Sheep and Goats

Category: Health

  • Science Takes a Hit in Pandemic’s Aftermath

    Nobody’s trying to diss vaccines here—honest, I’m not. I’m just trying to write a commentary on evolution—to what extent (if any) can it be reconciled with Genesis? Why should vaccines thrust themselves into the middle of the discussion? No reason at all, that I can see.

    Except that Sean Carroll, author of ‘The Making of the Fittest,’ does just that. Many times I’ve mentioned this book in my blog. At last, he reaches the ‘dessert’ portion of his book that he likens to a full-course meal. He’s dealt with all the basics for evolution. He rests his case. Now, it’s time for dessert and after-dinner conversation—of which there is a lot. Now he launches into related topics. Two of them are related. A third is not.

    Carroll brings up Stalin’s science crony (Lysenko), who disregarded evolutionary teachings (as a bourgeois notion of the West) and consequently imposed mass starvation on the Soviet Union through mandated and misguided agricultural policies. Okay, that fits. He brings up how deniers are ever scheming to attack his cherished evolution and how they might be defeated. That fits, too.

    In between he sandwiches in a critique of those who practice chiropractic. “Spinal crackers” he calls them. (Let the reader use discernment that he doesn’t like them.) That doesn’t fit at all. What in the world do chiropractors have to do with anything? It’s as though his brother in-law went to a chiropractor rather than the doc Carroll recommended and he is still grumbling about it.

    I mean, his book is about evolution and the war against creationists. Chiropractors have no problem with evolution. At most, some will put a theistic spin on it, but there are plenty of scientists who do that too. Their schools incorporate evolution. What’s with this ax to grind over chiropractic? Ah, here it is: The “founding principle [of chiropractic] conflicted with the medically accepted view of infectious diseases as being caused by germs.” Well, that is certainly unforgivable but even so, is that enough for “spinal crackers” to earn his special contempt in a book plainly about something else?

    Oh, here it is: “The opposition of chiropractors to the germ theory of disease led to a resolute opposition to vaccination, opposition that continues among a substantial fraction of chiropractors today.” Well, maybe, but it’s news to me. If it ever did, suffice it to say that most have long since grown out of that notion. This doesn’t seem to placate Carroll at all. He is determined to eradicate the offending health regimen.

    Now, as it turns out, for many years, I worked in a field of repetitive motion that periodically took it out on my back. Many times I would pull a muscle leaving me in pain and almost unable to walk. Each time, my favorite chiropractor restored both posture and pain instantly. How he did it, I don’t really care. It’s not as though when my back heard that science doesn’t endorse him it went bad again. This is especially poignant as I have known many to suffer back problems, go the route of conventional treatment, culminating in surgery, and end up essentially crippled for life. Few of them are comforted by knowing their selected route was “evidence based.” So now, does Carroll put chiropractors on the kill list? Not on my watch.

    Not once did any chiropractor I engaged make any comment about vaccines. Nonetheless, what underhanded methods have they used to undermine them, according to Carroll? He mentions a few. First, they “doubt the science,” a sin that includes (1) “point[ing] to other measures, such as sanitation and hygiene, as the entire explanation for a decrease in certain diseases [rather than vaccination].” They also (2) question the motives and integrity of scientists, suggesting conspiracies between them and pharmaceutical companies—in short, that “their support for vaccination is motivated by greed, not public health.” They (3) cite dissenting views among “ardent critics who hold medical credentials,” as though those views are right, even though they are minority. They (4) make appeals to personal freedom. They (5) exaggerate harms vaccines might cause. However, Carroll says, “once the fog of disinformation clears and the efficacy of vaccines is demonstrated on a massive scale, most of the arguments provide weak refuge.”

    Funny he should say this just fifteen years before response to a worldwide pandemic took these arguments off the back burner and put them up front. These days those five points are reasserting themselves and it has nothing to do with chiropractors. The safety of the Covid-19 vaccine proved so flawed, its efficacy so overstated, and the curtailment of freedoms (point 4) so egregious during the pandemic, that not only do the Covid vaccines come in for intense criticism, but the furor has spilled over into all vaccines. One might even say that all of science takes a hit by thrusting it forward as though a poster child. Here Carroll’s book is named Top Science Book of the Year by USA Today, and he cannot stay on topic. He must veer from evolution to tackle a topic made prominent by its sheer irrelevance to his book.

    The obvious gaslighting that occurred during the pandemic has come back to bite them all. Were you to tie a millstone to the feet of every chiropractor and pitch them all into the sea, it would make no difference to current circumstances. Nobody, self included, would have ever predicted it. When you rile the masses, however, they research matters and end up doing far more damage to your cause than you ever dreamed they would. Speaking to Carroll’s point (1), for example, the CDC’s own mortality data reveals that in 1900, measles caused 13.3 deaths per 100,000 population. By 1960, the figure was .2 deaths per 100,000. The measles vaccine was rolled out in 1963. Thus, the chiropractors’ point (1) is exactly correct, at least in the case of measles. After a mortality drop of 98% had already taken place, a vaccine to eradicate measles was introduced. Its backers thereafter claimed credit for the entire drop.

    Not to mention that letting vaccines take over a job that nature or sanitation or hygiene or something was already winning is not necessarily a good thing. Turns out that when you force the human immune system to be on high alert for a particular pathogen, it comes at the expense of everything else. The immune system’s capacity is not infinite. Does this explain why mainstream vaccine experts highlighted in a 2017 study that children worldwide vaccinated with DTP were 10 times MORE likely to die in the first six months of life compared to unvaccinated children? They didn’t die from what they were immunized against, but they did die, at a ten-fold increased rate.

    Not to mention that most vaccines (not true of the measles vaccine, but it was of Covid-19) alleviate symptoms but do nothing to prevent transmission. This becomes counterproductive. A sick person who doesn’t know he’s sick stays in circulation and infects others. A sick person who knows he’s sick stays home and infects nobody. Though it be hard to imagine today, I used to look forward to measles, chicken pox, and mumps. It meant a week off school. The same thing happened with the Brady Bunch family, a sit-com from the 1960s. The eight children all came down with measles in an episode titled “Is There a Doctor in the House?” It’s “a slight temperature, a lot of dots, and a great big smile” due to staying home, playing Monopoly, and missing school. It’s very hard to gaslight someone out of recalling their own experience. Lest this threaten to happen anyway, here is a sit-com to confirm that my experience was nearly everyone’s experience.

    Believe me, look into these things and it is a hornet’s next you look into. So much for Carroll’s point (3). The dissenting views he complains of are having their day in the sun. As to his point (2), greed eclipsing public heath, I commendably don’t go there—but it is only by ignoring human nature. Somehow the most ardent cheerleaders of science envision practitioners of their discipline immune to the base forces that afflict the unenlightened ones. Tell Carroll to put on his pith helmet once more and get back to digging up fossils. Science takes a hit which it brought on itself. It made a massive authoritarian grab for the world, locking down everyone for years, forcing its will on them all, only to be caught with its pants down.

    As for chiropractic, ought we expand this to all alternative health therapies that Carroll would likely also have a problem with? Vincent McCabe’s 1997 book, “Let Like Cure Like,” discusses common principles to most of them: “These philosophies, both thousands of years old, have yet to be proved scientifically because of the limitations of science, not because they are not true.”

    It is left to the reader to assess this statement. Are there limitations of science? This is not the same as asking whether science knows everything. Its most fervent supporters readily acknowledge that it does not. The point of contention is whether science itself has limitations. Given time, could it figure out everything? The great divide hangs upon that question. It is given increased pertinency as science is the driving mechanism for those who would choose human rulership over the ‘Lord’s Prayer’ rulership of God. Will it truly enable them to “know good and bad,” as was promised in the garden?

