Debt Parasitism And The Collapse Of Antiquity

michael-hudson  |  The Collapse of Antiquity, the sequel to Michael Hudson’s “…and forgive them their debts,” is the latest in his trilogy on the history of debt. It describes how the dynamics of interest-bearing debt led to the rise of rentier oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome. This caused economic polarization, widespread austerity, revolts, wars and ultimately the collapse of Rome into serfdom and feudalism. That collapse bequeathed to the subsequent Western civilization a pro-creditor legal philosophy that has led to today’s creditor oligarchies.

In telling this story, The Collapse of Antiquity reveals the eerie parallels between the collapsing Roman world and today’s debt-burdened Western economies. 

Endorsements

“In this monumental work, Michael Hudson overturns what most of us were taught about Athens and Sparta, Greece and Rome, Caesar and Cicero, indeed about kings and republics. He exposes the roots of modern debt peonage and crises in the greed and violence of antiquity’s oligarch-creditors, embedded in their laws, which in the end destroyed the civilizations of classical antiquity.”
James K. Galbraith, author of Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe.

“In this fascinating book, Hudson explores the rise of the predatory rentier oligarchies of classical Greece and Rome. He makes a fascinating and persuasive case that the trap of debt led to the destruction of the peasantry, the states and ultimately even these civilizations.”
Martin Wolf, Chief Economics Commentator, Financial Times.

“Michael Hudson is an old school, 19th-century classical economist who puts fact before theory. To read his new book, The Collapse of Antiquity, is to learn why and how it has come to pass that we live in a world in which the money owns the people, not the people who own the money. The clarity of Hudson’s thought is like water in a desert, his history lesson therefore a sad story that is a joy to read.”
Lewis Lapham, editor of Lapham’s Quarterly.

Scope

The Collapse of Antiquity is vast in its sweep, covering:
• the transmission of interest-bearing debt from the Ancient Near East to the Mediterranean world, but without the “safety valve” of periodic royal Clean Slate debt cancellations to restore economic balance and prevent the emergence of creditor oligarchies;
• the rise of creditor and landholding oligarchies in classical Greece and Rome;
• classical antiquity’s debt crises and revolts, and the suppression, assassination and ultimate failure of reformers;
• the role played by greed, money-lust (wealth-addiction) and hubris, as analysed by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and other ancient writers;
• Rome’s “End Time” collapse into serfdom and pro-creditor oligarchic legacy that continues to shape the West;
• the transformation of Christianity as it became Rome’s state religion, supporting the oligarchy, dropping the revolutionary early Christian calls for debt cancellation and changing the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer and “sin,” from a focus on the economic sphere to the personal sphere of individual egotism;
• how pro-creditor ideology distorts recent economic interpretations of antiquity, showing increasing sympathy with Rome’s oligarchic policies.

Backcover

Rome’s collapse was the forerunner of the debt crises, economic polarization and austerity caused by subsequent Western oligarchies. The West’s pro-creditor laws and ideology inherited from Rome make inevitable repeated debt crises, transferring control of property and government to financial oligarchies.

Classical antiquity’s great transition to the modern world lay in replacing kingship not with democracies but with oligarchies having a pro-creditor legal philosophy. That philosophy permits creditors to draw wealth, and thereby political power, into their own hands, without regard for restoring economic balance and long-term viability as occurred in the Ancient Near East through Clean Slates.

Rome’s legacy to subsequent Western civilization is thus the structure of creditor oligarchies, not democracy in the sense of social structures and policies promoting widespread prosperity.

 

Higher-Dimensional Incompetence Resulted In 3-Dimensional Imprisonment

Heaviside's vector calculus, also known as vector analysis, was developed in the late 19th century as a way to simplify and unify the mathematical treatment of physical phenomena involving vectors, such as those described by James Clerk Maxwell's equations of electromagnetism. At the time, Maxwell's equations were typically expressed using quaternions, which are a type of mathematical notation that involves four complex numbers. The quaternion algebra, developed by James Clerk Maxwell and William Rowan Hamilton, was a more complex mathematical system that had been used to describe physical phenomena, but it was eventually replaced by vector calculus due to its relative simplicity and ease of use.

Quaternions involved complex numbers and required the use of four dimensions, which made them more difficult to work with and interpret. In contrast, vector calculus used a more familiar three-dimensional coordinate system and involved only familiar algebraic operations. Quaternions were found to be somewhat difficult to work with and interpret, especially for those who were not familiar with the notation.

