Month: February 2022

https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-former-harvard-prof-martin-kulldorff-science-and-public-health-are-broken_4270247.html

Martin Kulldorrf says “science and public policy are broken” after  leaving Harvard, presumably in a fit of mutual disgust.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355581860_COVID_vaccination_and_age-stratified_all-cause_mortality_risk

“Comparing our estimate with the CDC-reported VFR (0.002%) suggests VAERS deaths are underreported by a factor of 20, consistent with known VAERS under-ascertainment bias. Comparing our age-stratified VFRs with published age-stratified coronavirus infection fatality rates (IFR) suggests the risks of COVID vaccines and boosters outweigh the benefits in children, young adults and older adults with low occupational risk or previous coronavirus exposure.”

Put another way, Trudeau is defending junk science in terrorizing and trampling over (via his self labeled “jack boots”) Canadians who are voicing valid objections to horrible policy.  The scientific rationale for “vaccine” mandates simply does not exist.  And this study presumably looked at death numbers from previous variants.  Death from Omicron is very, very low, so the case has only become stronger since these researchers started gathering data.

https://sites.krieger.jhu.edu/iae/files/2022/01/A-Literature-Review-and-Meta-Analysis-of-the-Effects-of-Lockdowns-on-COVID-19-Mortality.pdf

“An analysis of each of these three groups support
the conclusion that lockdowns have had little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality.”

The net conclusion, once you run the numbers is that the lockdowns killed AT LEAST hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone.  They saved few lives from COVID, and caused hundreds of thousands of people to miss cancer and cardiovascular disease diagnoses when the illnesses were treatable.  Drug overdoses and suicides also went up about 50% from already very high numbers, and there is no reason to think the cascade of effects from all of this, such as depressive and anxiety disorders–which of course are also through the roof–will not continue for some years to drive higher rates of self destructive behaviors originating in despair.

I have been saying of course that all of this is a global crime, and saying it for some time.  IT IS THE LARGEST ASSAULT ON THE RIGHTS AND WELL BEING OF ORDINARY PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD OUTSIDE OF WARTIME.

And as I have said, the number of people Anthony Fauci and the people paying him to ignore his own science will in the end have killed will be on a scale with the numbers from the World Wars, with no other wars in even remotely the same ballpark.

Actually, one more: https://summit.news/2022/02/21/prominent-lockdown-advocate-admits-he-got-it-wrong/

In a new book called The Year the World Went Mad, Woolhouse expresses regret at SAGE’s involvement in pushing lockdown measures that caused huge devastation yet only served to delay the spread of the virus.

“We knew from February [2020], never mind March, that the lockdown would not solve the problem. It would simply delay it,” said Woolhouse, adding that no one in government appeared to recognize the failing of that strategy.

“The early global response to the pandemic was woefully inadequate,” says Woolhouse, adding that the WHO praising China for its draconian ‘zero COVID’ approach set the scene for similar disasters across the world.

Woolhouse was asked why governments set about imposing such brutal restrictions with seemingly no regard for their consequences.

“There was never at any stage, even by the following year, any form of analysis of the harms caused by lockdowns,” said Woolhouse. “Were they even considered? I haven’t seen any evidence that they were and that is very, very troubling.”

As early as April 2020, SAGE was sent information confirming that lockdowns would “cost three times more years than the disease itself,” but there was virtually no consideration of the fact that “those over 70 had at least 10,000 times the risk of dying as those under 15 years old.”

The government then lied to the public in claiming that the virus “doesn’t discriminate,” despite this being manifestly untrue.

“I heard [the official] argument caricatured as: everyone died, but at least no one was saved unfairly,” said Woolhouse, adding, “BBC News backed up this misperception by regularly reporting rare tragedies involving low-risk individuals as if they were the norm.”

I think the broad plan is now clear enough (and I think it is vaguely ludicrous to deny there IS a broad plan, although the specific participants and their sundry goals is certainly a good topic of discussion):

Use a mass terror event to create pervasive fear of terrorism.

Use that fear to create an ubiquitous surveillance state.

Use that fear to condition submission to essentially irrational mandates.

Then use that fear to label political dissidents terrorists.

Jan. 6th, like 9/11, was a planned event.  FBI and presumably agents from agencies whose existence we don’t suspect, were everywhere.  Guys like Ray Epps were planted to go around and agitate people, to say “we have to go INTO the Capital”.  Some violence was initiated by Agents Provocateurs, and once they  had enough footage of what appeared to be violence, they opened the doors to the Capital, enabling all the selfies which they used to prosecute those foolish enough to place ANY trust in our system, and which is now enabling the Biden Administration to torment and abuse people for nakedly political reasons.