    ******  The bookstore

  • Anecdotal Evidence and Science

    What to do with Eyewitnesses

    In May of 2020, no hope was held out for victims of Covid-19. The “warp speed” development of a vaccine had not yet landed. Sufferers were advised bedrest and fluids at home. They were only to enter the hospital if they were almost dead (which in many cases would finish off the job for them), President Trump then described a letter he had received:

    “I got a letter from a doctor the other day, from Westchester, New York, around the area, he did not want anything. He just said: ‘Sir I have hundreds of patients and I give them hydroxychloroquine, I give them the z-pack, which is azithromycin, and I give them zinc, and out of the hundreds of patients, many patients, more than 300, I haven’t lost one.’ He said: ‘Please keep pressing that sir.’”

    Q: What do you do when people are dropping dead left and right and then a physician comes along with a treatment he has used on over 300 patients and says ‘I haven’t lost one?’ Do you:

    A) Ignore him.

    B) Seek higher-quality evidence

    C) Go talk to those 300 and shake them down for their stories.

    Though any one of common sense would choose C, the actual response was a cross between A and B. Why? Because to choose C makes you beholden to “anecdotal evidence,” a horrific faux pas in the discipline called science.

    Michael Shermer discussed anecdotal evidence in his Great Courses lecture series, “How to Think Like a Scientist.” Anecdotes are near-worthless, he maintains. If you want to think like a scientist (who doesn’t?) you ignore them. “Ten anecdotes are no better than one and one hundred anecdotes are no better than ten,” he stated. “Imagine how worthless five hundred must be to him,” I said in ‘Workman’s Theodicy,’ referring to the five hundred eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection.

    Okay, okay, so the five hundred eyewitnesses to Jesus’ resurrection were long dead at the time of his and my writing; that throws a significant caveat into it for sure. But the three hundred eyewitnesses from the Westchester physician were not dead! Quite the opposite. They would have been dead, many of them, were it not for his treatment that he subsequently tried to share with the nation. How can you not go and talk to them?

    Science did not. They devised “higher quality” studies to conclude that the doctor was talking through his hat, and that whoever disdained science enough to listen to him was equally foolish. Is it because talking to the patients requires leaving the laboratory? Is it because if you send someone to speak with them, whatever they bring back is also “anecdote” and therefore equally untrustworthy? I can’t think of a better circumstance to validate the Romans 1:22 verse of fools insisting they are wise.

    So stupid is this mainstay of “thinking like a scientist” that conspiracy theorists arise to insist it was not stupidity at all, but design. The plan, they insist, was to discredit anything cheap and effective so as to make a financial killing with the next product from Pharma. It is a battle for others to wage, not me. Good luck to those who embark on it; it’s like arguing over the trinity. I let it pass. Others can conclude what they will. But it may just be a limitation of science itself. Science is simply not nimble enough to deal with anecdotal evidence, so it doesn’t even make the attempt. It ignores it. It carts that stuff to the curb. No matter if lives are said to depend upon it or not—out it goes.

    This doctor, a Vladimir Zelenko, was not the only doctor to weigh in. Other doctors would also weigh in, and even eclipse him by testifying before Congress. I heard one of them, a Dr Pierre Kory. In the early days of Covid-19, he and others did not want to just sit around waiting on CDC guidance which didn’t come beyond bedrest and fluids. They started tinkering with already existing drugs that they had used for other illnesses. Might some be adapted to the new contagion? The found the answer was yes. ‘Look, I’m not dissing any vaccine,’ Kory said. ‘But it’s not here yet. In the meantime people are dying. I’ve found a regimen that works. [just like Zelenko and others had] Please let me use it! Please tell others about it!’ But it was anecdotal evidence. Though each doctor who testified had hundreds of patients treated, hundreds of eyewitnesses that could have been sought out, it was to no avail. Science can’t be impeded by such nonsense. They ignored him and sought out higher quality evidence that would tell them he was wrong.

    You’d almost think that President Trump’s own experience with Covid 19 would indicate Zelenko (whose regimen he promptly adopted and who closed his practice shortly after sending his letter, so harassed was he by detractors—he has since died) was onto something. In October of 2020, Trump himself came down with Covid. He was old and obese, two huge factors of comorbidity. Everyone thought he was a goner. Instead, he kicked the illness in no time at all. Shortly thereafter, he was waving from his limosine. During his 4-day hospital stay, he was mostly ambulatory and worked from his bedside. Did the Zelenko treatment help him recovery so quickly? The answer will never be known, probably, for his care consisted of treatments then unavailable to the general public, primarily a regeneration monoclonal antibiotic cocktail.

    And no, don’t carry on about Trump’s getting treatment better than you would get. That is just the way it is with regard to leadership of anything in this system of things. On a recent trip to Chicago, I was even reminded of how past-mayor Daly had to think very quickly to extract himself from such a trap.

    It seems that the President, the Pope, and Mayor Daly had been caught adrift in a small boat which had sprung a leak. It could thereafter safely transport two persons, but not three. The President promptly pointed out that as leader of the free world, it could hardly be he that bailed. The Pope made the same observation on the basis of heading the world’s largest religion. Mayor Daly, a politician renowned for his corruption, began to sweat. “Gentlemen, gentlemen,” he proposed, “Let’s do this the democratic way! Let’s take a vote.” So they did and Mayor Daly won, five to two.

    Does it water down this post to conclude it with a joke? Maybe. But how can you conclude that a policy of ignoring eyewitnesses is anything but a joke? God help us when this mainstay of science is picked up by the judicial system. Prosecution and defense alike will soon stop calling upon them, since science has deemed them unworthy of consideration. It recalls a certain chum of mine, admittedly given to corniness, who stocked a bookshelf with various Bible translations and his collection of comic strips—Calvin and Hobbes was a favorite. That way he could say, “If it’s not in the Bible, it’s a joke.”

    ******  The bookstore

  • Exposing an Inordinate Trust in Science

    In the days of ‘Me Too’ a common endorsement of anyone leveling an accusation was ‘Why would she lie?’

    I’m almost at that point now with conspiracy theories, so many of them have turned out true. I’m almost at the point (but not quite) of saying that the burden of proof should be upon those denying them, not those asserting them, so awry has gone the doomed trial period of human self-rule.

    Here is the doctor, Anthony Fauci, who directed the U.S. Covid-19 policy testifying before Congress at July’s end, 2026. One political party grills him relentlessly. The other party lauds his long tenure of public service. It was precisely the opposite from 30 years ago, during the AIDS epidemic, when the accusing and supporting parties were reversed!

    After an opening statement in which he declares himself the victim of a witch hunt which threatens even science itself, he invokes his fifth amendment right over 100 times. It is the answer to every question asked of him. In a snafu that screams the absurdity of human government, the accusers holler that he cannot plead the fifth, since he has already been pardoned. However, if the pardon is invalid, as has been alleged due to its being signed by auto-pen and not the participating president, then he might be in hot water and pleading the fifth is exactly what he should do.

    Thirty years ago, it was Democrats blasting him for stonewalling off-patent AIDS therapies in order to pave the way for a new one, AZT, a toxic antiviral that neither cured AIDS nor prevented transmission. This time, it was Republicans blasting him for stonewalling off-patent Covid-19 therapies in order to pave the way for a new one, remdesivir, which would be nicknamed by many nurses, “Run—death is near.”

