Sheep and Goats

Category: Covid 19

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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.

  • Gain-of-Function Research. Evolutionist Assumptions to Kill us All.

    Gain-of-function research is a euphemism for taking something harmless in nature and making it harmful, maybe in order to make a bio weapon, maybe to make a vaccine against one, or maybe for who-can-say what reasons. Newsweek, back in April 2020, reported on U.S—China collaboration over such research. Peter Breggin, a doctor better known as an advocate of psychiatric drug reform, traced it back still further. U.S. government agencies denied it. Dr. Fauci, head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, even did so before Congress. But recently the National Institutes of Health acknowledged it. “‘I told you so,’ doesn’t even begin to cover it,” said the Senator who had first made the charge.

    Dr. Breggin has recently branched out from psychiatric reform to tackle the question of just how the pandemic arose. “How do researchers determine if a virus found in nature can become a pathogen, i.e., “bind to human cells?” The laboratory scientists engineer it into a pathogen and use their success to claim it could also emerge naturally from nature—a conclusion which makes no sense,” he says in his book Covid 19 and the Global Predators

    Why does it make no sense to him?

    “Engineering a benign virus into a lethal one is a complex time-consuming, highly technical process, thereby making an accidental change of that sort in nature extremely unlikely.” he says.

    It makes no sense to me, either. Next paragraph of his book, he repackages and runs the claim through again: “When the researchers…believe they have made coronaviruses capable of producing a Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in humans…they absurdly claim that natural selection is likely to do the same thing! and use that claim to scare us into giving them further amounts of our taxes to support their dangerous Frankenstein-like activities.”

    It is dumb as dumb can be. But are these researchers disingenuous in suggesting that natural evolution might do what they could do only with the most painstaking effort? Or do they really believe it? Breggin seems convinced they are disingenuous. I think they really believe it.

    The reason I think they really believe it is found in a Watchtower publication, The Origin of Life—Five Questions Worth Asking. Evolutionists who think the living cell arose spontaneously through natural selection try to test their theory by building one themselves.  Only ‘Five Questions’ has the common sense to observe:

    “Similarly, if scientists ever did construct a cell, they would accomplish something truly amazing —but would they prove that the cell could be made by accident? If anything, they would prove the very opposite, would they not?”

    Evolutionists think it here too! If they can design it, that must mean it could come through evolution! It is also, as Breggin says, “a conclusion which makes no sense.” It is the reason one must always go easy putting faith in science. In the midst of genuine research comes an assumption so blindingly dumb as to contaminate whatever follows! Moreover, in Watchtower’s brochure, the assumption just puts egg on the face of the scientists. In the current gain-of-function application, it threatens to kill us all!

    To sum up: “The work entailed risks that worried even seasoned researchers. More than 200 scientists called for the work to be halted….[since] it increased the likelihood that a pandemic would occur through a laboratory,” per the Newsweek article. Obama banned it. Trump, after initially permitting it, also banned it—probably the only thing the two have ever agreed upon! What emboldens researchers to do end runs around the bans of two presidents and perform the risky research anyway? Their overarching belief in evolution.

    Senator Paul made the point as to its dangers, he who tweeted ‘I told you so’ about the gain-of-function admission. It’s not so much that government health agencies were lying, he says. Rather: “Right now we have a virus where the whole world has been turned on its head, it has a 1% mortality. Can you imagine if they create something in a lab that has a 15% mortality or 50% mortality? Some of the viruses they have been experimenting with in Wuhan have 50% mortality.” Evolutionists threaten all humanity when they act on their assumptions.

    Interestingly, the NIH letter admitting to gain-of-function research did not use the term, “though the work he described matches its commonplace definition precisely,” says the National Review writer. Of course! It is like when I was asked if nighttime employees really sleep on the job. I replied I had never seen one do that. However I had seen them engage in activity that so closely resembled sleep that it was impossible to tell the difference.

    Changing definitions can get you out of many a jam. Even Xi Jinping insists that the government he heads in China is democratic. All you need to do is change your definition of democratic to see it that way. And don’t get me started on how the C-word has changed over the years to target unpopular groups. It once was the case that if you fell under the spell of a charismatic leader, withdrew from society, and began doing strange things, you just might be a member of a cult. These days, simply following Jesus in being “no part of the world” is enough to trigger the hated word.

