the Nuremburg Codes, which were developed after it was found how many experiments had been done by the Nazis on unwilling, captive subjects.

Here are a couple relevant elements (the full list is at the link):

1. The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.

2. The experiment should be such as to yield fruitful results for the good of society, unprocurable by other methods or means of study, and not random and unnecessary in nature.

3. During the course of the experiment the human subject should be at liberty to bring the experiment to an end if he has reached the physical or mental state where continuation of the experiment seems to him to be impossible.

Here is the thing: how can ANYONE say that these vaccines trials are necessary when no effort has been made to do honest testing on alternatives, such as the elimination of D and zinc deficiency, and the use of safe and proven drugs like HCQ and Ivermectin?

This whole thing is madness.  It was bad at the start, and seems to spin more out of control daily.  I myself proposed something like the Great Barrington Declaration some time in April or May or June.  Somewhere in there.  It was logically obvious: you look at who is at risk, keep them home, and tell everyone else to go get the illness as soon as possible.  I even proposed injecting the young and healthy WITH the disease to speed up the process and probably make it safer, since the conditions of the infection could be controlled.

And even now, I would MUCH prefer the option of being injected with SARS-CoV-2 than with ANY of these vaccines.  We don’t know what we don’t know.  They may be safe.  They may be fantastic (although I very much doubt, based on what I have seen thus far).  But they are UNNECESSARY for most of us.  And why incur an unnecessary risk?  It is stupid.

And it is criminal of governments to demand it of us.  They need to be sued as individuals and institutions for the PATENT violation of ethical codes passed to prevent Nazi style atrocities from recurring.

Walmart, if it implements a “vaccine passport” should be sued on a class action basis, and if any sanity remains in this nation, they should lose badly.  Among other things, I would argue it constitutes de facto discrimination.  No one has the right to demand we participate in medical trials, and no one has the right to deny us access to the right to shop if we refuse to obey illegal orders.

Same with airlines.  Same with universities.  Same with all corporations.

People’s fear has made them more stupid.  No one thinks better under stress, and our media and the Left in this country have done everything in their power to turn this molehill into a mountain.

Again, it is credible to claim EVEN NOW that this disease is no more dangerous for most people than the flu, and LESS dangerous for those under 35 or so.  This is an empirically defensible claim.

It is horrifying to watch all of this, to watch the world get played like a fiddle, to watch so many of our leaders kowtow to imbeciles and crooks.

And yes, Donald Trump was a big vaccine supporter.  I think he was wrong on this particular score, but he spent his entire four years getting surrounded by people controlling his information, and trying to box him in politically.  He had to drop the HCQ since his endorsement was making things worse; and he is no doctor, and the doctors around him were seemingly feeding him this vaccine story.  I don’t fault him.  But I don’t agree with him.

Until we get serious about eliminating what I have taken to calling Nutritional Immunodeficiency, and studying the patent successes in South Asia, Egypt, Sweden, and elsewhere, no one should be compelled to take one of these fucking jabs, for any reason, in any context, including the military.

Leftism is a psychopathology.  As I have commented, their basic model is to break everything they touch, then lie about it.  The hippies of the 60’s and 70’s, who are the professors now, are still lying about what happened in Vietnam.  They are still ignoring their many decade failure to do anything decent and meaningful for persons of color in this country, and their patent role in actually SUPPRESSING progress, which will continue today in most newspapers and news channels.

You will see it just by turning on your TV today, or looking at the internet.  They will call for one time lottery payments paid out for nothing, for no crime committed or suffered by anyone living, as a bribe for continued loyalty.  They will demand people speak in certain ways, as if speech were magical, and the discourse of wealthy white people put food on the table of hungry kids in the ghettos of this nation, brought their fathers home, calmed their mothers down, improved the quality of their education, or made their streets less violent.

Here is what I propose: the quest for purpose and dignity are inherently difficult for many of us–particularly those who have been humiliated as children, made to feel existential shame, and who have felt genuine, deep terror–but it is the main game of life, and must be pursued by each of us in our own individual way, albeit ideally with social support.