    Since he represented science—he repeatedly said that he did—a media with no use for religion but boundless enthusiasm for science, long ate up and heralded every utterance from his lips and shouted down as misinformation anything contrary. Heaven help you if you went against official narratives. Doctors lost hospital privileges and some their licenses. Individuals lost their social media accounts. Today, many of those dissident views, such as the very origin of the Covid 19 virus, are widely viewed as correct. It didn’t hop from one animal species to people. It was an accidental result of human tinkering, called gain-of-function research. As always (human government triggers so much mistrust these days) conspiracy theorists arise to charge that it was not accidental, but deliberate,for who knows what nefarious ends

    And no, I have no ax to grind regarding Doc Fauci. My former post of ‘What if Moses spoke like Trump,’ from the pandemic’s onset, when he and the president were nightly on television, left unmolested the statement that he was the great doctor soon to save us all. Nor do I have any ax to grind with regard to vaccines. Dissing them has never been my cause. There is an ax to grind, however, in the unthinking adoration often entertained toward science, it being the human answer to God’s proposed ruling of the earth. Who needs the latter when science will deliver us? In order to properly address that misplaced adoration, one must shovel through the snow of vaccine lore clogging the path, but it is not an end in itself.

    The boundless trust and enthusiasm in science is such that (U.S) society tolerates what they would never tolerate in any other area: the removal of liability should results go bad. The most common sense item in the world, instantly acknowledged in all other fields of activity, is that if you remove incentives for things to be safe, they soon won’t be. People will take shortcuts in research and manufacture. That’s why one has legal recourse in case they be harmed by—say—defective auto parts, or medical implants, or toys for your child, or household appliances, or power tools, or household chemicals or, or nearly anything—with one notable exception. If you are injured by a vaccine, you are out of luck. They alone are immune from liability. To attack them is to attack science itself—what crazy person would do such a thing? The author of ‘Vaccines, Amen’ likens the current reality to a customer asking a car salesman if his product is safe. “Prove to me it isn’t,” the salesperson retorts. It is an absurdity tolerated in only one area, probably enduring for only one reason: an over-devotion to science from people who have cast out God but not their instinct to worship one.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Darwin’s Bulldog

    This book I have in mind, attempting to reconcile Genesis with evolution, will not be anti-science. But it will be taken that way by mainstream science because of its ever increasing “my way or the highway” attitude. “Can’t we all just get along?” I will plead like Rodney King. No, will be the answer. We can’t. ‘All or nothing’ thinking, it is called.

    It is not really the evolutionists, per se. Darwin himself wasn’t that way. He saw no inherent conflict between his theory and belief in a First Cause. It is the atheists who have hijacked that field. Perhaps, it starts with his contemporary, Thomas Huxley, who was nicknamed “Darwin’s bulldog.” You might well be apprehensive running across a gentleman with a bulldog. It recalls my own father-in-law, a gentle soul if ever there was one, calling out to his newly arrived campsite neighbors who were alarmed at his galloping pit bull come to greet them, “Don’t worry, he’s friendly!” Turns out he was, but not so Darwin’s bulldog.

    With these new modern atheists, if you express reservations, any at all, against evolution accomplishing all by itself the job of life, you are anti-science. I have called such people, not scientists, not even evolutionists, both of whom can be broad minded, but scientism-philosopher-atheist-cheerleaders (SPACs), who ram their anti-God dogma down everyone’s throat as the be-all and end-all. They are the epitome of narrow-minded. Bititish satirist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that science “could be as dogmatic as any Church, and with less justification, and its devotees as bigoted as any country clergyman.” He was speaking of the scientism-philosopher-atheist-cheerleaders.

    Most recently, that “my way or the highway” attitude has been showcased in connection with vaccines, thrust to the fore during the Covid 19 pandemic. Were you to express any reservations about them, any at all, you were summararily labeled “anti-vax.” I hesitate to go there too much, hoping not to be drawn there against my will, because it is yet all in the blender of history-making. Instead, I’ll try to confine myself to examples of intractibilty that have long emerged from the blender and are considered settled.

    One such example is that of Ignatz Semmelweis. In the mid 1800’s, the Hungarian medical doctor got it into his head that fever and death following doctor-assisted childbirth could be curtailed by washing hands and equipment frequently. Doctors back then would deliver a baby, having just emerged from an autopsy, only wiping their hands on their smocks! There were some sort of tiny “particles” contaminating the women, Semmelweis proposed. Doctors howled with laughter at such nonsense. Isaac Asimov’s ‘Guide to Biology’ vividly portrays Semmelweis’ presenting his ideas at seminars, with his esteemed audience mocking him, hurling catcalls! Doctors argued that, even if Semmeweis’ findings were correct, washing one’s hands each time before treating a pregnant woman would be too much work.

    Semmelweis enforced strict antiseptic practices at the hospital under his supervision, cutting deaths to under 1%, and it made no difference in their attitude! Colleagues ridiculed him his entire life, he suffered a nervous breakdown, says Asimov, and died in an insane asylum tormented by memories of women screaming in their death-agonies following hospital-acquired infections. With Semmelweis out of the way, his own hospital went back to familiar practices and the mortality rate climbed to 35%. You can read the bare facts in many places, but Asimov’s account is the most vivid I have come across, remarkable in a book that purports only to be an outline, a “guide.”

    Yet, it is not vivid enough. It gets worse. From Asimov, I took it that he suffered a nervous breakdown over the “cognitive dissonance” of knowing he could save countless women who died in agony if only the establishment would listen to him. Reality was much more sinister than that. Not only did his colleagues not listen to him, but they are the ones who consigned him to an insane asylum when he started to get too in-their-face about saving lives. It wasn’t any nervous breakdown at all! It was punishment such totalitarian regimes are known to practice, sending dissidents to psychiatric institutions! Whenever those atheists start prattling on about how scientists graciously change their views at the first hint they may be off-base, whereas it’s only the pig-headed religionists who “stay the course” come hell or high water, I play the ‘Semmelweis’ card.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Keeping Calm and Showing Trust: Covid 19 Revisited: Isaiah 30

    I’m still fond of the year text from 2021: “Your strength will be in keeping calm and showing trust.” (Isaiah 30:15)

    Anxiety is the flavor of our age, “staying calm” our greatest need. It’s a crazy world, with norms such as gender that have been in place for all human history changed overnight. Unheard of expressions, such as “fake news,” pop up suddenly and become ubiquitous. Tidal waves like AI come out of nowhere and you don’t know if they will wipe out humanity or usher in a new Renaissance. “Keeping calm” along with the means of doing it, by “showing trust” is what we gotta do.

    The anxiety reached a crescendo in that 2021 year. This was during Covid days. Lockdown became the world policy. You lost your job (in the U.S*) if you declined vaccination with what was really not a vaccine, at least not in the conventional sense of allowing minuscule exposure to a disease. Instead, it was a new form of gene therapy to make the body recognize and destroy a pathogen it had never encountered. Fast-tracked, it proved to be nowhere near as safe and effective as touted. Drugs that were safe and effective (ivermectin was the subject of a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2015) were deemed dangerous so that emergency authorization could be obtained for the newfangled vaccine.

    Some had it worse than the U.S. Friends living in Myanmar told me authorities came calling every day for temperature checks. If you failed one, they could haul you away to quarantine camps. 

    Jehovah’s Witness meetings were affected. One week, direction came that they would proceed with disinfectant wiping down of all touchable surfaces before each meeting. Within days, they had been suspended. Then, all within a week, meetings had migrated to Zoom. I posted with glee that we would be meeting in “Zoom Rooms.” I mean, how can you beat that? And there Witnesses did meet for two or three years. 

