The “crits,” as they are known, disagreed over whether their framework for examining systemic racismwas too far removed from activists, and if their approach focused enough on the struggles of the poor.
“This
was before the internet, before email. If you wanted exchange of ideas,
you met face-to-face,” Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University
of Hawaii at Mānoa, said in an email. “This allowed for expressions of
difference, questioning, arguing, while forging solidarity.”
But in recent months, critical race theory has leaped from the classroom to conservative news networks, where
it has been attacked as divisive. Conservative activists and
politicians have seized on the issue, often redefining the academic term
to encompass nearly any examination of systemic racism. Several state
legislatures are considering whether to ban teaching critical race theory in schools.
In
interviews, the scholars who helped create this academic framework said
they’re angry about the way the current debate distorts their ideas.
They worry about chilling effect this backlash could have on teaching
about race and racism in America.
“This
is basically an effort to create a boogeyman and pour everything into
that category that they believe will prompt fear, discomfort and
repudiation on the part of parents and voters who are primed to respond
to this hysteria that they’re trying to create,” said Kimberlé Crenshaw,
a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and
Columbia Law School.
newyorker | The invention of the sensitivity-training group is often traced to a
specific evening: Lewin was running a workshop for teachers and social
workers in Connecticut, where he had been hired by the state to help
address racial and religious prejudice. After the participants had left,
a few stragglers returned and asked to be permitted to sit in on the
debriefings, and Lewin agreed. Though it was initially awkward to have
the participants present, Lewin realized that the setup led to frank and
open conversations. He saw the transformative possibilities of
uninhibited feedback in the real time of the group session, and
established the idea of the corporate T-group—shorthand for sensitivity
“training group”—at the National Training Laboratory, in Bethel, Maine.
His inroads into social engineering could also be put to less
conciliatory purposes; Lewin was a consultant for the Office of
Strategic Services and developed programs to help recruit potential
spies.
The T-group, which was sometimes called “therapy for
normals”—rather insensitively by today’s standards but with the intent
of destigmatizing the practice—was a therapeutic workshop for strangers
which would take place in a neutral locale and promote candid emotional
exchange. A typical T-group session would begin with the facilitator
declining to assume any active leadership over the session, a move that
would surprise and disconcert the participants, who would collectively
have to work out the problem of how to deal with a lack of hierarchy or
directives.
It sounds simple enough, but the experience could be
deeply unsettling, even life-changing, for some. As one contemporary
witness of the Bethel N.T.L. workshops remarked, “I had never observed
such a buildup of emotional tension in such a short time. I feared it
was more than some leaders and members could bear.” The T-group promised
an antidote to the oppressions of Dale Carnegie-style insincerity that
dominated the business world, and, crucially, the sessions seemed to
provide a glimpse of a reality in which it was finally possible to know
how one was really perceived.
the prize for the “toughest encounter seminar that had been ever
convened at Esalen” went to one run collaboratively by George Leonard
and Price Cobbs. Leonard was a white psychologist from the South, whose
youthful encounter with the terrified eyes of a Black prisoner
surrounded by a white mob instilled in him a lifelong commitment to
fighting racism. He implored Cobbs, an African-American psychiatrist who
was co-authoring the book “Black Rage,”
to come to Esalen to collaborate. They organized a storied,
twenty-four-hour-marathon racial-sensitivity workshop between Black and
white participants that became rancorous: “the anger rolled on and on
without end” and “interracial friendships crumbled on the spot.”
Finally, Anderson relates how, as the sun was beginning to rise, an
African-American woman was moved to spontaneously comfort a crying white
woman, and this shifted the tenor of the entire session. Though the
episode could easily be read less sunnily, as another troubling instance
of the oppressor requiring comfort from the oppressed, the facilitators
purportedly deemed it a success. Cobbs spoke to Leonard and declared,
“George, we’ve got to take this to the world.”
Cobbs’s
career encapsulates the shift of sensitivity training from its literary
roots to corporate argot. He was sparked by early epiphanies about
Black anger and injustice, inspired by reading Richard Wright, James
Baldwin, and Ralph Ellison. He admired the plot of “Invisible Man,”
for instance, because “the unnamed main character’s sense of his own
invisibility fans his ultimate rage into flames of
self-expression. . . .” Cobbs credited Lewin’s research as a key
precedent when he went on to found Pacific Management Systems, a
training center for T-group leaders, and he played a role in the spinoff
of diversity training from sensitivity training. His years of advising
African-American businesspeople formed the basis of his guide, from
2000, “Cracking the Corporate Code: The Revealing Success Stories of 32 African-American Executives.”
In her provocative history “Race Experts,”
from 2002, the scholar Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn examines Cobbs’s career as
part of the larger story of how “racial etiquette” and sensitivity
training “hijacked” and banalized civil-rights discourse. Quinn
persuasively maintains that “sensitivity itself is an inadequate and
cynical substitution for civility and democracy—both of which presuppose
some form of equal treatment and universal standard of conduct,” and
neither of which, of course, the U.S. has ever achieved.
This is how science – the actual process – not the Fauci version – should be working.
I have repeatedly stated that I am seeing much much more vaccinated positives than one would ever have expected. As I have stated, they seem to be much sicker (though not critically so) and they tend to happen in clusters. For the past two months, this has stuck out from the dominant media narrative. I have never had to fight the cognitive dissonance between the media and my own eyeballs in my life.
I belong to a large non-public alumni group of my residency program that has literally thousands of IM docs all over America. The first thing a scientist does is to confirm that your observations are general or something you are just seeing. It was quickly obvious from that group that I was far from alone despite the “minimal breakthrough cases” media narrative.
So, then you do everything you can to hypothesize reasons why you are seeing what you are. I have been a physician for 30 years and that experience plays a huge role as well. Having this gigantic number of breakthrough cases just simply does not happen. I continue to see more than half the cases in vaccinated patients and so do many others. UNHEARD OF IN VACCINES BEFORE NOW.
Part of hypothesizing why is looking to the literature for evidence. Seldom is this found in RCT at this stage. Case reports and series like this paper are critical. They are seeing the same breakthrough ratio. And they have done a lot more viral research than you can. This is a gold mine for my own questions.
Is there anything in the paper that could possibly explain what I am seeing. Lots of times, it is not in the headline part but in all the test results and discussion. And yes, there is a very important finding deep in the results.
Why would clustering and sicker patients be so much more common in the breakthrough patients – there must be a reason for that?
If you look at the brief discussion of cT or cycle threshold you will see that the vaccinated patients have a SIGNIFICANTLY lower cT than the unvaccinated. That is the way the PCR test works. It basically means the vaccinated have a much higher amount of viral active particles than the unvaccinated. That would account for the breakthroughs I and my colleagues are seeing being a bit more ill. And it would explain the clustering. THe vaccinated breakthroughs have much higher viral load so they are much more contagious and the higher viral load makes them more symptomatic.