In psychology, long term pathologies are often assumed to continue their existence due to some hidden benefit they bring.  Yes, you are sick.  Yes, you are miserable.  But is there not something you LIKE, that is perhaps familiar?  Do your symptoms bring you some secret sense of power?  Often: yes.  This is called a Secondary Gain.

What I would suggest is that the Secondary Gain white people get from preventing black folks from advancing, by what amounts to over-mothering, is cheap morality.  And as with many moral crusaders, their work on the outside delays their work on the inside.  They get to justify avoiding doing their own inner work, finding their own inner dignity, articulating an honest and sincere morality.

And black folks, of course, likewise get an excuse to avoid doing THEIR inner work.  They are “oppressed”, even though most of Africa would give a finger from each hand to come here and be allowed access just to the opportunities black folks have in this country, to free education, to capital, to political freedom, to BOOKS (read this,) and perhaps weep a bit: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2007/dec/08/nobelprize.classics 

I myself am not innocent in all this.  I get secondary gains from blogging, from thinking, from abstracting.  I flatter myself that some of what I write (certainly not all of it) is intelligent, but it perhaps does not matter.

I can say I continue to try and do may work every day.  It hurts.  It hurts a lot.  But I continue.  That is what I do, and who I am: I go on.

Please read and share:  https://www.city-journal.org/death-and-lockdowns

Short summary: “Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”

I’m not blogging much because I am working a lot.  I have a long list of ideas noted down–I am, perhaps, afraid to stop–but it may be a while before I post them.

One positive to this new website is that it is not, yet, on the Google Shit List.  I had been unaware of this, but they have a Shit List and if you get on it, your website will not show in searches, and I think most social media incorporates it, so I have not been able to link to my blog on my Facebook profile for at least a couple of years.  For now, it is working.  It won’t break my heart if it stops, but if I understood the claims of the new host they work to keep you off the shit list.  That’s good.

The point I logged on to make today is that I think, I really think, that the essence of the Buddhist Shunyata is the sense of living in an ocean.

I was driving by some old high school today, and looking at the windows, and wondering what it was like for the students to look out those windows.  Then I was recollecting my many bored days in school, where I would struggle to stay awake, because I just needed a five minute lecture and I usually had whatever it was.  I went to an OK school, but it was not filled with bright students.

Then I had this strong sense of nostalgia, and sense of loss, and longing.  I am far, far from that place, and I have moved around so much I have no real home, no place.  And the way I have lived my life, I really have no major professional accomplishments.  I am a bright fellow.  I could have been a doctor or lawyer or academic or anything else.

But, it seems to me, I have tried to stay on the track of life, to pursue doggedly the nature and purpose of life, the nature of emotional health and well being, and have tried over and over and over to confront my pain and heal it, which has been difficult and slow.

Then it hit me: There IS no place.  If I were a successful, egotistical doctor or lawyer (trust me: my ego would be huge, uh, -er) all that could be stripped from me in an instant.  It has no permanance or reality.  No physical dwelling place, no city, no home: all are gone in an instant, cosmically speaking.

And I felt like the universe and me living in it is a huge ocean.  There is an up and a down, but there is nothing stable.  There is nothing to hang onto, nothing that you can grab for dear life and which will not dissolve in the holding.

We live in an infinite ocean.  But that doesn’t matter.  What matters is where you are relative to everything and everyone else.  You are a part of a dance which renews every moment.

This is the Buddhist ideal: to use change as an advisor.  To learn to live and laugh with the continual ups and downs of life.  What was is gone, and what is to be is not yet.  There is however a deep rhythm, or rhythms, which set a variety of times, which we can interact with and riff on.

To some great extent, no true spiritual progress is possible without becoming lost, after leaving the shore far behind.

Those, in any event, are my thoughts today.  I like to think of myself as creative, and what creativity I possess comes from being open, to never knowing what is next, and never forcing anything.  I never try to think thoughts: they just flood me when I am doing anything else.

But think of Shunyata not as an emptiness, but as a mass of motion and currents and events without any fixity, without dry land, with nothing to hold on to, where you can never return to the exact place you were before, or the person you were just a moment ago.

It’s tricky.  And with the terror comes also freedom.  Do you think any sea lion would ever consider living its whole life on dry land?  Not a chance.

So I finally watched this movie, which is on many critics top ten lists, and for many at number 1.  I read a few years ago it knocked off Citizen Kane in some poll or other.