    The bookstore

  • To Jab or Not to Jab: That is the Question—Part 2

    “We know it can be difficult to make a wise decision when there are various opinions and conflicting reports that the world provides, perhaps making it hard to know what to believe,” said Stephen Lett on jw.org. Boy, he sure got that right!

    There have been adverse reactions to Covid vaccines. How common are they? One in a hundred or one in a million? How serious are they? Like stubbing your toe? Or like being struck by lightening? These are the questions that matter. You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to find answers to them, but it is. So Bethel tells what it knows, which is not everything, but it does fill in a lot of blanks.

    They tell of those they find easiest to track—fellow Bethelites and special full-time servants—22,000 of the first and 44,000 of the second who have gone ahead with vaccination. Of the 66,000, four reported “severe adverse reactions that may be linked” to the vaccine. Those four are now all “stable and their conditions under control.”

    These “statistics have been collected by our brothers, so we can trust these figures,” Lett says. And we can. It’s not a scientific study. It’s data. As data, it may be better than a scientific study. Alas, “follow the science” has become a joke these days, with everyone spinning it their preferred way and calling it “the science.” We have all learned from experience that if one study doesn’t go our way, just hold out for the next one that may.

    Four out of 66,000 works out to .006%. I wouldn’t want to be that in that .006% but it seems pretty unlikely I would be. How much comfort I would take in my condition being “stable and under control” would depend upon just what that condition was. But doesn’t it roughly correspond to the odds of being struck by lightning or going down in a plane crash? In a world of 8 billion people you can find countless examples of anything. 

    At Bethel they are Bible-only people, and they are chomping at the bit to get back to their sole reason for being. Their special mandate is to prepare and distribute the spiritual food. Covid-19 just gets in their way. Take the vaccine and be done with it, seems their position. They can look around themselves and see people are not dropping dead once they take it. Might it cause long-term problems down the road? Well, so will Armageddon if left unannounced, so they don’t dare unannounce it. Bro Lett concludes with the line, using gestures peculiarly his, “The coronavirus is not the worst trial to strike out at all mankind and it won’t be the last. We can expect things to deteriorate even further as these last days march on till their end.”

    In this eighth Governing Body update since Covid-19 began, he also relates some disaster relief efforts and introduces the next year’s text: “Those seeking Jehovah will lack nothing good.” (Ps 34:10) They are putting the pandemic behind them. Were lockdowns the answer and had the world followed their lead, Covid-19 would be a distant memory by now, since they locked down almost immediately. Been there, done that, they say of lockdown, it’s time to move on. They invite everyone to “get behind” them, which led one bro to say, “get behind them in what?” Take the vaccine is the first interpretation that comes to mind.

    I admit this has not gone down the way I thought it would—you can’t always get your way. Several months ago, it was ‘vaccination is a health care matter and we do not presume to choose for others on such things.’ Later the statement was made that Witnesses were not anti-vaccine, apparently to counter the impression of some that they were, and it was pointed out some at Bethel have chosen to accept the vaccine. Then that “some” turned out to be just about everyone—99% in the U.S! It’s ‘pedal to the metal’ time there. You are not allowed to do stuff without the vaccine. You are allowed to do stuff with it. So they take it and move on. If it hasn’t gone down the way I thought it would, it has gone down in a way to get things done, so maybe I should have figured it. 

    Now, the trouble with all this, if there is one, is that you may suspect the Bethel brothers haven’t looked deeply into what’s cautionary of the vaccine. It is a downside of being single-minded. Do you suspect they just monitor media that ardently cheers the one hand and does all in its power to proclaim Tevye-like that “there IS no other hand”—which satisfies them because they want to get back to serious work?

    If there’s one thing Witnesses are convinced of, it’s that this whole system of things is going down. Whoever looks aside from the plow is not well-suited for the kingdom of God—you know they’re not going to forget that Luke 9:62 verse. If one set of scoundrels isn’t driving the whole world into this ditch, then another set is driving it into that ditch. Who cares about winning a shoving match with Big Pharma or the conniving globalists? Losing out to the “normal” ungodly state of things is just as bad, and that’s what the pharma and globalist enemies want to get back to.