So we now have a suggestion and strong evidence that the vaccinated population may be spreading much more virus than the unvaccinated. I would say that is a critical public health issue and must be further researched immediately.
This Certainly needs much more work. THis is not confirmatory of any conclusions. But it is consistent with observation on the ground – unlike most of what the media has been spewing to the American people. But this is how science works. This paper is about the gamma variant but a conference yesterday with experts discussed that similar findings were being found in delta and lambda. The suggestion in this paper is now on the front of my mind. I am even now thinking of ways to confirm or falsify these conclusions going forward. This is science.
Another issue. The writers make the point that the breakthrough rate is extremely divergent from the expected rate. The difference is this paper documents what is happening in REAL LIFE. So much of what we are hearing on our media about vaccine efficacy is research being done in vitro. It is presented as gospel truth. I just want to scream.
*****
And this type of wide variation is to be expected in the real world – that is the way it goes. And another very severe confounding issue is the absolute gigantic chasm of numbers between these two data sets. I am in a very small area with a very small N. LA is gigantic. So theoretically, the LA numbers would have a much higher statistical power. However, there are an infinite number of confounding variables that must be taken into account in a side to side comparison. I have chills when I hear the media making all these god-like pronouncements about this place or the other. It is just very difficult to compare apples to oranges and they really should not be making blanket statements about every locality based on numbers coming from just one. This habit has been yet another bad side effect of our sterilization of the local health departments and the dependence on one centralized center.
The other issue left off your calculations is the number of people who are very ill and suffering at home. This is not a small number. I know this for a fact because there are about 10 patients on our call list that are COVID positive and very sick and we call them twice daily. They refuse to be in the hospital, largely for financial reasons. That is almost certainly an issue in LA as well.
Another possible confounding issue is if there is a much larger group of younger people who are not nearly as likely to be admitted whether vaccinated or not in either LA or here. The demographics and the attitudes of different age groups vary widely between different parts of the country.
The vaccine efficacy of 61% in my area is much closer to what is being experienced in Israel right now for what it is worth.
And thank you for the efforts to do these numbers – you should be a medical student.
One other little pearl to think about. ANYTIME anyone in medicine reports a 100% rate of anything – assume they are lying until proven otherwise. I would assume that to be the case in every field. There is no such thing as perfection.
When the LA report came out last week that their hospital admissions were 399 and all 399 were unvaccinated, I knew right off the bat that they were lying. That just does not happen in medicine. These people need to find better liars. For instance, if they had said 356 were unvaccinated, which is still a respectable number, I would not have raised an eyebrow. But they went for the gold, and earned hundreds of hilarious comments in my doctor’s forum that evening. The average physician in America who is hip deep into these tragedies is really getting tired of all the shenanigans.
*****
For several weeks – dating back to mid May – I was seeing groups of fully vaccinated patients becoming positive – but asymptomatic. Most of these situations arose because one member of the family or group was found to be positive because of foreign travel – or having surgery or whatever.
As this became more and more common – I began to be very concerned about what the future may hold. And the Health Department and CDC were just ambivalent.
The guidance of the local health department was to ignore this – “they are vaccinated – there is no way they can spread, etc.”. Just as the CDC guidance was telling them to do. I do not much like to have armed nuclear warheads sitting around, and I am very persistent – so I ordered the contact tracing on my own – every close family member or close contact was checked. And to my absolute horror – large clusters of them were positive. But at that time, they were asymptomatic- almost every single one. I have been dutifully reporting these numbers to Yves and Lambert for weeks.
Then about a month ago – something changed. People were then starting to become ill – and come to clinical attention that way. There were no longer just the asymptomatic patients. And again – on my own – ordered the contact tracing – and found the same thing. Multiple vaccinated family members positive. Multiple bridge group members positive. Multiple church members positive, etc etc. And lately – socials around the July 4th weekend were also clustered. At that point in time – there was no one sick enough to be in the hospital. But the vaccinated positives were clearly more ill than the unvaccinated positives. Heavier coughs, more SOB, more febrile. This included even the younger ones among them. But again – no one sick enough to be hospitalized.
And then – this week – we have had a seismic shift. We have admitted multiple very ill vaccinated patients – two of which were critically ill. At the same time – we are admitting unvaccinated patients as well. Some of them too are now very ill. We have had deaths this week – all of those patients were unvaccinated. But I am not holding my breath – we now have two critically ill vaccinated patients that I am not sure are going to make it. I do not have the best handle on these situations this week because I am in quarantine. But right at this minute – we have more COVID patients in the hospital since January – and it is right at 50/50 vaccinated/unvaccinated – and I would say they are equally ill.
It has been fascinating to watch this very orderly step up in severity over time. And then this week the bottom dropped out. And I live in a very vaccinated county – the paper reported this AM a 72% vaccination rate. The only stragglers were the 12-18 group which is below 50. The “herd immunity” concept is certainly not working here. And the local medical folks are just horrified that this is getting this bad after working so hard for this really good vaccination rate. It is reminding me greatly of the ramp up we had last summer – it is almost the same in every way – except it got much worse much quicker. I am hoping it will burn out – but not looking like that so far.
I will share something else. I have a very small limited patient size – I am in a small town. But I am very attentive to media reports of numbers from other locations. Big cities and big sample sizes give perspective. When I heard last weekend that there were ZERO vaccinated patients in the hospitals in LA – I grew immediately concerned – because that was not our experience at all – It is basically a WHAT HAVE WE DONE WRONG MOMENT….So I called three of my old students who are now on the front lines in the LA area – to the one – the response was “I have not a clue what they are talking about – that is just not true…”. Among the three of them the averages they were seeing were about 75% – 85% unvaccinated in the hospital – and all had had very ill vaccinated patients. I did not feel so bad then. But My God, the media cannot be trusted with a single god-damn thing. I have never seen such a bunch of liars in my lifetime. It is a real tragedy – when we need them the most they are doing propaganda. And do not even get me started on the Health Dept people who are misleading the population like this.
usefulidiots | The press is a crucial part of democracy, checking on the government
and alerting the public to what’s going on. The water supply has been
poisoned––that's the kind of thing we depend on the fourth estate to
report about.
But where have they been? The national press was
universally late in reporting on the Flint Water crisis, and quickly
dropped the corruption, greed, and mismanagement that poisoned Flint's
water and people. But the story continues, though you'd never know it
from mainstream media. So is the crisis over?