After reading how confusing it was, I really don’t see it as that confusing at all.  It is an attempt to map out and paint the contours of madness, how it feels, what it is like to lose connection with reality.

It is a map of pain, of existential pain so deep it leads to suicide, to the “quietus of a bare bodkin”, and an empty stage–where nothing was real anyway–and to silence.

I feel this.  And you know, this story, in all its permutations, is being acted out in many places and many hearts the world over AT THIS MOMENT.  A moment ago someone ended their life.  I read that, on average, someone ends their live every 40 seconds somewhere on Earth.

You don’t think about this much, but this is an extraordinarily confusing planet.  We are born, often born to parents who love us incompletely, confusingly, and sometimes hurtfully because they don’t know any better, or don’t have the will or ability to do better.

Far too many of us are born to dismally poor, filthy places which cannot be escaped.  Sex is one of the only comforts which is free, and that leads to children, who repeat the process.

We breathe in our culture, whatever it is.  If it is one heavily influenced by modern American triviality, continual rush, mindless banter, and greed, you may find yourself on a conveyor belt to a life which will never nourish anything truly good in you.  You will find yourself lonely, surrounded by people, who also feel alone.

What a sight this is!!!  I am less alone by myself than I am with most people.  But it is because I am not afraid to hear stories of hell that over and over people tell their life stories to me, things they tell they have never told anyone else.  I don’t look away.

And to be clear, pain and suffering frighten me as much as anyone else.  I feel it more keenly, I think–both my own and particularly that of the world–than most, so if anything I simply have more familiarity with it, more time spent learning to live with it, and perhaps less fear of it than people who have suppressing it and lying about it.

Here is what I want to propose: the hero’s life consists in seeing the evil of the world–the pain, the cruelty, the confusion, the nausea, the self loathing, the unfairness–and learning to live with it, in the present.  To reject nothing.  To see everything.  To KNOW that you can’t fix most of it, or add anything lasting or meaningful.  To KNOW this world is broken.  But to remain present anyway, and still seek out light in all this, and try to bring it into this darkness.

This is heart wrenching, horrific, terrible, terrifying task.

I will often find myself watching movies and having to pause in some particularly painful or awkward scene.  I say to myself “I can’t take it”.  But of course I always do.  But I am keenly sensitive, to a fault.

How can you feel compassion and not be swept away?  This is the key question.  I think a lot of people who use this word don’t really understand it.  They use it, in my estimation, most of the time as a way of separating the world into the compassionate and those lacking compassion.  It is a tool of judgement and one of self importance.  And it is nearly always a lie.

Compassion for all is compassion for all, even the deluded and confused.  This is an awful thing to attempt to practice in reality.  If you do not feel the difficulty in this, then you are a better person than me, or you have not understood this at all.

Ponder the holocaust of the animals, which is the barbeque and cooking of the animals.  The countless pigs and chickens and goats and cows herded up, slaughtered, butchered, then cooked and eaten.

But is the ocean not full of the eating of fish by other fish?  Is the world outside your door not filled with birds eating insects, and larger birds eating smaller birds and their eggs?  If you look, you will often see hawks being attacked by smaller birds protecting their eggs or perhaps themselves.

We did not invent this world.  Its rules are not our rules, as far as I know, or as far as anyone, I think, knows.

One cannot live purely in this world.  One must compromise.  And I think trying too hard to be a saint actually lowers your spiritual level.  Saintliness is, if I may coin a word, RULE-liness.  It is calcifying your perception and behavior to create ruts within which you live your life.  If enough people live in these ruts, peace and harmony result, but this is not, in my view, the best result possible.

I will often lay in my bed after I awake and just feel my body, which is a sort of Kum Nye practice.  And I allow what thoughts will come to come, patiently, and without effort.

I read the other day that famous passage from Marcus Aurelius where he talks about how the birds and the bees are up early and about their work, so why shouldn’t he be?  The world has an order, and he too has his part to play, so why not up and at it every morning?

Perhaps ironically, perhaps even comically, I was laying in my bed pondering this this morning.  Should I be up and at ’em?  I feel most days I paint half of a beautiful canvas then give up.  I don’t really know why, but I think a big part of it is getting through this digestive hurdle, of accepting the world fully without any avoidable blindness.