    Of course, Bethel will never tell people to get vaccinated. They will not forget that “we are fellow workers for your joy” and not “masters over your faith.” (2 Corinthians 1:24) They will remember well: “Who are you to judge the servant of another? To his own master he stands or falls.” But they will lead by example, and this they are doing.

    Maybe it’s because I hang out online a lot that I have come across a lot of friends aghast that the organization would so quickly embrace the Covid vaccine. Some of these friends are not listening to “the voice of strangers,” but they have vetted those strangers to separate the relative sheep from goats. They know, or at least they think they know, that Covid 19 responds readily to early treatment with mostly cheap (though increasingly hard-to-get) drugs). They cheer when the Nebraska Attorney General kicks back at the “official” storyline. The doctor who wrote the White House with the medical regimen that quickly cured Trump thinks there will one day be the equivalent of Nuremberg trials for those who let hundreds of thousands die by discrediting and even withholding treatment of an eminently treatable disease.

    Moreover, their concern on vaccines is for long-term safety. Short term safety appears okay, per the Bethel stats, but on the long term these “hesitant” ones are dubious. They’re not moved by official promises of safety. They know that Vioxx was perfectly “safe” until the day it was pulled from the market to reveal a phalanx of Pharma lawyers empowered to beat away all its injured customers. They know the new vaccines are not like the old vaccines that when you took them it meant you didn’t get the disease. They don’t think they’re safe.

    Some of these hesitant ones feel arm-twisted. Bethel explicitly says no one should be made to feel arm-twisted, but they feel it nonetheless. It is simply the nature of peer-pressure. One local bro reminds all at the meeting how we ought submit to government mandates, apparently misunderstanding that there are no government mandates in the US at present, but only a mandate that certain employers fire those unvaxxed. Feel strongly enough about the issue to walk away from your job and you have violated no mandate. Another speaks of how “our loyalty and obedience really allows us to get back together,” implying that those not onboard are disloyal and disobedient.

    Relax. Not to worry. The game is the same, its just up on another level. If the concern is one of safety, a whole different set of Bible principles come into play. Nobody would dispute that Jehovah’s Witnesses are among the most safety-conscious in the world. And with safety principles on the front burner, even ‘obey the superior authorities’ principles begins to fade. Madame Moaaga pointedly did not obey the secular authority when she convinced herself that obedience to them would cause her harm.

    These things happen. It’s human nature. Nothing to get all excited about. Indeed, if meetings should open with vax requirements and without a Zoom option , or even if there is a Zoom option, just how far will people go in sticking to their conscientious guns? It is a question some are asking of themselves.

    As much as we are concerned about safety these days, what if someone does research and concludes they can best stay safe by relying upon distancing and other preventative measures? Stand your ground, if you think best, but be respectful standing it. That way you become an informed voice on something that is not the specialty of the Bethel brothers. So long as you do not get strident over it, who knows? In the event you are on to something, maybe they will one day take some pointers from you. In the event you are not, maybe you will take some pointers from them.

    “Get behind the Governing Body” the bro said in Update #7, but get behind them in what? How about get behind them in remaining undistracted from the main mission? Don’t let it become our new cause, for we already have one. That is something everyone can agree on, and it doesn’t call for any decision as to vaccination. Through Zoom, informal, letters, phone & other non-contact means, many have proven to themselves that they can yet have a meaningful share in the ministry regardless of vaccination status. Research the matter all you want, for those so inclined, in case you’re cursed with being one of those high-information people who has to know everything about everything, but don’t become emotionally divided. You don’t want to be distracted from the good news.

    See: To Jab or Not to Jab: Part 1

    Edit: I’m going to append all future Covid-19 posts to this one, in effect making one super-long one. No matter how controversial the topic becomes, no matter how strong opinions get, it is not the issue, from Jehovah’s Witnesses point of view. As Brother Lett stated, Covid-19 is not the last crisis to be faced as this system of things marches on to its final end. So in addition to other posts in this category—this will now be the featured post—here they are:

    Here in the US, the new gold standard of ‘sleever’ information has become an almost 3 hour interval with podcaster Joe Rogan and Dr. Peter McCullough. 

    For background, Joe came down with Covid, took the medications that supposedly don’t work, and promptly got better. He has since become very vocal about it.