The goal, obviously, is government terrorism.  The goal is to so destroy anyone caught engaging in dissident activity that they are deterred.  This is textbook Authoritarianism.

Trudeau, likewise, more or less labeled peaceful protesters conducting what amounted to a sit-in as “terrorists”, which enabled him to use legislation intended for people blowing things up and shooting people to persecute honest working class Joes and Janes as if they were trying to, oh, I don’t know, burn down buildings?

Did you read they used Directed Energy Weapons on protesters in Canberra?

That there is a plot to destroy political liberty the world over is really indisputable.  To what end or presumably ends, I cannot say.

I do like to cite this piece from some years ago from time to time, since the fundamental illiberalism particularly of environmentalists has been very open and obvious for some years now: https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/all-the-leaves-are-brown/

If wisdom is good judgement, and if good judgement comes from bad judgement–which I personally believe to be the case, with the wisest people often being those who have done the fullest inventory of how not to do things and why–then what I will call here the Cancel Anti-Culture virtually ensures no one subjected to its irrational and constantly shifting mandates can POSSIBLY become wise.

All of us, to grow as human beings, need to make mistakes.  We need to take risks.  We need to learn to manage risks.  We need to get negative feedback when we go too far in any direction.

And people who are taught from the earliest age to live in terror of others judgment–can I say the Stepford Children?–cannot possibly bear the idea of individual risk.  They may well be willing to fly suicide planes into people and buildings, but only because they were told to do so.  That is less frightening to them than the risk of watching the wrong TV show, or admiring the wrong celebrity a moment too long.

Cancel Anti-Culture can ONLY breed imbeciles. It can only breed people who lack judgement because they have never taken individual risks in their lives.

Everything happy, everything good, everything genuinely beautiful comes from empowered individuals, sometimes in a dance with one another, sometimes with their own imagination and muses.

Monster children breed darkness and horror, and Cancel Anti-Culture breeds monster children.  Again, I will reference Tamina’s Island, as envisioned by Milan Kundera, which I think is as close to a perfect metaphor as I have seen.  Evils are abetted, not extinguished, but it takes people willing to see and think on their own to see that.

I think when you get to the heart of your heart, you will find that it is defined by innate tenderness and vulnerability.  We are, in the animal kingdom, like rabbits.  We are quiet, not overly bold, social, and most of us, given  our druthers, would prefer to avoid conflict.

Now, some of us morph through repeated traumatic experience into Vorpal Bunnies.  I am half joking, half serious.  The image of a violently dangerous bunny is funny because that is so contrary to their nature.

And it IS contrary to their nature.  It is contrary to ours too.  But you can only take so much before you shut out and off the World.

Many of us, certainly me, gravitate naturally to the Apex Predators.  To the tiger, the lion, the Orca, the eagle, the hawk.

But if you think about it, you don’t need much courage when you are stronger than  everything you see.  The latent idea is to be able to open up a can of whoop ass on your enemies before they can do it to you.  And so violence is fed, all of it partly rational.

I will submit, though, that it takes more courage to live as a vulnerable creature in a world you KNOW is violent.

My feelings may differ in five minutes, but that is what I feel at this moment.

In general, what drives you also torments you.  You should both thank it and curse it.

The wounds of hatred are never direct.  What happens is the hate of others–which you can assume to be an outward expression of self loathing–induces, through resonance and  conditioning, a sense of self loathing in you.  That step is not necessary if you simply observe, as Eric Baret among others points out, that what they are actually hating is a projection of some lost part of their own personality.

And more generally, the meme of “hate” has obviously been co-opted to SUPPORT hate.  This is obvious, right?  While it is true that Americans owned black slaves (as did and do many Africans, with the slave population in Ethiopia being roughly 20% or so of the whole nation until the Italian Fascists freed them), and that lynchings happened, and Emmett Till and Medgar Evars were murdered and etc., THE CIVIL RIGHTS STRUGGLE WAS SUCCESSFUL.

What was sought was a chance equal to that of everyone else.  No more open discrimination.  As Frederick Douglass wanted, black Americans got the right to try and succeed, and try and fail, in a world which was not actively working against them.

Legally, that happened around 1965.  Practically, most true discrimination based solely on race was gone by 1990 or so.  What true racism remains comes from the frequent perception that black in general are less educated and more prone to criminality than most whites.  And the data backs this up. Every individual deserves their individual chance, but if general statements are generally true, I would not call that racism.  I would call that a call to action.  Because you have to choose to believe either that blacks ARE inferior, which is the truly pernicious form of racism; or you have to grant that the social systems which should have been lifting them up have instead been keeping them down, as I believe to be the case.

The problems are obvious: terrible schools, in too many cases a culturally conditioned contempt for formal education, a dearth of good jobs in historically black neighborhoods, and too many single parent homes, which reliably create higher rates of everything bad, including criminality.  That last applies to all races.