And it hit me that people are not animals.  We have some unknown and unknowable degree of freedom, what I have for some time called “non-statistical coherence”.  We can go sideways.  We can cross all the ruts.  This is not forward movement, but it broadens the path of our possible progress.

I think our version of the bees and the birds is doing natural good, obvious good, doing the right thing by those immediately around you.  Enough good, but not too much.  Simple gestures, but not elaborate flourishes.  Private giving, without counting, because it is needed.

I think most deep evil can be traced ultimately back, somewhere along the line, to compulsive goodness, or rather, to compulsivity in the name of some principle whose life has been extinguished and stuffed into an outer form filled with sawdust and petty cruelty and ignorance.

A deep rut enables long movement, but only in one direction, and you are closed off from all around you.  Going sideways, and perhaps even in circles opens up perceptual pathways which would otherwise remain closed.

And these are ultimately energetic pathways.  It is a principle of Kum Nye that energy, when flowing properly, takes care of itself.  Your will has nothing to do with it, and after some while not even your conscious attention.

So right now I am looking at this pit of ghastliness, at the man behind the dumpster in Lynch’s vision, and trying to calm all fear, and all aversion, as well as all attachment.  It is not hard, you know, to become attached to pain and misery.  I see it every day, not least in myself.

To live safely is to live in peace with the knowledge that pain, loss and death are the lots of all of us; it is to look into hell without terror or greed.

Now, logically, there is a light, a Buddha-nature, which helps with all this.  When I find it, I will most likely record it here.  Perhaps that should not be true, but it most likely is true.  I have long found it hard to predict my own future behavior, not least because it is in an interactive loop with both my inner and outer environments.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” H.L. Mencken.

Here is an interesting statistic: if the United States had the same death rate from COVID-19 as that reported in India—about 1 person in 8,666—then the death toll from this pandemic would now stand at about 38,000, which is an average flu year, rather than the 550,000 or so it stands at right now.

Our death rate is well more than TEN TIMES that of a nation characterized by mass poverty, extreme population density nearly everywhere, and an utter inability to properly do most of the things Anthony Fauci says are necessary without mass starvation.

Whose response, based on the numbers, do you think is more intelligent?

Assume for a moment they are underreporting by HALF. We can be quite sure, since they are not stacking bodies in the streets–something we would be reading about, believe me–that there is no mass death, and it is quite reasonable to assume their rate is much lower than ours, even if precise numbers are impossible to come by.

The country is filled with malnourished, crowded slums lacking basic sanitation. Why is their rate not twice our own? We are rich and well fed, with mostly uncrowded homes and plenty of space.

This same pattern holds in a number of similar countries, such as neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh.

You may reasonably ask “what are they doing differently”? The answer is I’m not sure, but most likely the liberal and early use of zinc and Vitamin D supplementation—which were known a year ago to be key determinants in outcomes—as well as the medicines Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin. India makes about 70% of the world’s supply of the former. Some there also claim that their much higher intake of vegetables plays a role, particularly cabbage and cucumber.

Here is one article that is relevant and in my view useful: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/07/what_made_asias_largest_slum_a_success_model_for_treating_covid19_comments.html

What is CERTAIN is that we are not learning anything from them, or trying to.  These gaps in death are not being reported or remarked on.  All of our lives have been slowed down or even put on hold.  Why is the media not looking for solutions, rather than reasons to continue all this abusive tyranny?

They seem to be doing a lot of experimenting and sticking to what works. If you look up Ivermectin studies, for example, they were most likely done by Indian or Bangladeshi doctors. Ivermectin seemingly makes short work of SARS-CoV-2 viruses in a Petri dish. We think we know this much.

Put another way, they are deploying FREEDOM to fight this pandemic responsively, intelligently, locally and effectively. In the “land of the free, and the home of the brave”, meanwhile, we have become compliant, frightened creatures attached to hitching posts of dogmatism, inflexibility, and obviously very bad policy, some specifics of which I would like to explicate.

The author is an intelligent, frustrated person attempting quixotically to play the role of Sunday afternoon quarterback from the sidelines.