    Peter McCullough is a cardiologist. He has hundreds of articles published in medical journals. Since the early days of the pandemic he has cleared his decks to focus on the worldwide response to it.

    The interview is here:

    https://covidvaccinesideeffects.com/joe-rogan-interview-with-dr-peter-mccullough-video-full-episode/

    Of course, it has been removed as ‘misinformation’ by the major social media sites. However, rebuttals to it are posted, such as this hour long interview at Facebook by Dr. Zubin Damaria, who goes by the handle ZDogg.

    https://zdoggmd.com/peter-mccullough/

    I think it’s good to post both. Let people sort them out as they will.

    We moved so quickly (and for obvious theocratically practical motive) from: “Vaccine is a personal choice and we do not presume to make health decisions for others” to “Follow the Bethel lead and get vaccinated” that it is a challenge to adjust. Deep deep deep down in my gut I hope that the brothers are not so immersed in preaching & Bible matters that they simply acquiesce to the mainstream’s word on COVID without further inquiry.

    ’You’re not following the direction of the Governing Body’ one of my wife’s close friends said to her (nonconfrontationally—we have not had any confrontations). ‘Well, I guess we aren’t,’ I told her, and I am not particularly comfortable with that. However, I could counter (though I haven’t as of yet) that if I really was into not following direction, I would buttonhole every Witness I know and implore them to get more familiar with what goes on behind the scenes of the COVID 10 campaign.….

    Within days of the McCullough interview, Joe Rogan did another with Dr. Robert Malone, arguably the inventor of the mRNA technology used in Covid vaccines, He has since turned very cautious regarding them:

    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/joe-rogan-robert-malone-interview-covid-vaccine/

    And, as with the McCullough interview, a rebuttal:

    https://factcheck.afp.com/http%253A%252F%252Fdoc.afp.com%252F9V36YN-1

    …

    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.

    ….

    McCullough spoke of the ‘absolute’ advantage of the vaccine vs the ‘relative’ advantage. The relative advantage is quite high. That is, the vaccine offers significant protection as opposed to doing nothing at all. This is the protection that media fixates on.

    Absolute protection compares the vaccine with taking other measures to protect oneself. These include the masking & distancing, but primarily it is fortifying oneself with substances that make catching the illness unlikely—the ingredients—ivermectin—is among them, that front line doctors testified before Congress that they took in treating thousands of Covid patients that did indeed fully protect them. 

    The ‘absolute’ advantage of the vaccine is quite low, he said. It is a percentage point or two, probably not worth the risk of taking it.….….

    ***

    The following is a beaut, not primarily because of anything it sayo on climate change, but because of what it tells of ‘fact-checking’ sites.

    Facebook was sued for its fact-checking. Their defense? They can’t be sued, for it is just opinion, and opinion is protected speech.

    https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/facebook-admits-fact-checks-pure-opinion/

    ****

    Someone spoke of

    Working doctors who speak out are targeted. Such as FBI raiding your consulting rooms and taking all patient records to determine if and when you prescribed ivermectin etc. 

    I didn’t know this. It certainly isn’t everywhere, but it is consistent. In NY, the attorney general has sent threatening letters to out of state pharmacies filling ivermectin prescriptions for NY residents.

    I can’t see how this can do anything but escalate. It’s a little like Abraham Lincoln’s recognition (“I’m not smart enough to lie.”) that once you lie you have to keep on lying to cover yourself. Can you imagine if it ever became more that ‘conspiracy theory’ that hundreds of thousands died unnecessarily—that most could have been saved by early treatment with cheap drugs that were withheld? Do you think relatives of those victims would let bygones be bygones? 

    The whole facade would come down, with massive, not just civil litigation but with criminal prosecution.

    It is something how so many times in history have villains gone down by turning on each other. 

    “I will call for a sword against him on all my mountains,’ declares the Sovereign Lord Jehovah. ‘Every man’s sword will be against his own brother” (Ezekiel 38:21)

    Can foreglimmerings not be seen today?

    ***

    1/14/22. Pfizer, Moderna Sue Human Immune System For Patent Infringement, reports the Babylon Bee.

    It is satirical, but my very own personal conspiracy theory is that these snakes 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 for them (Prizer stock was up 59% in 2021) but I think it is 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 little 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, 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, there is intense lobbying effort to get him kicked off Spotify) 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!