So you can tell easily enough who the TRUE allies of the black community are.  They are talking about the importance of fatherhood.  They are working to implement Charter Schools.  They are creating supports for black businesses, including tax incentives.  And they are certainly not advocating for making violent streets MORE violent by getting rid of cops or bail.  Some are perhaps talking of needed police reforms.  Some of that is certainly useful in some places.

But overall the Left is BY FAR the worst enemy the black community has.  It’s not even close.  Had they been left alone they would be much, much farther along by now.  Effectively, the Left is in a codependent relationship with them, with the goal of ,making them permanent dependents on the State, which is to say of Democrat politicians who look at their offices as opportunities for getting rich and yanking people’s chains.

 

You know, retirement would be an ideal time to take up a meditative practice.  You have time.  You have life experience.  You are facing death more closely than most people in busy lives spent forgetting death.

It is truly a pity so many of our parents grow old watching TV, lonely, lost, and just waiting.  Why not waiting and listening?  Waiting and learning?  Waiting and growing?

Whenever I’m traveling, particularly in smaller towns, I always like to stop at the local bookstore, if they have one, and buy a book of poetry.  I write in it where and when I got it.

This helps me remember where I’ve been, and  my hope is one day it will provoke pleasant memories.

Buying books at those stores of course helps them survive.

And I buy poetry to help poetry survive.

The problem with poetry is that it serves no obvious functional purpose.  You don’t learn anything, and there are no grand adventures.  Usually there are few Big Thoughts, like you might get from a philosophical text.

No, poetry is a lazy Sunday with your slippers on, a good cup of coffee in a huge mug–a warm fire in the winter if you’re lucky, or possibly a pleasant spring day somewhere else–and most of us have forgotten this is one of our options.  You don’t always have to be going somewhere. You don’t always need to be thrilled.

Sometimes the journey IS the destination.

 

 

I think practically this amounts to learning to do without the fight/flight/shame (I heard shame also called “fawning” the other day) response.

There are huge advantages to this response. It exists for a reason. But until we learn to do without it, we have to fear it on some level, and that fear prevents the cessation of fear, which in my view is the first and perhaps only main spiritual goal,

Me, I fear my rages. I also fear helplessness. And emotionally learning to do without this tesponse FEELS like empowering helplessness, if I may offer such a phrase.

But actual violence, to protect yourself or others, is perfectly acceptable. This is a violent world, and if we are here for a reason—as I believe we are—we are responsible for protecting our embodiment and those of others.

And it is also worth noting that while hyperarousal DOES make us stronger, more pain resistant, and more aggresive in both fight and flight, it also makes us stupider.

This renouncing anger and violence ptactically is renouncing those FEELINGS, which include fear and shame as hidden concomitants.

And think how often shame follows both rage and cowardice (running).

I think this is getting close to the truth.

Krishna told Arjuna to fight and kill, but to do so without hate, and in effect without violence. All that is born dies, but nothing and no one ever dies. No final violence is possible; nor is any lasting harm.

Stupidity is a powerful stabilizer. Rather than allowing reality to speak you interrupt, and assert an alternative reality that need never change since you created it.

Most of the most dangerous idiocy in this world is perpetrated intentionally, even if also unconsciously, which is to say with the collusion of a part of the personality that person chooses not to acknowledge.

I read many years ago in the lesser known Taoist text the Wen Tzu that you can infer most of what you need to about a culture by its music; or for that matter, lack thereof.

I was listening to Charles Mingus’ “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, and it hit me that, musically and culturally, there is a kind of before and after for black Americans. You had gospel, then jazz and blues and soul, then hip hop.

Hip hop is the After. Gone is nuance and the possibility of love, of open searching, of joy outside a sort of grim and violent and short conquest of a fundamentally antagonistic and gray world.

White folks, in the main, after being fascinated for at least half a century by what was certainly reasonable to call black music, went over in large numbers to rock, which is blues’ baby, as Muddy Waters put it.

What does rock celebrate? Reckless abandon. Excess. Losing your sense of self in orgiastic spasms fueled by sex and drugs and loud music.

Rock, as the word was used by many intellectuals in the middle half of the last century, is anti-“bourgeois”, but it is a flame that dies young.

Is that an ideal to aspire to? As I have pointed out, perhaps the greatest rock star of them all died alone on the toilet of constipation brought on by drugs.

Oh, I wander often, and usually have no idea where I am going. Intellectually I am a lost pilgrim in a foggy landscape. I find roads from time to time, but I rarely stay on them. Wherever they go is long known. Repetition is not my aim, even if I do I do sometimes repeat myself.

I suppose if your goal is to get lost then you are lost in the sense you dont want every time you find yourself on a road!!