    In a service group Zoom meeting on the ministry, one sister said how we ought not “put people in boxes.” I agreed with this remark as I gazed upon ten boxes of people on my computer screen. With very little fuss at all Jehovah’s Witnesses adopted the Zoom conferencing software. Didn’t it provide case-in-point to those talks about how Jehovah considers people individually important? There were other church groups that also adopted Zoom—Witnesses were not alone—but because their normal program structure doesn’t incorporate congregation participation, there were complaints that the result just seemed too irrelevant and inadequate. Some of those churches indeed had additional social groups, chat rooms, but that was just it—they were for chat, with no spiritual component built into it.

    Then there were also some churches that blew past social distance strictures as a scheme to subvert religion and held their services as usual, enraging everyone else for being so ‘irresponsible,’ even defiant of public policy.

    How much ‘credit’ would Jehovah’s organization get there for quick cooperation with the new social distancing policies at no spiritual detriment to believers? When the “CultExpert” tweeted that cult members are putty in the hands of their leaders ordering them to ignore science and convene as usual, I appended that there is at least one “cult” that did not. When he said that cults fall into line with the prompts of his new nemesis, the Supreme Cult Leader Trump, I told him that there is at least one “cult” that is universally known to be apolitical—and not involved in such controversies at all. Somewhere along the line, i told him that if all persons were ‘cult’ members like Jehovah’s Witnesses, COVID-19 would have moved on by now—it’s not OUR people that were partying on the beach, but it likely included some of his, whose distinguishing feature is “independence” and “forming their own mind.” That’s a recipe for cooperating with government recommendations? I don’t think so.

    The Zoom company wondered why so many of those using their app identified as Jehovah’s Witnesses—this was related to us by a brother in our service meeting group. Zoom had served as a tool for his huge family reunion just after the Memorial, bringing together ones who had not crossed paths in some time, and some of them had Warwick connections. Warwick brothers got to witness to the Zoom team, they related. Six Zoomer leaders attended a meeting, and three of those stayed on till the end. 

    Now, our brothers will unfailingly put a spiritual face on doings that may be completely non-spiritual. But surely the core of the story will be true. They will spin it that these Zoomers are on the cusp of Bible study themselves, when doubtless their first motive will be to see how their product is being used and provide customer support. That does not mean a spiritual component is non-existent. Time will tell. Meanwhile, unless I am very much mistaken (how likely is THAT?) Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide were giving their product its most rigorous workout ever, ensuring that each member is connected to the coordinating organization—and this could not help but put the cause to the front of their consciousness. Just like Putin never saw anything like every Witness in the world writing him on behalf of their brothers, so Zoom never saw anything like the efforts to keep every Witness in the world unified in Bible teachings.

    Zoom was not ready for the explosion of interest in their product—nobody would be. It is as though you open a restaurant and everyone in the country shows up to order a hamburger. Some security issues came to the fore and the Zoom people scrambled to patch them, like the kid sticking his fingers in the dike. Two weeks into Zoom, congregation elders mentioned having received an 8-page letter from their own HQ on how to effectively yet safely use the product. All elders in the world got up to speed on Zoom—and there would be among them a huge number, no doubt, with very shaky grasp of technology to begin with. 

    Now you know—you just know—how the Witnesses would have been in interacting with Zoom personnel. They would have been respectful, patient, and even helpful, as the creators of what one Italian IT firm called the “world’s best website” (mentioned in one of the Yearbooks—I think, 2017). Contrast that with the typical customer, who might well not be that way at all—screaming when something goes wrong, some of them. Faith and its resulting qualities are not the possession of all people.

    It seems a perfect time to kick back at some of those naysayers—you know who you are—who have said, “Who needs organization?” People then were going stir-crazy in the greater world, but it was not so with Jehovah’s people. Just ‘Jesus and me?’—that’s enough? It is the bottom line, of course. You need a relationship with the father and with the son. But as a gimme, God throws in a network of united worshippers—a brotherhood. Anyone would be crazy to pass that by. We are social beings. We’re built that way. The brotherhood had come to the fore with its quick adaptation of technology. 

    At the same time, the non-stop Bible counsel emphasized on how to get along with family and spouse in forbearance and love—you want to try to tell me that didn’t come in handy? There are many people for whom the worst possible stressor would be to sentence them to open-ended ‘prison terms’ with their family—cooped up in the same house! But it was not so for Jehovah’s people. Payoff for the godly counsel had never been more apparent than in the days of “keeping calm and showing trust.”.

    (*given that the company was big enough)

    When the pathogens at last settled, I wasn’t sure how I would feel about returning to the Hall. I’m starting to get up there in years. Zoom is convenient. You don’t have to travel. You don’t have to worry about how your lower half is dressed. But no sooner did I walk through the door than I knew it was the right move. 

    Our attendance was solid and enthusiasm ran high. The hybrid Zoom tie-in was seamless. The speaker read that familiar passage of 2 Timothy 3:1-5. Though he did not dwell on “not open to any agreement,” it resonated with me. There is scarcely any point today, no matter how trivial, that people do not debate and argue to the nth degree. I’m not one to avoid the news, though I see why some would. It’s exhausting. “It’s like a bad accident,” said my neighbor, unsuccessfully trying to wean herself. “You know you should look away, but you can’t.”

    It was refreshing being in that Hall where not a trace of that contentious spirit was to be found. It is not even that everyone agrees—they just know enough how to yield and not to squabble. Given the state of Covid in our community just then, I personally thought the strong mask recommendation a bit dumb. But the majority apparently did not feel that way. I was asked to wear one, so I do. It wasn’t that big of a deal.

    Though, given the size of the crowd I did begin to think maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. I had not been in such close proximity to large groups of people in two years.

    I also wasn’t sure how easy it would be to avoid handshakes. I like not having been sick in two years and I had resolved not to do it. But some in-your-face people are very insistent and the alternative elbow bump just seems too stupid to initiate. But in fact, a fist bump proved pretty easy to do. “What! Are you trying to kill me?” I would say to anyone approaching with outstretched hand..

    Alas, not all is peachy. I did see something to complain about. The speaker played a two-three minute video, and afterwards everyone clapped! I’m not playing this game anymore. I know how it starts . Someone well-respected thinks it is fine to “show appreciation.” He claps and others follow suit. People usually follow suit. I know this from the rare occasions that the music was not cued up and the attending servant can’t find it. If I knew the tune, I’d just belt it out. You’re only out there a split second or two before others follow suit. (It’s an unsettling split second, though—what if they don’t?) In the past I’ve given two or three half-hearted claps. No more. It’s silly. The video doesn’t know you’re clapping for it. We don’t clap every time some gives a demonstration on the platform. The Watchtower reader doesn’t earn an applause. It is enough to applaud the speaker, for that is customary and is the way things are done everywhere.  I don’t squabble over such things but neither do I have to follow suit. It is sort of like when brothers approach stage by disappearing behind that quarter wall and then appear again. That drives me nuts. Just walk up on the platform. Do it right, brothers!

    Ah well. This is our version of problems. A bit less serious than those that hamstring the greater world, I think.

    ******  The bookstore

  • Deciphering the Code of Life and the Human Immune System: Part 1

    There are 3 billion base pairs in human DNA. Each is a rung on the latter of the double helix structure. But it is not as though each rung is a gene. Instead, a collection of them will define a single gene, of which there are over 20,000. The feat of mapping them all was accomplished in 2000. “Today we are learning the language in which God created life," President Clinton said at a White House ceremony celebrating the deed, reported in the New York Times. It is both an echo and update of Galileo’s quote from long ago: “Mathematics is the language in which God has written the universe.” It may be that Clinton’s statement was said for expediency, as Galileo’s certainly was not—the latter meant it. But I like when people are respectful toward God.