The key elements of the response in the United States, and much of the world, which in no small measure looked to us for leadership, have more or less been a focus on 1) delay (another word might be prolongation), and 2) vaccines.

Do you remember the role masks played in the “two weeks to flatten the curve?” Can you remember back that far, in this past benighted year?

Masks were going to protect our medical capacity, and buy time to get more ventilators into our hospitals.  As you no doubt know by now, other than perhaps a few boroughs in New York for a few weeks–following Cuomo’s indefensible readmission of known COVID cases to nursing homes, which amounted to mass murder–no hospital chain in America was EVER taxed beyond its capacity.  No one I read about died for lack of a hospital bed, although a lot of people died both with and without being put on ventilators.

We never became Italy for the simple reason that we are not Italy.  We have a much better medical system in all respects, and self evidently a year later the risk of overwhelming hospitals is non-existent.

But somehow the two weeks became two months, and for all the “experts” can say, may become two years. Many Americans, having numbed themselves to being told what to do, meekly accept whatever the “latest” is.

The point in all this is that masks are meant to delay the illness, to slow it, but that nothing that SLOWS can ever be argued to END anything. On the contrary, obviously, delaying means dragging out, and that is precisely what has happened.

And masks themselves are not without negative health consequences. One is that a generation of children is losing the ability to interact with other open faces–even when in school, which many of them are not. The social and developmental cost of this is unknown and unknowable, but perhaps very high. Certainly, fear is burrowing deeply into many of them.

And many of us adults miss seeing smiles. I have met a number of people whose actual faces are a mystery to me. There is a psychological cost to this. It is a bit depressing. It increases the already abundant sense of social isolation. We are not meant to live like that, in my view.

And in terms of physical health consequences, masks seem to induce mouth breathing in many people, and mouth breathing creates dry mouths, and dry mouths create cavities and other dental problems, which in turn increase overall mortality, sometimes sharply.  They also reportedly increase oral yeast infections, acne, and cold sores.

And most of these consequences seem unnecessary: if we had the same death rate as Sweden—which never mandated masks in most public places, and where mask wearing compliance was, I read, quite low—then we would have about 400,000 deaths, as of mid-March, 2021, which is around 25% less than what we in fact have, according to the official numbers. 

Few masks, and better outcomes.

And it is worth noting that it has been known for nearly 200 years that pandemics come in demographic waves that look like Bell Curves. 1 case becomes 2 cases becomes 3, then 5, then 3, then 2 then 1 then it is gone. All pandemics end. This is called Farr’s Law.

Sweden has seemingly traversed its latest curve, and shows every sign of having ended the second wave of this pandemic naturally. They had almost no death in August, September and October, and I expect that death rate to go close to zero for some time in the future (look up “COVID Dashboard WHO Sweden”, then scroll to the death graph to see what Farr’s Law sorts of Bell Curves look like.)

The best explanation—no doubt among some competing ideas—is that pandemics end when we achieve that much discussed condition “Herd Immunity”.

The Big Idea in America, as it has evolved, is that of course we need Herd Immunity, but that doing so naturally, by letting the disease run its course, would involve catastrophic amounts of death, so we need to delay with lockdowns and masks, then create what I call Induced Herd Immunity through mass vaccination.

This is not illogical on the face of it, but ignores two LARGE problems: 1) Lockdowns kill people; and 2) vaccines are not necessary for most people, and there is some unknown but non-zero chance that the vaccines may be more dangerous than the disease over the long term, especially among the young.

With respect to the first point, Stanford Professor of Medicine Jay Bhattacharya recently told Newsweek that the lockdowns were and remain the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made…The harm to people is catastrophic.” (Look up Bhattacharya Newsweek and perhaps COVID)

Stress kills, and it is plausible and empirically consistent with past findings to suppose that overall mortality rates spike sharply when unemployment goes up. One number cited in the movie “The Big Short”, and more or less later validated as at least likely in the neighborhood of correct, and certainly defensible, by the BBC, says that in the United States 40,000 more people die a year for every ONE POINT increase in unemployment. A five point increase, then, is 200,000 people a year, for as many years as that increase holds. A three year, 5 point increase would, using this math, kill more people than have thus far died of COVID.