Jordan Chariton and Jenn Dize of Status Coup say no. In their recent article,
they uncover mounds of corruption, finding the government guilty of a
huge coverup with cleared text messages, piles of thrown away phones,
and then-Governor Rick Snyder telling his staff: “Don’t put anything in
writing because emails are cannons for our enemies.”
They lay out a
real case against Snyder for misconduct, willful neglect of duty, and
even involuntary manslaughter. But today, he’s facing penalties
equivalent to a parking ticket and a potential of up to one year in
prison. And no one else is talking about it.
BAR | Through the lens of racial fortuity, Bell rejects the liberal view of
history as one of racial progress, favoring instead a cyclical view of
history in which Black people experience progress through interest
convergence and setbacks under racial sacrifice. For example, Bell
argues that the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil War Amendments
to the U.S. Constitution are instances of interest convergence. In the
first case, ending slavery was a means to the end of “saving the union”;
in the second case, the amendments helped the Republicans maintain
control of Congress. However, these instances of interest convergence
were followed by two instances of racial sacrifice: the Tilden-Hayes
compromise, which ended Reconstruction, and the disenfranchisement of
Black voters in the South, which prevented Black voters from influencing
elections in those states.
For Bell, the most important example of interest convergence is the Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which ruled that racial segregation is unconstitutional. Bell originally argued this in his 1980 paper “Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma,”
where he posited that the Court’s decision resulted not from a moral
concern about Black well-being under Jim Crow regimes but from three
international and domestic interests. Internationally, the U.S. needed
to end segregation because it embarrassed the country on the world stage
and undermined Cold War imperatives. Bell’s thesis was later
corroborated by historian Mary Dudziak, who demonstrated that
the Supreme Court wanted to end segregation because the Soviet Union
and Third World anticolonial movements were using Jim Crow to criticize
Amerika. Domestically, the U.S. needed to end segregation because it
needed to gain Black support for Cold War foreign policy and because
segregation was viewed as a barrier to industrialization in the South.
Thus, Bell’s materialism inspires his theory of racial fortuity,
which interprets even the most celebrated events of Amerikan racial
history as cynical decisions designed to advance capitalists and
imperialist ends.
“The U.S. needed to end segregation because it embarrassed the country on the world stage and undermined Cold War imperatives.”
The second theme in Bell’s CRT is realism, which provides the basis for his theory of racial realism.
Bell’s realism begins with an emphasis on the empirical realities of
Black people in Amerika. On this view, CRT politics beings with
historical and sociological descriptions about what is rather than with idealistic hopes about what might be.
But for Bell, when we examine the patterns of racial fortuity in
Amerikan history, we should reach the obvious conclusion: there is no
empirical reason to believe that racism and white supremacy will ever
come to an end in Amerika. In other words, U.S. history suggests that racism is permanent and racial equality is impossible.
To be sure, Bell does not mean that racism is an ahistorical or eternal
phenomenon; rather, he says that nothing in Amerikan history would make
any reasonable person believe that racism will end in the U.S.
Bell has gotten a lot of heat from critics who claim that racial
realism leads to inaction, pessimism, and fatalism. But Bell argues that
the problem is not the struggle but the aim of the struggle. Too much
energy and too many resources, Bell writes, have been wasted chasing the
unrealistic goal of racial equality. But that just means that the
struggle should aim for something else. As Bell writes in his famous
1992 essay “Racial Realism,”
“Racial Realism…requires us to acknowledge the permanence of our
subordinate status. That acknowledgement enables us to avoid despair,
and frees us to imagine and implement racial strategies that can bring
fulfillment and even triumph.” In his follow-up book Afrolantica Legacies,
Bell lays out seven “rules of racial preservation,” guidelines designed
to help Black people survive and even thrive in a perpetually white
supremacist empire.
Thus, Bell’s realism inspires his theory of racial realism, which
views Amerikan society as permanently racist and which advocates
survival strategies as a more effective and realistic alternative to
traditional civil rights calls for racial equality.
The third theme in Bell’s CRT is anticolonialism, which provides the basis for his critique of the Black middle class. In Afrolantica Legacies, Bell draws upon Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America, which argues that the elite of the 1960s were implementing a program of “domestic neocolonialism.”
According to Allen, the white Amerikan elite were happy to integrate
politically convective middle class Blacks into the power structure
because it would protect the status quo from accusations of racism while
giving those same middle class Blacks a stake in the system. By
becoming beneficiaries of the Amerikan capitalist empire, Black middle
class citizens were increasingly likely to identify with and defend it.
“Belll views Amerikan society as permanently racist and
which advocates survival strategies as a more effective and realistic
alternative to traditional civil rights calls for racial equality.“
Following Allen, Bell explains neocolonialism and the class role the
Black bourgeoisie plays in a neocolonial regime: “The colonizing
countries maintained their control by establishing class divisions
within the ranks of the indigenous peoples. A few able (and safe)
individuals were permitted to move up in the ranks where they served as
symbols of what was possible for the subordinated masses. In this, and
less enviable ways, these individuals provide a legitimacy to the
colonial rule that it clearly did not deserve.”
Bell levels a class critique against the Black bourgeoisie, whom he
sees as having led Black political protest down the wrong path time and
time again. He criticizes NAACP
lawyers for advancing the organization’s demand for integrated schools
at the expense of their constituents' demands for better Black schools.
He condemns high-profile conservative Black politicians and judges, such as Clarence Thomas, referring to them as “overseers.”
antiwar | Has the government become any more humane, any more respectful of the rights
of the citizenry?
Has it become any more transparent or willing to abide by the rule of law?
Has it become any more truthful about its activities? Has it become any more
cognizant of its appointed role as a guardian of our rights?
Or has the government simply hunkered down and hidden its nefarious acts and
dastardly experiments under layers of secrecy, legalism and obfuscations? Has
it not become wilier, more slippery, more difficult to pin down?
Having mastered the Orwellian art of Doublespeak and followed the Huxleyan
blueprint for distraction and diversion, are we not dealing with a government
that is simply craftier and more conniving that it used to be?
In Guatemala, prisoners and patients at a mental hospital were infected with
syphilis, “apparently to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually
transmitted disease.” In Uganda, U.S.-funded doctors “failed
to give the AIDS drug AZT to all the HIV-infected pregnant women in a study…
even though it would have protected their newborns.” Meanwhile, in Nigeria,
children with meningitis were used to test an antibiotic named Trovan. Eleven
children died and many others were left disabled.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The government insisted that the gases released into the subways by the DHS
were nontoxic and did not pose a health risk. It’s in our best interests, they
said, to understand how quickly a chemical or biological terrorist attack might
spread. And look how cool the technology is – said the government cheerleaders – that
scientists can use something called DNATrax
to track the movement of microscopic substances in air and food. (Imagine the
kinds of surveillance
that could be carried out by the government using trackable
airborne microscopic substances you breathe in or ingest.)