    At about the same time, beginning with single-celled organisms like bacteria, other researchers were finding identical segments of DNA that didn’t seem to do anything and were interspersed among the segments that did. Says the above New York Times article: “. . . human DNA is full of repetitive sequences—the same run of letters repeated over and over again—and these repetitions baffle the computer algorithms set to assemble the pieces.”

    Sean Carroll, in his 2007 book, The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution, incorrectly called these sequences ‘fossil DNA,’ though he surely knows what they are by now. At almost the exact time of his book’s writing, that DNA was being revealed as anything but ‘fossil.’

    Things must be given a snappy acronym for memory’s sake. CRISPR did the trick: “clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic (reads the same backward and forward) repeats.” Now—just what were they, those repetitions that would “baffle the computer algorithms?”

    One researcher ran the middle sections of such repeats through a database. He found that they were exactly the same as the DNA segments of attacking viruses!—as though the host ‘remembered’ its attacker. Walter Isaacson uses the analogy of copying and pasting a mug shot. That way, should that virus ever show its ugly mug again, it will immediately be spotted. Without fail it will be spotted, since the mug shot is not just there once at the post office, but interspersed again and again throughout all the DNA corridors!

    Adjacent to these clustered regularly interspersed short palindromic repeats (CRISPRs) are enzymes* that not only do the copy and paste, but also the search and destroy. They’ve been dubbed ‘CRISPR-associated enzymes’—‘Cas enzymes’ for short. Since there are several of them, and they all perform different functions, they are numbered: Cas1, Cas2, and so forth.

    *Enzymes are proteins that initiate chemical reactions but are not consumed themselves. The Cas enzymes molest an invading virus, one targeting it, one holding it down, one cutting it up into harmless bits, one posting the mug shot for future reference. What all this means, and this with the Cas enzymes only in 2008, is the structure and mechanism of the immune system is revealed!

    Now, before progressing to what is annoying, let’s stop and savor the accomplishment, for it is monumental. You don’t have to right away reveal yourself an old codger forever posting signs ‘No turn-arounds in this driveway!!’ It’s proper to savor the accomplishment first. That’s what ‘The Code Breakers’ does, subtitled ‘the Future of the Human Race,’ the Walter Isaacson book completed in 2021. Isaacson has make it his specialty to write biographies of the world’s memorable innovators—even geniuses—such as Leonardo DaVinci, Albert Einstein, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs, and just now, Elon Musk. The Code Breakers is more of a collaborative story. The names are not as recognizable. Isaacson wrote a similar book on the digital revolution in which most names are not as recognizable. Jennifer Doubna is the main focus of The Code Breakers. She is not the one who gave CRISPR its name, though. That fellow is Francisco Mojica.

    It’s all very proper to name names when relating a human play, and Isaacson’s book is a must-read for anyone wishing to be brought up to speed on the topic. Only the Watchtower does not name names, and that is because it is a superhuman play that they follow and relate. You don’t have to know the names of the actors to follow the play; it can even be a distraction if you do. Besides—it is a bit of a self-reinforcing cycle—because they’re not following the human actors, but the play itself, they don’t always know just who the actors are. With just mild exaggeration, Elon Musk reduces to ‘one wealthy businessman,’ Vladimir Putin to ‘one Russian politician.’

    But that’s an aside. Isaacson is telling a human story, and he does relate the names and the interplay between them. For an interesting read, you must relate the names. Besides, it’s risky if you don’t. There is no sweeter sound to a person than the sound of his own name. “Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to men who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race,” writes Dale Carnegie in How to Win Friends and Influence People, a book that is largely forgotten today but shouldn’t be. His observation is true enough. I can’t walk though a park without passing benches emblazoned with the names of those contributing to it.

    But that’s another aside. The works of the code-breakers are truly momentous. Name them all—not a problem with that. Now—on to what is aggravating:

    To be continued:

    ******  The bookstore

  • Mongeville and Big Pharma, with Guest Appearance of Peter Breggin. I Take it All Back What I’ve Said About France

    Huh! Here’s something I’ve never seen before. Is it just me? It’s at least everyone in France.

    American detective shows are too violent and/or banal to watch, so sometimes we opt for foreign offerings. This is how my wife and I  came to enjoy Manara, an Italian series. It is delightful, witty, empathetic, visually stunning—but with one major caveat. You can forget about any Hebrews 13:4 notion of the marriage bed being undefined. That doesn’t mean you’ll see anything super steamy but the idea is ever-present.

    Anyhow, that’s just background. 

    The next show up is the French detective show Mongeville, running 8 years, in which a retired judge teams up with a perky woman police officer. So far, no hanky-panky, nor does the tone seem set for any, but there are many episodes to go. We are just at the 4th. Neither of these shows, at least by American standards, are particularly violent. It’s hard to do a murder mystery without someone getting killed, but there’s no gore. It’s just a premise for some cute interaction of characters. Think, in the case of Manara, Jim pining after Pam, as in Office, then Pam pining after Jim, yet miscommunications and mishaps always occur so that they cannot connect.

    It is episode 4 of Mongeville season 1 that introduced something new to me. A sub theme of early episodes is that Judge Mongeville’s daughter disappeared long ago and he is trying to track her down. In episode 4, he interviews her old med school teacher. That teacher relates how the girl was brilliant, so brilliant that pharmaceutical recruiters hired her for one of their ‘missionary’ projects. When she saw what was going on there, she was so repulsed and in some way so fearful lest her response bring trouble to her family, that she disappeared into yet another country.

    See, pharmaceutical companies test their products, but they test them in developing countries so that “if anything goes wrong” there’s no one to complain about it. The statement is made matter-of-factly by the daughter’s med school teacher, not with the air of being shocking, but with the air that everyone knows about this, companies all do it, and if any of them do not, they quickly fall behind the competitive curve of those who do.

    Well, I’d never seen it—such a statement made on a popular TV entertainment show. Shows featuring ‘rouge doctors’ are a dime a dozen. Occasionally even a ‘rouge’ medical company, a bad actor in an otherwise beneficent industry, enters into plot, but never have I seen a show that sets forth the entire industry as villainous. 

    It reminded me of something in Peter and Ginger Breggin’s book, COVID-19 and the Global Predators, over the campaign to discredit cheap and effective anti-Covid drugs so that people would have no choice but to pine for a vaccine. He tells of one of the studies embraced as proof the drugs were no good in which patients were administered those drugs at known toxic levels so as to achieve the desired results: 39% died.

    “The Brazilian authors of this study must have known they were treading on dangerous territory by purposely causing many deaths. Coming from a poor area of the country, they may have felt they could get away with sacrificing their patients without local reprisals. They simply gave lethal doses of chloroquine to patients to prove that the drug and its derivative hydroxychloroquine were too dangerous to treat COVID-19.”

    It was shocking to me read this statement. Not unbelievable, because if you’ve been around the block a few times, few things are unbelievable. But shocking it was, completely new to me. Yet here is Mongeville in effect saying. “So what else is new? It’s just taking what we all know happens to next level.”

    D453CDA1-8451-4460-AFEB-C4B469167FE7

    I take back all I have ever said about France. I even take back what my right wing brother said about them during the French Fries / Freedom Fries brouhaha a few decades back, when my globetrotting cousin complained that she could no longer use the word gay because the homosexuals had commandeered it, and I said, ‘She’s just mad that she can no longer refer to Gay Paree.