DECREASING unemployment, conversely, LOWERS the death rates, which were presumably relatively low last February, when we had a record economy.

And in poorer countries, hunger and even starvation have become present realities. We are not being told—and I cannot find statistics related to—how many people are dying of hunger in the developing world right now, but I will recall for you that the Nobel Prize last fall went to the UN World Food Programs.

The list of consequences is long, but includes missed vaccinations, missed cancer screenings, and all mental health related illnesses and deaths, including drug overdose (up by a third) and suicide.

Lockdowns create misery, at least among the poor who lose their ability to earn a living. 

This point is not debatable.

And the point being discussed is that of saving lives. It can and has been claimed by qualified people that the true death rate among those exposed to this disease is .05%, or 2 deaths out of two thousand people exposed, among those under 70 (look up “just 0.05% of healthy daily mail”).

And the death rate is not a law of physics. It is affected by public health policy. As noted, the death rate in India is reportedly a tenth of our own. Effective mitigating measures exist. Good medicines exist which have past histories of safety.

And I have been arguing for some time that there is NO REASON that in a country as wealthy as the United States, with as robust an “information distribution” system as we have, that ONE PERSON in the country should suffer from what I call “nutritional immunodeficiency”, which is to say a lack in, at least, Vitamin D or zinc. Deficiencies in both were known A YEAR AGO to lead to worse health outcomes. It can even be argued that almost no one who is sufficient in both will wind up in the hospital.

Yet both deficiencies are relatively common. One or the other likely affects at least 1 in 5 of us, or some 66 million Americans, and are particularly common among the elderly.

The campaign would be simple: “take two pills a day, no more, no less, and do your part to get America healthy again”. If people can be talked into double masking—or for that matter single masking–they can take two pills. And that campaign would reduce ALL deaths from infectious diseases, and no doubt result in a lot less sick days. And some economist could put a number to it.

And this leads directly to the role of vaccines. I am not, to use the current term used to denigrate those asking reasonable questions, an “anti-vaxxer”. Vaccines clearly play a role in public health. The elimination globally of smallpox was one of the great public health triumphs of the modern era, as have been the near total elimination in the United States of diseases like Mumps, Measles and Rubella, among others.

But logically, THERE IS NO WAY TO KNOW THE TWO YEAR EFFECT OF A VACCINE WHICH HAS ONLY BEEN IN EXISTENCE SIX MONTHS.

Prior to being deployed on a large scale—and outside of childhood vaccinations, nothing on the scale of these COVID vaccines has ever been attempted—all vaccines historically have been tested AT A MINIMUM for two years. That is my understanding. We can’t know what we don’t know. All medical interventions can cause unpredictable effects, and everyone knows this.

Has there been testing? Of course. Has there been as much testing as possible, given the time constraints? I have no reason to doubt it.

Is there a way to compress two years into six months? No. Definitely not.

I am not old enough to remember the Thalidomide babies, but I have read about them. Look this up. Billy Joel mentions them in his song “We didn’t start the fire”. The issue was that these sleeping and morning sickness pills were not sufficiently tested. There were no Thalidomide babies in the United States because the FDA blocked this drug from importation.

It is absolutely, 100% possible that these vaccines are completely safe. This is one of the possible outcomes.

Yet, the whole thing amounts to a global Beta test, to use the term used in software engineering. What testing could be done has been done, but there is considerable uncertainty, necessarily, and no honest person can deny it.

And by law pharmaceutical companies cannot be sued for adverse vaccine effects, or so I understand. Many years ago they talked Congress into exempting them from direct lawsuits. This makes some sense: there is a public health interest in general vaccine use, and there is little profit in manufacturing them. Given a large enough population some bad effects are inevitable, and if the companies then have to answer financially for effects they cannot predict or prevent, then they will stop making the vaccines. Even the most cynical among us can find some logic in this.

But the flip side is that it eliminates the financial need for utmost caution and care. You can sue for damages, but you have to go to a special vaccine court, and the damages paid are paid by the United States government, which is to say the taxpayers. That is my understanding, and this arrangement applies to all vaccines.

And the reality is that according to the WHO’s own statistics, as I read them a year or two ago, about one child in a million dies or suffers permanent injury from most of the major mandatory vaccines. That is not much, but it is not zero. Vaccinations often cause temporary inflammation, and sometimes—not often–it does a lot of damage.