In 1953, government operatives staged
“mock” anthrax attacks on St. Louis, Minneapolis, and Winnipeg using generators
placed on top of cars. Local governments were reportedly told that “‘invisible
smokescreen[s]’ were being deployed to mask the city on enemy radar.” Later
experiments covered territory as wide-ranging as Ohio to Texas and Michigan
to Kansas.
And this is the same government that has taken every bit of technology sold
to us as being in our best interests – GPS devices, surveillance, nonlethal weapons,
etc. – and used it against us, to track, control and trap us.
So, no, I don’t think the government’s ethics have changed much over the years.
It’s just taken its nefarious programs undercover.
The question remains: why is the government doing this? The answer is always
the same: money, power and total domination.
It’s the same answer no matter which totalitarian regime is in power.
The mindset driving these programs has, appropriately, been likened
to that of Nazi doctors experimenting on Jews. As the Holocaust Museum recounts,
Nazi physicians “conducted painful and often deadly experiments on thousands
of concentration camp prisoners without their consent.”
The Nazi’s unethical
experiments ran the gamut from freezing experiments using prisoners to find
an effective treatment for hypothermia, tests to determine the maximum altitude
for parachuting out of a plane, injecting prisoners with malaria, typhus, tuberculosis,
typhoid fever, yellow fever, and infectious hepatitis, exposing prisoners to
phosgene and mustard gas, and mass sterilization experiments.
The horrors being meted out against the American people can be traced back,
in a direct line, to the horrors meted out in Nazi laboratories. In fact, following
the second World War, the US government recruited many of Hitler’s employees,
adopted his protocols, embraced his mindset about law and order and experimentation,
and implemented his tactics in incremental steps.
undark | Walter Freeman was itching for a shortcut.
Since the 1930s, the Washington, D.C. neurologist had been drilling
through the skulls of psychiatric patients to scoop out brain chunks in
the hopes of calming their mental torment. But Freeman decided he wanted
something simpler than a bone drill — he wanted a rod-like implement
that could pass directly through the eye socket to penetrate the brain.
He’d then swirl the rod around to scramble the patient’s frontal lobes,
the brain regions that control higher-level thinking and judgment.
Rummaging in his kitchen drawer, Freeman found the perfect tool: a
sharp pick of the sort used to shear ice from large blocks. He knew his
close colleague, surgeon James Watts, wouldn’t sanction his new
approach, so he closed the office door and did his “ice-pick lobotomies”
— more formally, transorbital lobotomies — without Watts’ knowledge.
Though the amoral scientist has been a familiar trope since Victor
Frankenstein, we seldom consider what sets these technicians on the path
to iniquity. Journalist Sam Kean’s “The Icepick Surgeon: Murder, Fraud, Sabotage, Piracy, and Other Dastardly Deeds Perpetrated in the Name of Science,”
helps fill that void, describing how dozens of promising scientists
broke bad throughout history — and arguing that the better we understand
their moral decay, the more prepared we’ll be to quash the next
Freeman. “Understanding what good and evil look like in science — and
the path from one to the other — is more vital than ever,” Kean writes.
“Science has its own sins to answer for.”
Expert at spinning historical science yarns — his last book, “The Bastard Brigade,”
was about the failed Nazi atom bomb — Kean presents a scientific
rogues’ gallery that’s both entertaining and chilling. Naturalist
William Dampier, who influenced Charles Darwin’s work, resorted to
piracy to fund his fieldwork in the 17th century. He joined a band of
buccaneers that seized gems, scads of valuable silk, and stocks of
perfume in raids throughout Central and South America.
A century later, celebrated Scottish surgeon John Hunter worked with
grave robbers to obtain bodies so he could study human anatomy. His
colleagues emulated his approach, and the pipeline from corpse-snatchers
to anatomists continued for decades. The practice was tacitly accepted
because it could yield valuable insights — Hunter discovered the tear
ducts and the olfactory nerve, among other things — but the human toll
was horrifying nonetheless. At public hangings, so-called sack-‘em-up
men “sometimes even yanked people off the gibbet who weren’t quite
dead yet,” Kean writes. “They’d merely passed out from lack of air —
only to pop awake later on the dissection table.”
In a way, though, the gruesome endpoints Kean describes — the
scrambled brains, the ransacked ships, the deathbeds — are the least
interesting part of his story. They mostly confirm philosopher Simone
Weil’s impression that real-world evil is “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.”
What’s more compelling is Kean’s take on how the scientists justified
their actions. They pushed aside thoughts of collateral damage — the
lives they disrespected and damaged — by rationalizing that their
contributions outweighed any harm they were doing. Freeman’s work at an
early 20th-century psychiatric asylum convinced him of the unalloyed
good of calming agitated patients via lobotomy. “The ward could be
brightened when curtains and flowerpots were no longer in danger of
being used as weapons,” Freeman observed.
kctv5 | On Thursday, the FBI confirmed investigators returned to a Grain
Valley home off Buckner Tarsney Road where officers discovered the
remains of 32-year-old Kensie Renee Aubry last week.
According
to court records a separate child sex crimes investigation into the
property owner, Michael Hendricks, and his girlfriend Maggie Ybarra
brought investigators to the property to search for a body last week.
Both Hendricks and Ybarra are accused of molesting a teen girl. During
that investigation, the teen told investigators she believed a woman’s
body could be found on Hendricks’ property because she was shown photos.
She says they described how the woman was killed.
Investigators
have not said what they were searching for Thursday or why they returned
this week. During their search at the property last Wednesday, they
discovered Aubry’s remains. She was reported missing in October of last
year from Independence, Mo. “It’s disturbing to know all that was
happening right behind us,” one neighbor said. “We’ve had kids out here
swimming and playing in the pool.”
kansascity | It seemed more like the plot of a horror movie than a true account of a night at a Kansas City-area bar.
Two
sisters claimed in a lawsuit that bouncers refused to let them leave,
battered them and handcuffed them to a wall — all because the bouncers
wrongly thought the women had used a counterfeit $50 bill.
Nick
Hinrichs, an attorney representing the women, told The Star on Tuesday
that his clients had reached a $1 million settlement against the
bouncers and the owner of the bar. Missouri Lawyers Weekly first reported on the settlement.
Examiner | Grain Valley police don’t suspect foul play but aren’t ruling it out
yet in the death of an Oak Grove woman whose body was found Saturday in
Grain Valley.
Amber Jo Bradley-Couch, 28, of Oak Grove was found
dead Saturday in Grain Valley by a man out walking his dog about 4:35
p.m. She had been missing since Jan. 19 and had been last seen at the
Whiskey Tango bar in Grain Valley.