    “Why can’t she?” my right wing brother said. 

    I take it all back.

    I even forgive (temporally) that France is the birthplace of FECRIS, that government-sponsored anti-cult agency that has greatly expanded the definition of cult to include most anything that is not firmly secular. You know, the agency that doubtless was behind that’s government imposing a 60% tax on Witness donations in a clear attempt to stamp out the faith, reversed with damages only many years later by the European Court of Human Rights. You know, the agency whose Russian vice president has labeled Witnesses extremists in that land of the bear and has caused them to suffer serious harm—even jail time and torture. Jehovah’s Witnesses will not take life under any circumstances—how extremist can they be?

    Even, whereas devotees of the Enlightment swooned with ecstasy when the power of the people escalated into the American revolution and representative government, but they cringed when the other result of that Enlightenment, the French Revolution, descended into murderous mayhem consuming even its early supporters for not being ‘dedicated’ enough—I overlook that too.

    I overlook all of it on account of the French show exposing the wiles of Big Pharma.

    “But don’t forget. ..” Abraham Lincoln related the tearjerker tale of a man on his deathbed making peace with his adversary. “If I get better, that grudge still stands!”

    That doesn’t entirely fit but it does give me opportunity to relate a favorite Lincoln anecdote. 

    ******  The bookstore

  • Why do I think of that Superman movie where the Man of Steel is about to square off with his counterpart Super Villian and some plebe says, ‘This is going to be good!’

    It’s the play we’re watching, not the actors in the play. You don’t have to know the names of the actors to follow the play. It can even be a distraction if you do. Besides, naming a villain, or even a hero, creates the impression that removing that person will change matters. Instead, another actor who has all the lines down pat steps onto the stage and the play continues with barely a hiccup.

    So it is that the Watchtower seldom names names or points to specific schemes. I often follow suit. But sometimes the players and schemes are so intriguing that I go astray.

    So here is Scott Adams, the guy who draws Dilbert, tweeting that he is “skeptical of anything that can’t be explained in a sentence." He’s talking about the keynote address at the WEF (World Economic Forum) meeting in Davos: 'Master the Future.' "What exactly do they do?" he added. "And why?"

    To which tweet Elon Musk appended: “Master the Future” doesn’t sound ominous at all … How is WEF/Davos even a thing? Are they trying to be the boss of Earth!?"

    Scott Adams is happily playing second fiddle to Elon Musk these days. He had come to the defense of the Covid 19 vaccine previously, but now he has done a complete turnaround, coupled with an apology: "I would like to publicly apologize for continuously ignoring the "accurate data" on Covid that people sent me for three years," he tweeted (Jan 24th) 

    Musk and he are best buds now. Scott floats the idea of whether he could win were he to run in the California Senate race. "Please run; that would be awesome," Elon responds.

    Twitter is where it's at now that Musk bought it and let the dissenting voices back in that are still banned most anywhere else for going against prevailing narrative. Bernard Strawman will be ecstatic. There is now 'dialogue' on that social media site that there is nowhere else. Musk let Peter McCullough back in, for example. The guy is the top published cardiologist in the country, maybe in the world. He had thought his stature gave him an untouchable status to dispute the prime vaccine directive, but he was wrong. Not long ago he was sweating it that his medical license was about to be pulled, a fate he has so far avoided.  

    After Musk tweeted that it “isn’t clear whether, all things considered, a second booster helps or hurts,” Yahoo News (1/12) took to explaining "what studies show." They show he's wrong, was their verdict–as it is everyone's verdict who wishes to remain on social media–or was until Twitter went apostate on them.

    Elon Musk casts doubt on whether a 2nd COVID booster helps or hurts. Here’s what studies show. (yahoo.com)

    'Vaccine hesitancy' is a real problem today, Yahoo lamented. Musk shouldn't go pouring on the gasoline. True, "when bivalent boosters were first given emergency-use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration, some were concerned about the lack of human clinical trial data, but updated information from clinical trials has since become available."  Pfizer provided it. They said their stuff was okay. Besides, "the CDC says serious side effects that could cause a long-term health problem are extremely rare following any vaccination, including COVID-19 vaccination.”

    Oh yeah? Well, it almost killed me, Musk tweeted. He "had major side effects from my second booster shot. Felt like I was dying for several days. Hopefully, no permanent damage, but I dunno." To which newly liberated, as though from Babylon, McCullough attached a name to what Musk had experienced and said that given his age and level of fitness he would probably be okay. Musk added to his first tweet, "And my cousin, who is young & in peak health, had a serious case of myocarditis. Had to go to the hospital."

    Speaking of going to the hospital: The Buffalo Bills home team's playbook incorporated the player who collapsed after arising from a routine tackle returning to the stadium and attempting to spur them to victory with his signature heart gesture. Alas, to no avail. They lost.

    I had seen the fellow fall three weeks earlier. He rose from making a routine tackle, then fell over as though dead, a startled Bengal jumping away. EMT worked on him near 20 minutes as teammates gathered around, some in tears, some in prayer, before taking him off to the hospital. After an hour of uncertainly, the game was suspended. Tens of thousands of fans were sent home. He is still said to be on oxygen in critical condition.

    There was instant speculation on social media that it was vaccine-induced myocarditis, same as with Musk's cousin. That occurred to me right away. Healthy athletes are dropping over dead right and left these days. The book that says it best is 'Cause Unknown: the Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022,' by Edward Dowd, a finance guy who's used to spotting trends. In it are hundreds of young people who have, since 2021, died unexpectedly for no reason. Each is verified by QR code so you can go and check for yourself. Furthermore, he has gathered the life insurance charts that show a 40% spike in unknown-cause deaths in the final quarter of 2021, when vaccine mandates kicked in.

    Dowd avoids the 'Who' and he avoids the 'Why.' He does only the 'What' and the 'When.' He takes the low-hanging fruit that others go beyond and in the process step into land mines. Tackle the 'who' and the 'why' and you are instantly labeled a conspiracy theorist. But anyone with an eye for detail and a knack for digging things up can tackle the 'what' and the 'when.'

    So instantly I thought of the possibility–even though the Explainer explained that I shouldn't think it.

    EXPLAINER: What happened to Damar Hamlin? | AP News

    I was smart enough not to put it on social media, but there was fierce reaction to those who did:

    Vaccine misinformation surges on social media, Fox News after NFL player Damar Hamlin's onscreen heart attack | Fortune and

    Twitter Is a Megaphone for ‘Sudden Death’ Vaccine Conspiracies | WIRED

    They do pile on, but welcome to social media. No wonder the JW organization's not thrilled with it. The only caveat to the loutish behavior, which was not pointed out, was that the accusers had been pummeled for months, and even banned if they said the 'wrong thing.' ‘Step out of line, the man comes and takes you away.’ Now they are unleashed, and like those bees from the abyss, they are furious that it took so long.

    'It's despicable that conspiracy theorist wackos would knee-jerk bring up the Covid vaccine!' was the prevailing sentiment. But others responded that of course you would think of possible causes–the stuff is known to trigger myocarditis–just as for the longest time if you wanted to go anywhere you were queried over whether you'd been to the Far East recently. 

    The tackle that felled the Bills player, after he had first arisen "didn’t appear unusually violent," the Explainer explained. Maybe it was "a rare type of trauma called commotio cordis . . . [which] occurs when a severe blow to the chest causes the heartbeat to quiver, leading to sudden cardiac arrest."