[Interestingly, I just looked it up and that page is currently missing from their website. Perhaps you can find those numbers, if interested. In the meantime, feel free to doubt my claim, which is based on memory. I was a bit surprised even then to find anyone putting harm numbers to vaccines, and am not shocked to find them seemingly scrubbed now. They are non-zero, and no honest or legally liable person can or will claim otherwise in any court, in my view.]

In my understanding, Messenger RNA is also a technology relatively new to this purpose. At least one Pfizer executive was quoted as stating that infertility in women was a possible effect of these vaccines. If you look up “snopes vaccine pfizer” (as of March 13, 2021) you will find an article stating that no, he didn’t say it would CERTAINLY cause infertility, but that it COULD, and that he was not head of research, but rather was at one time Vice President and Chief Scientist for Allergy and Respiratory.

Form your own conclusions from this.

But if the death rate is 1) low; 2) affected strongly by simple and relatively safe medical interventions; and 3) the long term effects of these vaccines are unknown and unknowable—why would we place our whole reliance on them? And how could any morally sane person make them MANDATORY?

Please look up the Great Barrington Declaration. It was written by three people at least as qualified as Anthony Fauci, who are professors in relevant fields at Oxford (I mistakenly said Cambridge in past emails), Harvard and Stanford. It calls for full reopening, now, while focusing on the protection of the elderly.

In my understanding they are not anti-vaccine, but for the reasons I have articulated here, I believe they also would argue that mass mandatory vaccination is neither necessary nor desirable, and that decisions should optimally be age dependent. Vaccines by far make the most sense for the elderly, who are most vulnerable. Vaccination would be a logical part of what they term Focused Protection.

We live in an extraordinarily odd time. The United States should be a leader in innovation and effectiveness. Instead, we seem to have led most of the world down a rabbit hole of untested crackpot theories whose essential fatuousness and failure have been obvious for most of the past year to anyone paying attention.

That is my view, at any rate, and I am entitled to it. That is a form of entitlement which our military has fought and died to defend. For the time being, anyway, this is a free country, and my right to dissent—to offer alternative opinions to those being pushed, making the world more diverse in what I hope is a useful way–is legally protected.

Please consider what is said here carefully. Please do your own research—I am passionate about all this, but am ultimately merely an intelligent amateur and I do make mistakes (like everyone, and I mean everyone, else)—and please forward this email to anyone you feel may read and benefit from it.

 

 

 

I would like to offer my take, having just watched last weekend the Lawrence Olivier version, reading along–and a bit further than their treatment permitted, as it left out a lot of dialogue, and all of Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern.

If people “know” nothing else about Hamlet, they have heard he is indecisive.  He can’t make up his mind.  He spends a lot of time hand-wringing.

I disagree strongly with this.  He showed his courage when he was willing to fight his comrades to follow the King’s ghost.  And he is obviously very, very intelligent.  His dialogue makes this extremely obvious.

What I would like to suggest–and I suspect this must have been said by someone somewhere, as commented on as this play has been for hundreds of years–is that this is a sort of Prodigal Son story, one in which Hamlet leaves the world he had known, but eventually comes back.

I don’t think the issue is that he fears to kill his uncle, or that he fears his own death, particularly.  Obviously, he contemplates suicide at the outset, and again in the famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy.

I think his issue is an Existential crisis, in which he doubts everything and everyone.  Revenging his father only makes sense within a world which makes sense.  It is only justice in a world where justice is the rule.  It only makes a difference if the world as it should be is protected, or the world as it ought not to be is corrected.

But what if nobody deserves justice?  What if the world is fallen, and everything and everyone a cruel lie?  Why participate in this farce?  His mother betrayed him, Ophelia lacks his wit and his trust, and even his old friends R&C are playing games with him, dimwittedly.

And there is some pretty clear misogyny here.  In the film version, he attacks both his mother and Ophelia, and of course utters the famous line “frailty thy name is woman.”