    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 twice as bad. I already posted this guy but here he is again:

    https://zdoggmd.com/peter-mccullough/

    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 assume they have a monopoly on the stuff—he admits that he has a bias. He is pro-vaccine. There. He said it. And then carries on as though this makes him a hero, as though it never occurred to anyone else that they too had a starting position! You notice how @JW Insiderand @Araunahave been squabbling forever over how we should view the CCP and they do no more than to reach stalemate? I have the answer. All one or the other must do is say, “I admit I have a bias.” Instantly that one becomes a hero and his/her adversary is manipulative Hitler.

    He patronizes us all lecturing about ‘causation vs correlation’ as if no one other than he has ever thought of such a thing—whereas they (the doctors he is attacking) all have. 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 (this is also true with the rebuttals of Malone), I almost think tech media would seek to ban him as well, for he acknowledges McCullough is an expert and further skewers 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 with him but can’t find any takers with the criticism that Steve Kersh (I went back to find 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 that is on top of hisgame? 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.’

    ***

    “We jokingly said we would wait first to see how many died from it.”

    Quite a few apparently. That doesn’t mean it is blatantly obvious. If you doubled the death rate of a specific illness, would that be immediately obvious to you? Probably not.

    Life insurance companies are now facing a massive unattributable increase of non-Covid death increases of millennial and younger persons of heart/clotting related issues—a sudden 40% spike was the last figure I heard. Since it can’t be attributed to anything else, by default some begin to mention the vaccine. 

    “When I talked to my pharmacologist friend who was involved with the vaccine, and I asked her if the vaccines were safe, she said as safe as any other drug we might take,”

    If the above findings are so, she is wrong. Moreover, the bugaboo with the vaccine is that it violates the Hippocratic oath: ‘First of all, do no harm.” Beyond all question, it does do harm to a relatively tiny group of people who formerly were not sick at all. That is the difference between it and the other medicines you speak of. In the case of the latter, the person is sick and must make the decision whether the benefits of a given medicine will outweigh the risks. In the case of the former, the person is not sick and may feel he/she never will be if he takes precautions that pose no danger in themselves.

    “this was an unprecedented, extremely contagious and dangerous virus affecting the whole world.”

    Far less so than is still constantly stated. For healthy adults it carries a 99% survival rate. The vulnerability of small children is almost zero. Moreover, the illness readily responds to treatment—it is anything but the “kiss of death’ that the mainline authorities made it out to be. Everything possible was done and is still being done to obscure this fact. 

    Unless one is elderly or has ‘co-morbitities’ one is not especially at risk even if they catch covid. As to advanced age: historically society has not inflicted risk upon the young to protect the elderly. Rather they seek to protect the elderly without risking the young, by increased quarantine measures upon them, for example, as the need arises. As to co-morbidities, a great many of these stem from unhealthy lifestyles, so to vaccinate so as to shield this group in effect is wanting those who deliberately make healthy choices to subsidize those who deliberately do not, or at least subsidize the business concerns that promote unhealthy choices.

    Then there was the revelation a few months back that ‘Covid hospitatlizions’ did not necessarily mean that people were in the hospital because of Covid, but only, once there, were tested and found to have Covid. What possible reason could there be for this obvious miscommunication other than an attempt to pump up the numbers?

     

    “I was saying that it was non compliance with recomendations to get vaccinated that caused problems (such as restrictions for the unvacinated)…..Non compliance was causing problems before anyone knew for sure whether they worked or not.”

    The reason so many were not in a hurry to comply is that they weren’t born yesterday. They were suspicious that a vaccine could be developed at ‘warp-speed’ since all previous vaccines had taken years to be approved. Even more so because the technology was radically new. The covid vaccine does not work like any previous vaccine that exposes the body to an inert sample of a disease so the body will ramp up a defense. Instead, it retrains the body to manufacture a defense against a pathogen it has never encountered. Many put no faith that human science would get that right on the first try, if at all.