    How rare is this? "Commotio cordis occurs “probably 20 times a year,” said the article, as it neglected to mention that the padded NFL gear is specifically designed to shield against such blows to the chest.

    Now Musk has let these dissenting voices like McCullough–and Dowd, he had been banned too–back in for the sake of dialogue. Just like Mr. Strawman, he thinks dialogue is good. He even says (Jan/16) he is tweaking algorithms so as to send opposing views your way, though you can tweak them away in settings if you want to live in an 'echo chamber.' Yikes! Does this mean Vic Vomodog and Larsen Ahithorolf are my reluctant new best friends? Twitter has become the cutting edge place to be. 

    Musk takes on the high and mighty: “We shouldn’t be obsessed with WEF/Davos, but they take themselves sooo seriously that making fun of them is awesome,” he tweets. And, "My reason for declining the Davos invitation was not because I thought they were engaged in diabolical scheming, but because it sounded boring af lol,” attaching an emoji wearing sunglasses.

    Elon Blasts WEF Effort to Run World, Tucker Finishes Them Off – RedState

    Yeah, well we didn't invite you anyway, they respond. He contradicts their narratives. “WEF is increasingly becoming an unelected world government that the people never asked for and don’t want,” he says. And herein lies the tie-in to the age-old biblical drama: it is about government.

    There's evidence he's getting under their skin. The EU Commissioner of Values and Transparancy, who of course is there attending, says:

    "I [once] had quite a high level of confidence when it comes to Twitter. I have to say that we worked with knowledgeable people, with the lawyers, with sociologists who understood that they have to behave in some decent way, not to cause really big harm to society. I always felt that this notion of responsibility was there. So this is what I don't feel from Elon Musk personally. . . " 

    and even issues an eerie–is it a warning?–"Our message was clear. We have rules which have to be complied with. And otherwise there will be sanctions."

    Why do I think of that Superman movie where the Man of Steel is about to square off with his counterpart SuperVillian and some plebe says, 'This is going to be good!'

    We is gonna get some dialogue! Newsweek is one of the first to break ranks. Don’t think that your critical thinking skills are going to navigate you through this chaos. The trouble with critical thinking is that those who most vehemently advocate for it are apt to think they have a lock on the stuff. Critical thinkers appear pretty evenly split on Covid matters.

    As for JW HQ, they noted that you couldn’t do anything without getting vaccinated, and they did want to do things, so they complied along with most everyone else. They monitored the congregation, noted people weren’t dropping dead upon taking it, and gave the green light after an initial period of‘neutrality.’

    094B98F8-7057-4861-9122-7CD9FF684356Trouble is, this entire post will be obsolete is in month.* That's how fast-moving things are. But maybe it's all evidence that we are not in the last days and that we are not just hanging on by a thread.

    Meanwhile, the coalition of Frontline doctors, the ones who testified before Congress (I heard them) that they were having astounding success treating Covid-19 with Ivermectin, have released tips for how those suffering from vaccine injury, even long Covid, might benefit.

    *Obsolete in a month? Since the above post was written, Musk, who he wouldn’t go because it was dull and the WEC, who said no way would they invite him, have gotten together and he did speak:

    ***  The bookstore

  • Zdogg

    “[Drugmakers] Sue Human Immune System For Patent Infringement,” reported the Babylon Bee on January 14, 2022.

    It is satirical headline from a satirical source. Still, one nifty conspiracy theory is that some in this industry have come to view the human immune system as ‘competition’ and would like to—ever so slowly so as not to overly attract attention—replace it. It would be not just for profit, though it will be very profitable, but also hubris—those who worship science thinking they can do anything. The human immune system is great, they say, but it doesn’t stop all illness. They aim to remedy that problem with their science—whereas anyone with a good dose of godly fear and common sense knows that ‘you don’t mess with the laws of nature.’ 

    Zdogg is the establishment doctor. In his snarky rebuttal of Rogan/McCullough (After back-to-back Joe Rogan grand slam interviews, one with Dr. Peter McCullough and one with Dr. Robert Malone, and the intense lobbying effort to get him kicked off Spotify as a consequence) he seriously floats the idea that he is in awe of the magnificent human immune system. That’s why he loves these new mRNA vaccines that train it to do what it has to do! Awesome as it is, it doesn’t know how to do it’s main mission?

    I never did get around to saying what I thought of his patronizing twaddle and it’s about time I did. You want to choke him. He points to McCullough’s supposed ‘logic fallacies’ as he commits his own that are far worse. I already posted this guy but here he is again:

    Commenting on how Dr McCullough was not swayed by the establishment hit pieces against Ivermectin, he points to how the objection to one was, ‘It wasn’t given soon enough’ and his objection to another, ‘It wasn’t given in combination with the other substances we all use,’ and then complained: “It never ends!” Isn’t a trail of two a little early to say ‘it never ends?’ Of course, the history of the front-line doctors taking the stuff and remaining untouched by Covid in the course of treating thousands of patients—and testifying to this before Congress—is not something he mentions.

    And then—this is just a classic with these ‘critical thinking’ champions who take it for granted that they have a lock on the stuff—he admits that he has a bias. He is pro-vaccine. There. He said it. And then carries on as if this makes him a hero, as though it never occurred to anyone else that they too had a starting position! All you have to do these days is admit you have a bias. Instantly you become a hero and your adversary a manipulative Hitler.

    He patronizes all in lecturing about ‘causation vs correlation’ as though no one other than he has ever thought of such a thing—whereas they (the doctors he is attacking) all do as a matter of routine. There is also abundant ‘guilt by association.’ And if you say something like “it happens all the time” he dismisses the entire point since it doesn’t happen ALL the time.

    If he wasn’t taking out a greater enemy, I almost think tech media would have sought to ban him as well, for he acknowledges McCullough is an expert, and further went on to skewer several sacred cows, asserting that the government has frequently lied, even naming Fauci himself, and stipulating the mandate policy is ridiculous.

    And then he dismisses (Rogan told McCullough, who hadn’t heard, about this) the tech fellow who has offered $1 million to anything who will live-debate Covid 19 with him but can’t find any takers with the criticism that Steve Kirsch [I went back to retrieve his name] ‘is a fellow with success in the search engine field who now thinks he knows everything’ and ‘talks a mile a minute’ and has ‘quick command of all the medical studies’ and ‘nobody can possibly keep up with that.’

    So it is a crime to be on top of your game? Why can’t he find someone on his side who is on top of his game? Find someone who also  is in-your-face (it is not as though the world suffers for lack of pugnacious people) who also has quick command of papers and research, and who can say, ‘Hold on! What is wrong with this paper is….’  Instead of just saying ‘nobody can keep up with that!’ 

    It’s what the anti-cultists do.  If you represent your cause well they present that as a liability! Would they not side with the scribes against Jesus at Matthrew 7:28?  “When Jesus finished these sayings, the effect was that the crowds were astounded at his way of teaching, for he was teaching them as a person having authority, and not as their scribes.”

    ‘That’s because they were listening to a manipulative cult leader,’ they would say. ‘Nobody can keep up with that stuff!’

  • Reproving Aaron Rodgers—it Would Have Been 34-0 had he Followed Proticol

    Q: I understand you claim not to be an expert, and you consider your sources to be trustworthy. The majority of the scientific community agrees mRNA to be safe. Are these sources you consider trustworthy, academic in nature? Have they acquired a per-review? 

    To the extent that the majority of the scientific community is under the influence of big money, they have lost much credibility.

    There is a former pharma executive online who states that for every dollar Pharma spends on educating you through drug ads and otherwise, they spend six times that amount educating the medical field. There is another Pharma VP who says: “Look, nobody has any money. Government doesn’t. Researchers don’t. Universities don’t. But Pharma has lots of money.” 