And it has no doubt been often remarked on–I am utterly unfamiliar with Shakespearan scholarship–that there are parallel stories between Hamlet and Ophelia.  Both lose their fathers to murder.  But Hamlet feigns madness and only contemplates suicide.  Ophelia genuinely does go mad and does in fact commit suicide.  Such, we might suppose, was Shakespeare’s view on the differences between men and women.

I think it Horatio alone who–in his honesty, steadfastness, and loyalty–brings him back “into the world” as it were.  He brings the one who was a stranger back home.  He brings back some sense that moral sanity is possible and desirable.  That is why when Hamlet finally resolves to kill the king, he does not do so when he is at prayer.  His new world–which is his old world, with greater sad wisdom–has rules.

And remember that Horatio tries to kill himself when Hamlet is poisoned, and is prevented from doing so by Hamlet, who tells him his job is to tell his story.  Telling his story only makes sense in a morally unpoisoned world.

And Horatio of course treats Hamlet as the brief king, and honorable heir to the throne of Denmark that he was.  He died as part of lineage, as part of a social system, as part of a place and time and cultural ethos.

And at the risk of being politically fashionable, given the situation, it would not be hard to see Hamlet and Horatio as lovers, particularly given how betrayed by women (particularly by The Woman in most reasonable psychologies) Hamlet felt.

My two cents.  Don’t spend it all in one place.

I try and capture the essence of Communism from time to time in definitions I hope are vaguely Bierce-ish.

Communism is a creed designed to create permanent inequalities of wealth and power in the name of eliminating inequalities of wealth and power.

If you look at the HISTORY, that is quite accurate.  You know who has created a LOT of new billionaires in this whole COVID SNAFU?  China.  The largest nation on Earth supposedly dedicated to the elimination of private wealth.

We become addicted to things which never give us what we need.

I think this is a generally true statement.

The background is a conversation I had with a young woman in a bar the other night.  She said she had been with 300 men (give or take: I don’t think she keeps a logbook, so that may be on the low side) and has only had an orgasm ONCE (with a South African she remembered well).  It took her three months to have an orgasm with her current boyfriend, even though at first they were having sex 4x a day.

It’s all about attention, and the power of control–for a moment–through sexual attraction.

But at a minimum we all want an orgasm out of sex, and as an ideal emotional intimacy.

And drinking never gives me what I want.  Not really.  It always seems like it should, as does food, to which I also have a mild addiction, but it doesn’t.  I’m the same me, with the same feelings, and with a lethargy and sometimes mild nausea the next day.  Nothing changes.  I don’t grow.  The pain does not go away.

She shared her life story, and her behavior made sense to me.  Her life has been one of continual disappointment and betrayal.  So she likes the approximation of intimacy without the emotional risk.  “One and done”, she kept saying.   I get that.  I am wired a lot like that myself.

My work continues.  I am getting more flashes of something better.  They remain rare, but for most of my life there has been nothing but intellect and an abstract hope kept alive by force of will.

I have really been feeling the evil in the world today.  And it is becoming obvious to me that the evil, per se, is not new.  As one obvious example, I supported our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though we committed much evil.  We simply lie to ourselves about it.

And that is not a dig at our troops: they did what they were asked to do.  But if you REALLY ponder it, it is is a very strange thing that heavily armed men backed with unbelievable technology have been on the other side of the planet murdering men, women and children, the latter two by accident, but they are no less dead.

I could go on–I’m just trying to use ideas to give words to feelings– but what I am sitting here realizing is that the path to goodness lies through evil.  What I mean by this, is that anyone who allows an unconscious or semi-conscious blindness to endure in them MUST build perceptual walls around it, and those walls make them rigid.  Those walls have to be repaired, reinforced, and this breeds the habit of divided consciousness, and divided consciousness by its very nature can never perceive wholes and wholeness.

The feeling of wholeness, I think, is that of attack, when one is divided.  Being split apart is something unpleasant we understand readily, but the inverse holds true: coming together means feeling a split which HAD been unconscious.

But Goodness is existing in God.  God is an ocean of energy and feeling which is not and cannot be divided.  We live as thin fogs in the much thicker, more real fog and water of Life, writ large.

And evil exists.  This world is evil.  It depends on murder.  All life depends on murder.  Cows eat grass, and wolves eat cows.  Bacteria eat us, eventually.

To find your way home, you have to pass through this realization.