She was not reported missing
until Feb. 6. It was first reported by police that her 1997 green
two-door Chevrolet Cavalier was found in late February in Blue Springs,
but Grain Valley Police Chief Aaron Ambrose said that car was not
related to the incident.
Ambrose said Bradley-Couch was found not far from Whiskey Tango and it didn’t appear that foul play was involved.
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/crime/article213899559.html#storylink=cpy
thedrive | The Air Force Research Laboratory at Kirtland Air Force Base has
released a new analysis of the Department of Defense’s investments into directed energy technologies,
or DE. The report, titled “Directed Energy Futures 2060,” makes
predictions about what the state of DE weapons and applications will be
40 years from now and offers a range of scenarios in which the United
States might find itself either leading the field in DE or lagging
behind peer-state adversaries. In examining the current state of the art
of this relatively new class of weapons, the authors claim that the
world has reached a “tipping point” in which directed energy is now
critical to successful military operations.
One of the document’s most eyebrow-raising predictions is that a “force field” could be created by “a sufficiently large fleet or constellation of high-altitude DEW systems”
that could provide a "missile defense umbrella, as part of a layered
defense system, if such concepts prove affordable and necessary.” The
report cites several existing examples of what it calls “force fields,”
including the Active Denial System, or “pain ray,” as well as non-kinetic counter-drone systems, and potentially counter-missile systems, that use high-power microwaves to disable or destroy
their targets. Most intriguingly, the press release claims that “the
concept of a DE weapon creating a localized force field may be just on
the horizon.”
In a press release accompanying the document, AFRL’s Directed
Energy Deputy Chief Scientist Jeremy Murray-Krezan adds that current
directed energy technology is “not quite Star Wars," but adds that the
AFRL is "getting close.” The document describes advances occurring both
in the private sector and the Department of Defense that are driving the
size and weight of DE systems down while increasing power, making the
kinds of weapons dreamed about in science fiction seem more like
reality. The authors describe the concept in more detail:
The “holy grail” from a military
utility perspective is a DE weapon system effective enough, favorable
from a SWAP perspective, and affordable enough to provide a
nuclear/missile umbrella. Although a concept often associated with
science fiction, in fact ground and ship-based DE defense systems
effectively act like point-localized force fields against small and
relatively soft targets today. Airborne and space-based DE platforms
could achieve a greater area defense and multipoint defenses, for a
broader coverage missile umbrella.
“By 2060 we can predict that DE systems will become more
effective, and this idea of a force field includes methods to destroy
other threats too,” Murray-Krezan said in the press release. “Eventually
there may be potential to achieve the penultimate goal of a Nuclear or
ballistic missile umbrella. It’s fun to think about what that might be
in 2060, but we don't want to speculate too much.”
quora | The
first thing to realize is why the military needs to care about UFOs in
the first place. It’s not because they have a bunch of Trekkies who to
go Star Wars/Trek cons wearing Chewbacca suits. Nope. The reason is
because of, Identification, friend or foe, that is supposed to tell us if an
aircraft is friendly or not. If an aircraft-like object seems to be
approaching a ship or some military asset and it doesn’t respond to IFF
and it’s not transmitting FAA-required ADS-B information and it’s not
anything we can quickly identify, then it’s automatically going to have a
good chance of ending up an a UAP bin, unidentified aerial phenomenon.
In other words, these could be artifacts that showed up, perhaps on
radar, that we didn’t bother worry much about since they disappeared
anyway. If you’ve ever taken a lot of data (and the US military has a
lot of data-gathering capability) you’d probably realize that this sort
of thing is to be inherently expected just because it’s needed for the
safety of civilian aircraft. From this perspective, the Pentagon saying
there are UAPs is a closer to a police officer on the side of a freeway
saying he doesn’t know the make and model of all the cars driving down a
busy highway at 70 MPH than them saying there are little green men in
saucers flying abducting people.
The
next thing I want to discuss is that the videos I saw after coming here
to Quora to research the UFO headlines seem like the regular nothing
burgers that have come from the UFO crowd for 50 years, just from a
military source. Stuff looking like a kid’s drone. Perhaps a regular
airplane, bird, or regular foreign aircraft without its transponder on.
And these days many groups are experimenting with large-battery
quadcopters. Their accelerations would indeed be higher than normal and
not what is expected. Then there are the supersonic startups. See, e.g., Meet Boom XB-1, The First Independently Developed Supersonic Aircraft Four
years after Boom revealed its plan to develop a new supersonic
aircraft, the Colorado-based aviation company introduces its first
demonstrator, XB-1.
Importantly,
the “pentagon” videos are grainy and in black and white. It is well
understood that fantastic claims should be backed by fantastically solid
evidence. But these were taken in darkness, grainy, etc. Usual crap,
but from an authoritative source. Keep in mind they military has some of
the best optical equipment that exists. Not 144x144. Not 640x480. Not
1080p. Not 4k. More like 2+ gigapixel resolution cameras. And that news
came out back in 2009:
Imagine what they have now. But, they give us grainy 640x480 BW!?! Hmmm.
Another
point is that there are only so many frequencies in the electromagnetic
spectrum. And, there are only so many exotic particles. Chances are,
despite the advanced nature of alien communications, they would probably
want to use something efficient, like radio waves, pulsed optical, etc.
These are things we would be able to pick up. Perhaps we wouldn’t be
able to decrypt them, but that’s another question. So, why would they
release grainy videos if they really have smoking gun recordings of
aliens speaking to each other or evidence of EM broadcasts? Either you
are going to release the smoking gun or you are not and feel the public
should not know. But, in the latter case why would you release anything
at all since it will just get curious cats asking questions like this
one here that I am answering about what you are trying to cover up? You
wouldn’t.
Another
point, getting back to IFF, if you review my post (sorry it is on a
site that if I give the url here the answer will get deleted due to it
allegedly being a spam answer) about the early days of the nuclear age,
and, more specifically, the ICBM age, you’ll see that one clear goal in
the 60s was total information awareness, especially with regards to
aircraft and smaller missiles above a certain altitude. That means
tracking almost all aircraft all the time.
You can already see this for most aircraft just by going to Real-Time Flight Tracker Map,
but I am saying the military has had that capability for everything
that is big enough to carry an adult human.
The question indirectly
comes up when people debate the benefit of needing aircraft like the
F-35 when we have such great ground to air missiles. (My answer here
says we need humans to handle the friend or foe question, but I am not
sure this is true.) Seeing all the kerfuffle over the alleged pentagon
UFOs, how is it that people talking about UAPs seem to have forgotten
about things related to the UAP/IFF problem, including mutually assured
destruction, nuclear deterrence, Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative
(SDI, aka “Star Wars”), the Cuban missile crisis, Norad tracking Santa,
that many countries by now have or had nuclear weapons (see color
below)?
nationalinterest | The Pentagon is massively fast-tracking its
Next-Generation Interceptor program to deploy a missile defense
technology capable of tracking and destroying a new sphere of enemy
threats to include high-speed, precision-guided intercontinental
ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and hypersonic weapons potentially traveling
through space.