In contrast, vector calculus provided a more intuitive and familiar way to represent and manipulate vectors, using familiar concepts such as magnitude and direction. As a result, vector calculus quickly gained widespread adoption and eventually replaced quaternions as the preferred method for expressing and solving problems involving vectors in physics and engineering. Heaviside's vector notation, which uses arrow notation to represent vectors and dot notation to represent scalars, is much easier to use and understand than quaternions, which are a type of mathematical notation that uses four-dimensional complex numbers.

While quaternions were primarily used in the study of electromagnetism, vector calculus could be used to represent any type of vector quantity, including displacement, velocity, acceleration, and force. This made it a more widely applicable tool for solving problems in many different fields of science and engineering.

Nuclear Engine For Rocket Vehicle Application

autoevolution |  We don't blame you if you're shocked the United States wielded a nuclear spacecraft engine as far back as the 1960s. You're probably even more shocked that hardly anyone remembers it. The Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application (NERVA) project would've been nothing short of a crown jewel program for any other research team. But not for New Mexico's Los Alamos Laboratories.

That's right; the NERVA engine was developed by the same team who brought the world the first nuclear-fission weapons. The very same that helped end World War II. If there was ever a project substantial or significant enough to overshadow literal nuclear rocket engines, that certainly fits the description. For Los Alamos scientists and engineers, it makes sense the first logical step post-Manhattan Project would be in the direction of rocket engines.

Come the end of the Second World War, novel German rocket science from future NASA personnel like Wernher Von Braun was now in the hands of the Americans. But while the V2 chemical rocket was nothing short of witchcraft to average folks in the mid-1940s, it wouldn't be long for experts to ask if there was another, more powerful means of fueling rocket engines.

In the following decade, a torrent of proposals across America for nuclear-powered planes, trains, and automobiles defined the 1950s as the start of the atomic era. Right alongside preposterous ideas like Ford's Nucleon passenger car was one of the first working concepts for a nuclear fission-powered thermal rocket. One that, in theory, could provide power and fuel economy no traditional chemical rocket could ever dream of. 

Though any number of nuclear isotopes could theoretically do the job, Los Alamos Labs and Westinghouse chose enriched Uranium-235 for the NERVA application. This choice was made because U-235 is lighter and less prone to super-criticality than its Uranium-238 cousin. As a result, it has the potential for an incredibly high measurement of what rocket scientists call a specific impulse. 

With the potential to heat hydrogen fuel to 2,400 Kelvin (3860.3°F, 2126°C), the NERVA engine could have provided American spacecraft with exceptional performance while not being so wasteful that it couldn't conserve fuel for an entire mission. The potential for space exploration seemed palpable during the NERVA development. Be it traveling to near planets like Mars and Venus or even places farther off like the Asteroid Belt. It was all suddenly theoretically possible.

In August 1960, the recently formed NASA established the Space Nuclear Propulsion Office with the sole purpose of overseeing the NERVA program and any developments made afterward. With offices in Germantown, Maryland, Cleveland, Ohio, and Albuquerque, New Mexico, the resources and personnel required to keep the program running spanned the continental U.S.  

Six NERVA technology demonstrators were built between 1964 and 1973. The highest power threshold NASA could muster during testing was a scarcely believable 246,663 newtons (55,452 lbf) of thrust and a specific impulse of 710 seconds (7.0 km/s) in the NERVA  Alpha variant. This engine could theoretically operate in deep space and maintain this level of thrust throughout the duration of a space mission. So you can only imagine what NASA may have had planned.

Records indicate Wernher Von Braun envisioned a successor booster rocket to the Saturn V, called the Nova series. Had it been built, the nuclear/chemical hybrid rocket would have joined the Space Shuttle in a spacecraft fleet that would have been nothing short of astonishing. One can only imagine how humans could have landed on the surface of Mars by the early 1980s had everything gone to plan.

Underwater Supersonic Objects

dailymail |  As swimmers know, moving cleanly through the water can be a problem due o the huge amounts of drag created - and for submarines, this is even more of a problem.

However, US Navy funded researchers say they have a simple solution - a bubble.

Researchers at Penn State Applied Research Laboratory are developing a new system using a technique called supercavitation.

The new idea is based on Soviet technology developed during the cold war.

Called supercavitation, it envelopes a submerged vessel inside an air bubble to avoid problems caused by water drag.

A Soviet supercavitation torpedo called Shakval was able to reach a speed of 370km/h or more - much faster than any other conventional torpedoes.

In theory, a supercavitating vessel could reach the speed of sound underwater, or about 5,800km/h.