    Those resistant knew that Pharma is absolutely not to be trusted, that it has a long track record of insisting a product is safe when they know better, insisting it right up to the second the product is ruled unsafe, and they lawyering up to beat back the onslaught of lawsuits. Note the horrendous things that medical experts said about them in the aftermath of Vioxx:

    https://www.tomsheepandgoats.com/2007/11/vioxx-the-athei.html

    Making the rat smell ten-times worse is that in the case of any vaccine they have negotiated immunity for themselves. They have no need to lawyer up. Get injured with a vaccine? It’s on you. There is no redress. For various reasons the VAERS system, supposedly put in place to remedy these wrongs, does not. Have you ever heard of a lawyer going after a vaccine case, even from VAERS. They will go after other government agencies—SSI lawsuits are a burgeoning legal industries these days—but they have not heretofore thought it profitable to tackle the vaccine industry.

    “There was no information about possible long term complications because…. well it’s self explanatory….because not enough time had elapsed. They simply didn’t know.”

    This did not stop them from and has still not stopped them from insisting the product was safe. In fact, though buried for the longest time, it is now revealed that the most widely used vax initially failed its safety data. The CDC director acknowledged being misled by Pharma. Then there was that bizarre request to keep safety data hidden for 75 years. What could possibly account for that other than widespread fraud? the suspicious people said. Subsequent events have shown they were right to be suspicious. 

    Arauna previously cited a former hedge fund manager from Blackrock. It is he who first drew attention the the 40% spike in non-covid deaths. He says he has lived through three Wall Street debacles, the ‘dot-com’ bubble of 2000, the ‘people will never default on a mortgage/house prices will never fall’ bubble of 2007, and the ‘trust the science’ [his label] bubble of today. Wall Street is now figuring it out, he says, adding that ‘these people are caught, they know they’re caught, and so they do what all fraudsters do when they know they’re caught: they “triple down.”

    “The information is out there,”

    It depends upon what you mean by ‘out there.’ If you mean whatever would advance the cause of mass vaccination, yes, that is out there almost no matter where you look. But if you mean the factors such as been outlined above, these are largely scrubbed from social and news media. The relatively small channels of independent websites and small coalitions of professionals that cannot be snuffed out are thereby labeled anti-vax conspiracy theorists in hope of discrediting them. 

    You have to follow some of these persons, subscribe to their email lists, to become aware of anything that is not pro-vaccine. If you do, you will find they routinely cite highly credible sources, medical and scientific experts, even government agencies themselves. To my mind, their offerings are far more persuasive than that of the ‘fact-checkers’ employed to ‘disprove’ them.

    “I would presume that by now there would be recommendations against it”

    One would think so. The fact that there are not in the face of the above highly-discoverable facts defies all logic. With that we enter “Arauna territory” of attempting to assign motives or intended outcomes. This is far harder to do, but is done because the ‘facts on the ground’ make no sense. Trying to make sense of them, people veer into what would be called ‘conspiracy theory.’ I do not know if Arauna is right about some of the dire statements she makes. But nothing she says strikes me as so implausible it should be ruled off the table.

    “Instead, the recommendation now is to get a booster once a year as we learn to live with the virus.”

    This could have been done from the very beginning, the hesitant ones have maintained. ‘Learn to live with the virus’ as humanity has learned to live with hundreds of diseases in the past. The fact that it was not done, that the world was and is still being turned upside down in a futile attempt to eradicate a treatable disease, creating enormous social and economic upheaval, puts enough wind in Arauna’s sails, and the millions like her, to blow her to Mars and back a dozen times on any given afternoon.  

     

    ***10/2022:

    And it remains to be seen how many conspiracy theories over the mRNA vaccines will be validated. Many assertions that would once get you banned from Twitter are now being admitted by official sources, such as this recent admission of Pharma execs that they didn’t actually have time to see if their product to stop transmission of the virus since they were traveling “at the speed of science.”

    “Do you know why I stopped you, sir?” “Not exactly, officer. All I know is that I was traveling at the speed of science.”

    ***

    “[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 twice as bad. 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 monopoly on the stuff—he admits that he has a bias. He is pro-vaccine. There. He said it. And then carries on as though 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 lecturing about ‘causation vs correlation’ as if no one other than he has ever thought of such a thing—whereas they (the doctors he is attacking) all have thought of it. 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 with him but can’t find any takers with the criticism that Steve Kersh [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 that 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.’

    ******  The bookstore