Mobile ICBM launchers, nuclear weapons
traveling at hypersonic speeds, multiple precision-guided re-entry
vehicles and multiple missiles attack at once, each with several
separating warheads are all very serious threats the Missile Defense
Agency (MDA) and industry are working quickly to counter through a
series of innovations, science and technology efforts, new weapons
development such as a Next-Generation Interceptor (NGI) initiative aimed
at deploying a new missile defense weapon by the end of the decade.
Intended to introduce paradigm-changing technologies, the emerging
NGI is being engineered to destroy multiple ICBMs at one time while also
distinguishing actual ICBMs from debris, decoys or enemy
countermeasures. This requires a new measure of seeker discernment able
to discriminate actual threats from decoys or track multiple threats at
once.
The initial thinking was that the new NGI will emerge by the end
of the decade, and it now appears the MDA is working with a
Raytheon-Northrop Grumman NGI team to see if the timeframe can be accelerated and possibly
be ready by as early as 2028. Northrop Grumman and Raytheon Missiles
& Defense are slated to provide the interceptor booster, kill
vehicle, ground systems, fire control and engagement coordination for
the country’s Ground Midcourse Defense (GMD) system.
Missile Defense Agency Director Vice Adm. Jon Hill said the
Pentagon’s number one requirement with the NGI is “speed and schedule,”
adding “we’ll be testing a little bit earlier.”
While a lot of detail about the technological configuration and
components of the emerging NGI are likely not available for security
reasons, the Pentagon’s request to industry did mention the possibility
of engineering a single interceptor able to carry multiple kill
vehicles.
“It is a really complex threat set and there is a lot of complex technology coming forward,” Hill said.
Northrop Grumman has partnered with Raytheon on an NGI development program to optimize innovations and technical progress from
each company through programs such as Northrop’s Ground Based Strategic
Deterrent ICBM and Raytheon’s Standard Missile-3 Block IIA interceptor,
both of which harness breakthrough technologies in the areas of sensing
discrimination, targeting precision, range and functional reliability.
spectatorworld | A more concerning tactic has been the application of negative
pressure to achieve social conformity. The vaccine-resistant have been
called ‘Covidiots’, ‘granny killers’ and, lately, ‘refuseniks’. Tony
Blair said recently that it was ‘time to distinguish’ between the
vaccinated and the unvaccinated: substitute race or another protected
characteristic and this is an ugly look. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz
described ultra-Orthodox Jews who do not follow the state’s vaccination
rules as ‘COVID insurgents’ and ‘terrorists’ in starkly obvious
bio-political language.
The implications are obvious: the vaccinated are clean and safe; the
unvaccinated are unclean, unsafe, worthy of ridicule and exclusion. The
writer Nick Cohen predicts a period of ‘class and racial strife’ and
observes ‘it is only a matter of time before we turn on the
unvaccinated’. Such a narrative of dehumanization is a serious threat to
weigh against encouraging vaccines and adherence to lockdowns.
‘Behavioral psychologists focus on what you can get people to do, on
short-term issues of behavior, not long-term issues of trust,’ says Dr
Jackie Cassell. In the haste to bring a speedy resolution to a pandemic,
to fast forward to a happy ending, what might happen to long-term
confidence in public health messaging, including future vaccination
programs? Emergency recourse to oversimplified pressure might not be the
best solution for the unsure, who may be more likely to benefit from an
in-depth conversation with a healthcare provider than from a cash
prize.
Fear has created a morality play where heavy-handed get-the-shot
tactics are privileged over the development of long-term trust. While
the current pandemic may necessitate a quick-fix approach, the long-term
objectives of improving vaccine confidence and overall trust in medical
science must not be lost. More threatening still, dehumanizing tactics
to deter anti-vax sentiment will divide us.
Some will rush, arms outstretched and sleeves rolled up, toward
syringes and sweets. Some will hang back, deterred by an eerily hard
sell. In the desperate desire to end the Horrible Story of the COVID-19
Pandemic, are we rushing toward a conclusion without being certain of
our priorities?
kunstler | America is on a bad trip. The country has lost its way
psychologically. Two things will be required to bring it out of the
fugue state it tripped into five years ago: some significant shocks to
the system and the passage of time. Those shocks are in the offing and
the “Joe Biden” regime — meaning Barack Obama and his wing-people who
run things — are looking more and more desperate as auguries manifest.
Their current tactical hustle is to amp up paranoia over the receding
Covid-19 episode. It looks like an attempt to smokescreen the emerging
evidence of massive and widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, and
the growing eagerness of a few other states besides Arizona to mount
audits of what went on last November 3rd. The supposed surge in new
Covid cases is really just a tiny blip, considering it comes off a
baseline of close to zero cases in many places. 11,140 so far have died
from Covid vaccinations, according to the Vaccine Adverse Event
Reporting System (VAERS). Last week 2,092 deaths from vaccinations were
added versus 1,918 deaths from the virus. Countries with the highest
vaccination rates are showing the most new Covid cases.
Yet, it’s looking like the idea is to set up the unvaxed for blame as
“Joe Biden’s” legitimacy dissolves and the country finds itself in a
political crisis because there’s nothing in the constitution that
provides for removing a president elected fraudulently, even if the
nation is crumbling around him. Vaccine disinformation is killing
people, Mr. “B” warned last week. CBS 60-Minutes led its Sunday
night show with more Covid scare stories. The message is everywhere
that you must get vaxed-up, and, if you don’t, there may be severe
penalties. Those likely to opt out of a vax are exactly those people who
distrust what the government tells them, meaning probably people who
did not vote for the current occupant of the White House. As it happens,
though, the number of people who distrust government is expanding even
beyond that demographic.
The regime must know that evidence of massive voting fraud and the
loss of political legitimacy will coincide with a financial train wreck
that looks to be chugging out of the station this very morning with all
asset indexes tanking as I write. There are even fresh reports of an
asteroid heading directly towards Washington DC this week. (So said
Devin Nunes, ranking member on the House Intel Committee, over the
weekend.) The asteroid is the long-rumored return from deep space of
Special Prosecutor John Durham with some interesting announcements
concerning the most poisonous narrative of this era: the RussiaGate
collusion hoax finally revealed as a seditious conspiracy by high
government officials in the Department of Justice and the Intel
agencies. I wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Obama and his wing-people
turned up in that mix. Won’t that be a nice accessory to “Joe Biden’s”
presidential flame-out? And won’t that be just the ripe moment for China
to move against Taiwan? Lawkes a’mighty… feets don’t desert me now!