    “Conduct a study for us,” Pharma says, “here’s tons of money to fund it.” If the results come back favorable to Pharma, they can expect more funding for other studies. If the results come back unfavorable, they will never hear from Pharma again. “No money has changed hands,” the VP says. “No agreements have been entered into. But everyone knows what they must do,’ as he goes on to claim this practice is universal.

    The above is said of new drugs. The regulatory hurdles for vaccines, even in normal times, are lower. In abnormal times, such as now, they are lower still. The existing vaccines were ushered in at “warp speed” under the Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This US emergency provision can only be done legally if there truly is a emergency—that is, if there is no existing alternative treatment for Covid-19. Thus, it becomes very important to certain parties to demonstrate that existing alternative treatments (read primarily hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin) are no good and/or cause injury.

    Q: Are these sources you consider trustworthy, academic in nature? Have they acquired a per-review? 

    Yes. Some of them are medical doctors who felt impelled to do something to help their patients. Initially, there was no guidance whatsoever from health agencies upon a Covid-19 diagnosis other than get bed-rest, keep hydrated, and come to the hospital if it gets real bad—by which time it was too late. Most patients put on ventilators died.

    So these doctors, mostly on their own & then they shared their results with colleagues, began experimenting with existing drugs to see if any could prevent the hospitalization that usually spelled death. They discovered and then shared with others their 80% or so success rate. One of them shared his regimen with the White House, and this is why when Trump was diagnosed with Covid, he was very soon up and running again.* Another pleaded before Congress—I heard him—that these drugs be made widely available. He stressed that he was not against vaccines, which then were only in the early stages of being developed and rolled out. He was only interested in saving his existing patients in the interim.

    These doctors describe how they were aghast that, not only were the drugs not made widely available, but they were targeted for elimination. They describe their bewilderment that studies were undertaken administering these drugs at levels known to be toxic. Of one Brazilian study that came to be heralded as proof that these cheap drugs that had been around forever were dangerous, one of these doctors writes: 

    “The Brazilian authors of this study must have known they were treading on dangerous territory by purposely causing many deaths. Coming from a poor area of the country, they may have felt they could get away with sacrificing their patients without local reprisals. They simply gave lethal doses of chloroquine to patients to prove that the drug and its derivative hydroxychloroquine were too dangerous to treat Covid-19”

    This is an outrageous charge and these doctors were slow to make it. But a lethal dose is a lethal dose. Malfeasance is clearly demonstrated at many levels. It is assessing the motivation behind the malfeasance that is perilous and causes different docs to come to different conclusions, not always agreeing with each other. A prominent view, however, is that this campaign to discredit the drugs that demonstrably work amounts to mass murder and is the equal of previous genocides. Hundreds of thousands of people died who didn’t have to.

    Didn’t many of Hitler’s medical experimenters wind up in South America? Of course, they’d be dead by now, but culture doesn’t die in an overlapping generation. I can’t picture rank and file technicians knowingly administering an experiment that kills people, but I can imagine them simply doing what they’re told, with no suspicions at all as to what their higher ups were concocting. Moreover, JWI I am sure will empathize with how poor people with the wrong skin color make good fodder for forward progress. Aren’t there examples in the US involving blacks and indigenous populations?

    Q: Are these sources you consider trustworthy, academic in nature?

    Some of the answer to this hinges on what you consider “academic.” The aforementioned doctor who sent his results to the White House and saved Trump also sent those results to certain official sources. These sources rejected the material because it was not a scientific study. “I understand it is not a scientific study,” he said, “it wasn’t intended to be, but it is still data.”

    Scientific “studies” like the above Brazilian one are trumping actual data. They are infringing upon what these doctors consider sacred, the doctor-patient relationship. The “studies” have been used to go over the heads of doctors, who prescribe, say—Ivermecitn—and then the pharmacies refuse to fill it. (and in some cases report the doctor). What is “academic” is trampling what is real.

    Q: Have they acquired a per-review? 

    Some of them are widely published prior to going into this area of medical apostasy. I heard one of them say that he holds an advantage over some of his colleagues in that he has been published in some many journals that he will be difficult to take down.

    All of them have been taken down, however,  on the mainstream outlets such as Facebook and YouTube. They are reduced to their own websites, where they aggregate breaking developments. How much they are actually reduced is a matter of debate. Most of them are reluctant beacons who never sought to be public figures. Their palpable integrity and manifest good motive draws people to their information. I consider them very credible. I mean, these are not the people who think Sandy Hook was a hoax.

    ___ * Aaron Rodgers, the quarterback, caused a major brouhaha when it was revealed that his prior claim of being “immunized” didn’t mean he was vaccinated. He was relying on something else, and then he came down with Covid-19. Of course, he missed the next game. But the one after that he led his team to a 17-0victory. 

    Doing my bit for “science,” I pointed out that it would have been 34-0 had he gone the conventional route.

    ***

    So am I right that if the spikiness of the S protein allows it to penetrate cells so as to infect, the spikiness of the antigen produced upon stimulation by the shot is just as architecturally dangerous, even though not infectious? And so, that is why you do want to take out the virus should it appear, but you want to do so through safer means, the ones being discredited? And that, unless and until the virus appears, meanwhile the spikiness of the shot inflicts damage of its own?

    Q: Can you clarify for me what you mean by "shot inflicts damage, of its own" if a synthetic protein has no dangerous antigen?

    The idea is that if the archtecture (the spikiness) of the virus in itself inflicts damage, enabling it to puncture cells, so will that of the manufactured antigens. Think along the lines of those computerized enactments of how strokes develop, blood passageways being clogged up by plaque, logjams that occur within the body. Molecules that flow through the body ought be smooth, and the virus, as well as the antigens made to combat it, are anything but. 

    The virus itself is not anything naturally occurring, but has been created through ‘gain of function’ research. If this is true, as is alleged with considerable evidence, then the antigens created that fight the virus are just as unnatural, even as they do succeed to some extent in muting it.

    Understand, I make no claim to be any expert. I’ve gleaned this from reading sources I consider trustworthy. 

    See: JWs and Covid.

    —

    [edit] I was amazed that this ‘gem’ should somehow slip through at Newsweek:

    “As a healthy 36-year-old woman, COVID-19 does not pose a statistically meaningful threat to my life. I have a 99.97 percent chance of survival. Why would I get a vaccine for a virus that I do not fear and that isn't a threat to my life—particularly when there is an element of risk from the vaccines?”

    https://www.newsweek.com/why-im-not-vaccinated-opinion-1648024

    For young children, the risk of death from COVID is statistically zero. You would never know it from the insistence of those holding the upper hand that they must be vaccinated as an emergency measure.

    Here’s one of a daughter who had to sue the hospital to treat her father on his deathbed with the treatment that they had refused: 

    https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/health/dying-covid-19-patient-recovers-after-court-orders-ivermectin-treatment

    The judge had ruled that since the man was on his deathbed, what could be the harm of a ‘risky’ drug? The man recovered so quickly that I could almost envision hospital chiefs wanting to apply a John 12:11 to him.

    The chief priests now conspired to kill Lazʹa·rus also,  since it was because of him that many of the Jews were going there and putting faith in Jesus

    If you want people to get vaccinated, said Sen. Ryan Paul, why don’t you try honesty? Instead, there is so much deceit at so many levels, and I don’t know how the prevailing powers manage that there never be heard a discouraging word for as long as they have, nor if their version can continue to prevail.