The turmoil could get pretty hairy by summer’s end. Money will be
flooding the system with the predictable loss of money’s legitimacy, at
the same time that a massive debt repudiation gets under way.
Hyperinflation and debt default at the same time? Sounds improbable, I
know, since the former means too much money and the latter means money
is disappearing like crazy. What it really means is that everything gets
repriced rapidly and violently, and not necessarily in US dollars.
Banks will not like this one teensy weensy bit.
AL | Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that
all but one of her COVID patients in Alabama did not receive the
vaccine. The vaccinated patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen
and is expected to fully recover. Some of the others are dying.
“I’m
admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very serious COVID
infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview Medical Center in
Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post Sunday.
“One of the last things they do before they’re intubated is beg me for
the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell them that I’m sorry, but it’s
too late.”
Three COVID-19 vaccines
have been widely available in Alabama for months now, yet the state is
last in the nation in vaccination rate, with only 33.7 percent of the
population fully vaccinated. COVID-19 case numbers and hospitalizations are surging yet again due to the more contagious Delta variant of the virus and Alabama’s low vaccination rate.
For
the first year and a half of the pandemic, Cobia and hundreds of other
Alabama physicians caring for critically ill COVID-19 patients worked
themselves to the bone trying to save as many as possible.
“Back in 2020 and early 2021, when the vaccine wasn’t available, it was just tragedy after tragedy after tragedy,” Cobia told AL.com this week. “You know, so many people that did all the right things, and yet still came in, and were critically ill and died.”
“A
few days later when I call time of death,” continued Cobia on Facebook,
“I hug their family members and I tell them the best way to honor their
loved one is to go get vaccinated and encourage everyone they know to
do the same.”
“They cry. And they
tell me they didn’t know. They thought it was a hoax. They thought it
was political. They thought because they had a certain blood type or a
certain skin color they wouldn’t get as sick. They thought it was ‘just
the flu’. But they were wrong. And they wish they could go back. But
they can’t. So they thank me and they go get the vaccine. And I go back
to my office, write their death note, and say a small prayer that this
loss will save more lives.”
More
than 11,400 Alabamians have died of COVID so far, but midway through
2021, caring for COVID patients is a different story than it was in the
beginning. Cobia said it’s different mentally and emotionally to care
for someone who could have prevented their disease but chose not to.
townhall | By a vote of 216 to 207 Tuesday evening, Democrats in the House of
Representatives blocked consideration of a bill that would require the
Director of National Intelligence to declassify information related to
the origins of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, specifically information
about any role the Wuhan Institute of Virology may have played in the
pandemic's outbreak.
— House Rules Republicans (@RulesReps) July 20, 2021
The COVID-19
Origin Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate by Josh Hawley (R-MO) and
Mike Braun (R-IN) and passed unanimously in May.
Rep. Michael
Burgess (R-TX) brought the COVID-19 Origin Act to the House floor for
consideration with Reps. Brad Wenstrup (R-OH) and Darin LaHood (R-IL)
explaining its importance shortly before Democrats voted down the
measure Tuesday night.
"The best disinfectant is sunlight and that's what we can provide today," Wenstrup explained
of the COVID-19 Origin Act. "The bill first establishes that we must
identify the precise origins of COVID-19 because it is critical for
preventing a similar pandemic in the future."
"I cannot stress
enough that this bill is not controversial by any means," Wenstrup
continued. "In fact, it passed the Senate in May with unanimous consent —
not one senator objected. Not Senators Ted Cruz or Rand Paul, not
Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. If those four members can get on
board with this bill, should not we be able to do the same?"
caitlinjohnstone | The weirdest thing about the Biden administration tasking itself
with the censorship of “disinformation” on social media is that the
United States is the hub of a globe-spanning empire that is built upon a
foundation of disinformation, maintained by disinformation, and
facilitated by disinformation.
If the propaganda engine of the US-centralized empire
ceased actively deceiving the public about the world, it would collapse
immediately. There would be mass unrest at home and abroad, status quo
politics would be abandoned, alliances and coalitions would crumble,
leaders official and unofficial would be ousted, and US unipolar
hegemony would end.
The
only thing keeping this from happening is the vast amounts of wealth
and energy which are poured into continuously deceiving the people of
America and its allies about what’s really going on in their nations and
political systems, and in the world as a whole.
Getting
people believing they live in separate, sovereign nations which
function independently from one another, instead of member states within
a single undeclared empire which moves as one unit on the international
stage.
Getting
people believing they control the fate of their nation via the
democratic process, when in reality all large-scale politics are
scripted puppet shows controlled by a plutocratic class who owns both
the politicians and the media outlets which report on them.
Getting
people believing they are part of a virtuous rules-based international
order which opposes totalitarian regimes to spread freedom and
democracy, instead of a tyrannical empire that works to destroy any
nation which disobeys its dictates.
And above all, manufacturing the illusion that the oppressive, exploitative imperialist status quo is normal.
My
mother, especially in her years as a busy young wife of an Air Force
officer, tended to shed things, rather than save and curate them, as we
moved every year or two.
So
when I was going through her belongings after she died in 2015, I
wasn’t surprised to find that there were not very many artifacts of my
early years.
One
of the few items she thought was important enough to keep was a little
yellow booklet, a small document with many addendums, held together by
staples that rusted decades ago.
On
the front cover, above my name, it says, “International Certificates
of Vaccination as Approved by the World Health Organization.” Inside are
page after page of records of the immunizations and boosters I received
— for typhus, typhoid, polio, flu, cholera, smallpox.
There
are those on the right today who would call this a “vaccine passport.”
Demanding that people show evidence of their covid-19 vaccination status
has become a front in the raging culture wars. States across the country
are moving to restrict schools and other institutions from requiring
people to demonstrate their vaccination status or immunity to the virus.
How
did we come to this? Immunizations have long been required for
international travel. Do residents of this country deserve any less
transparency and protection? There exist vaccines that are safe and
effective against a virus that has killed more than 600,000 in the United States and whose new strain is turning its fury on the unvaccinated.
The stipulations of my own immunization record were unbending: “It is the responsibility of the traveler to have the ‘approved stamp’ applied to the smallpox vaccination certificate or the cholera vaccination certificate. The certificate is not valid without the stamp and may not be accepted when required in international travel.”
wcvb | Massachusetts public health officials reported 716 new COVID-19
breakthrough cases in fully vaccinated individuals in the past week,
data from the Department of Public Health shows.
A breakthrough case is when an individual tests positive for COVID-19 after they've been fully vaccinated against the disease.
Advertisement
Numbers from the Massachusetts Department of Public Health show there
have been 5,166 cases of COVID-19 in fully vaccinated individuals as of
July 17, a significant increase from the 4,450 reported one week
earlier.
As of Tuesday, the DPH reported 1,649 new positive COVID-19 cases between July 10 and July 16.
When
analyzing the number of overall COVID-19 cases reported by the DPH
between July 10 and July 16, the breakthrough cases account for 43.4
percent of all new COVID-19 cases.
Massachusetts doctors say the
biggest cause is the arrival of the COVID-19 delta variant, which is
twice as infectious than the original virus.
"We also know that people who have the Delta variant actually have
1,000 times the amount of virus in their nose, in their bodies," Dr.
Katherine Gergen Barnett with Boston Medical Center said.
"the science demonstrates that if you are fully vaccinated, you are protected."
No qualifications at all.
The problem is that if you are indeed allowing a vaccinated person to have minimal symptoms at the same time the virus is not sterilized, you have effectively turned that person into an incubator for more mutant expression.
And then multiply that person by millions. You have to think in large numbers here. Allowing this much genetic mutation capability is a real issue for future variants that could be a lot more toxic.
If the vaccines were sterilizing, the person would have no symptoms AND the virus would be inactivated and unable to change.
That is the concern with non-sterilizing vaccines. It is basically what could happen in the future.
You have to think in large numbers, and exponential growth. The UK already gave us Delta, starting with the lumpenproletariat in globalization-blasted Kent, and Delta went round the world and dominated very, very quickly.
p.s., This (and other insights about the non-sterilizing nature of the current vaccines) implies that vaccine passports — e.g. showing proof of vaccination to enter a restaurant or board a plane — is ENTIRELY pointless.
IMDoc Anecdote:
I did not feel well when I got home from work last night. As the night wore on, I began to have a very severe cough, very loud wheezing (I do not wheeze), a mild headache, and a fever of 101. I knew exactly what was going on. As soon as I could, I called work to tell them I was not going in and headed right to medical care to be checked – and indeed I am now positive for COVID. I was fully vaccinated in mid April.
To me, this day was not and if but when. From the very first day in my internship in the big city in the middle of the AIDS pandemic – one of the leading internists in the country told my class – “We do not run from pandemics, we run into them.” My office of fully vaccinated staff has already had one wave of COVID go through about a month ago that somehow I missed – my time was up last night.
I am in great physical shape for my age – very healthy – and am already feeling much better today – I am going to be fine. But what has happened in the interim since this AM – has been eye-opening.
I was actually called by a health department phone operator within an hour or two of my diagnosis. They then put another administrative person on the line who informed me that I was vaccinated – and therefore no quarantine was necessary. I told them right away that was ridiculous – and I would be staying at home for now. Within 30 minutes, someone from the state health department contacted me – and I will be brief – informed me that it was very reckless for me as a physician to be talking about quarantine of myself a vaccinated person – the CDC has told us this is not necessary – you cannot spread the virus – doing this would potentially discourage others from vaccination – It may cost lives – My response – “so having me, a positive COVID patient, hang out in exam rooms or the grocery store with obese diabetic cancer patients is not going to cost lives? Please if you think I am being reckless – report me to the Medical Board – I will happily discuss this with my peers.”
These are the kinds of things that occur with pathologic lying. People actually begin to believe the accumulated lies are truth. All rational thought is completely clouded. I will state for the record – that neither person who spoke to me today was an MD DO RN or MPH. All administrative. I truly believe that most health care workers are beginning to wake up. I think a real genuine health worker would have rotted in hell before making such statements.
I called one of my old students/residents right after this call. He is currently the head of the Internal Medicine Dept at one of our big universities in Blue America. I was informed that out of the 20 or so faculty members in his division – all 100% vaccinated – 7 of them had become ill with COVID in the past few weeks. We kind of laughed nervously about the 95% number for relative risk reduction – and how we as a profession were about to learn that misrepresenting numbers like this to the public was a very bad idea. Then some profound statements from him ——
“I have been dealing with this nightmare called evidence-based medicine for years. Students and residents both now tell me that only peer-reviewed RCT are what they should be looking at – nothing else matters. They would not know the difference between a relative risk reduction and an incidence if they had to – they do not even bother to look at anything but an RCT – therefore they know nothing of medical statistics. This has been on full display for the world to see the past 18 months. Just look at any Twitter feed. We have a lot of work to do.”
And I, IM Doc, have several times discussed the human theater, the “stupid human tricks” of putting your vaccination photos on Facebook or TV as a motivator. And then spend days talking about the bad reaction you had to your vaccine – “I got really sick – Hallelujah – I know it has activated my immune system”. I got so so tired of that chestnut – but it was all over the Internet for months. Any vaccinologist, immunologist – etc – would tell you that was just horse shit. And now you know why that was a very very bad unprofessional thing to be doing. It literally motivates no one, and now there is going to be lots of explaining going on.
My old student today – “Actually the Facebook vaccination meme was the second worst thing. The absolute worst was the whole health care TikTok Video dancing – often done in ERs where there were lines of sick people waiting. It made me want to punch the wall. But now all these kids that put their Facebook vaccination photos online and bragged about it – are going to get to explain to all their patients and friends how they still got COVID after the vaccines – we have quite a few housestaff and students fully vaccinated becoming positive – not just the faculty.”
“Young Grasshopper – pride goeth before a fall”. There are those of us who have been warning that all was not well with our entire approach for months – and were laughed and scoffed out of the room. We as a profession are going to have a lot to answer for.”
All that is from my old student – now a leader in academic medicine – I am so so relieved – people are starting to wake up.
The take home message from where we are today – These vaccines are non-sterilizing. That means they may limit or eliminate symptoms – but they do nothing for the spread. There are probably all kinds of vaccinated patients harboring active infections at this very minute and they have no clue – the vaccine is making them not sick. But they are sharing it with all around them. Many if not most of them taking no measures because the CDC told them they did not have to – YOU ARE VACCINATED. The good news for today is that the symptoms, hospital, and death all seem to be low. The bad news is all of these harboring the virus are further playgrounds for the virus to mutate. And when you allow it to become more and more widespread – the more likely a really bad mutant will come to the fore. That is THE danger of non-sterilizing vaccines being used for a virus that is profoundly capable of mutating.
My advice today – DO NOT PLAY INTO THE DIVISIVE UNVACCINATED/VACCINATED GAME – at this point and in the near future – it is going to become increasingly obvious this is just not a hill to die on. TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF and YOUR FAMILY. Find and identify any elders in your community that may need help. Plenty of sleep – plenty of sunshine – lose weight, exercise, eat well – vitamin D 2000 daily. AND SMILE. It does wonders.
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