This would reduce the journey time for a transatlantic underwater cruise to less than an hour, and for a transpacific journey to about 100 minutes, according to a report by California Institute of Technology in 2001.

However, the technique also results in a bumpy ride - something the new team has solved. 

'Basically supercavitation is used to significantly reduce drag and increase the speed of bodies in water,' said Grant M. Skidmore, recent Penn State Ph.D. recipient in aerospace engineering.

'However, sometimes these bodies can get locked into a pulsating mode.'

Creating a supercavitation bubble and getting it to pulsate in order to stop the pulsations inside a rigid-walled water tunnel tube had not been done.

'Eventually we ramped up the gas really high and then way down to get pulsation,' said Jules W. Lindau, senior research associate at ARL and associate professor of aerospace engineering.

They found that once they had supercavitation with pulsation, they could moderate the air flow and, in some cases, stop pulsation.

'Supercavitation technology might eventually allow high speed underwater supercavitation transportation,' said Moeney.  

China is also developing a'supersonic' submarine that could travel from Shanghai to San Francisco in less than two hours.

Researchers say their new craft uses a radical new technique to create a 'bubble' to surround itself, cutting down drag dramatically. 

In theory, the researchers say, a supercavitating vessel could reach the speed of sound underwater, or about 5,800km/h. 

The technology was developed by a team of scientists at Harbin Institute of Technology's Complex Flow and Heat Transfer Lab. 

Li Fengchen, professor of fluid machinery and engineering, told the South China Morning Post he was 'very excited by its potential'. 

The new sub is based on Soviet technology developed during the cold war.

Ancient Anatolia: Meetings With The Ancient Teachers Of Mankind

arkeonews  |  “Our findings change the perception, still seen in schoolbooks across the world, that settled life resulted from farming and animal husbandry,” he said at a September presentation of the site. “This shows that it begins when humans were still hunter-gatherers and that agriculture is not a cause, but the effect, of settled life.”

The region of these settlements is named “Taş Tepeler,” literally meaning Stone Hills. Covering an area of 200 kilometers from one end to the other, Taş Tepeler is an Anatolian and Upper Mesopotamian territory that hosted the earliest settled communities.

As far as we know, Taş Tepeler is the first example of sedentism and social union on earth. Sacred and secular spaces were built simultaneously at Karahantepe, where humans dwelled year-round for about 1,500 years, and no remnants of farmed vegetation have been found.

Göbekli Tepe, which was previously thought to be the only place where nomadic people came to worship, is now considered a part of simultaneous settlements. Recent work has also revealed domestic structures at Göbekli Tepe. “In this region, we encounter monumental structures for the first time in the oldest villages of the world,” Karul says.

Scientists have long assumed that the domestication of plants and animals approximately 10,000 years ago pushed people to adopt a sedentary lifestyle and that the increase in food production enabled them to establish complex communities and build the groundwork for civilization. However, emerging evidence that Stone Age people erected permanent buildings for spiritual, rather than technically necessary, activities are challenging the conventional wisdom that they lacked a large-scale civilization with the division of labor and common ceremonial themes.

The Neolithic era, which coincided with the end of the Ice Age, symbolizes humanity’s tremendous transition from foraging to farming.

“It will take time for the scientific community to digest and accept this game-changing research,” says Mehmet Özdoğan, the professor emeritus of archaeology at Istanbul University.

“We must now rethink what we knew—that civilization emerged from a horizontal society that began raising wheat because people were hungry—and assess this period with its multi-faceted society. The foundations for today’s civilization, from family law to inheritance to the state and bureaucracy, were all struck in the Neolithic period,” Özdoğan says.

In Taş Tepeler, which is thought to be the beginning of the process where the shelter turned into a dwelling and real villages emerged 12 thousand years ago, there are finds on humanity’s first use of pottery and the ability to carry out basic trade initiatives. The monumental structures in the region are believed to be communal spaces where people come together.

Karahantepe rises within Şanlıurfa’s interesting limestone authentic land structure. These limestone rocks are the main material of the finds.

 

Premature Rejection Of The Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis - Sound Familiar?

sagepub | Scientists have initially rejected many theories that later achieved widespread consensus. In some instances, the rejection lasted for half a century or more, until enough new evidence arrived to convert all but the most obstinate opponents, who often carried their opposition to the grave.¹ The canonical example in the earth sciences is continental drift. First proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1912, continental drift did not achieve consensus until the mid-1960s.² The theory of meteorite impact cratering on the Moon and the Earth provides another example. We can date its origin to a classic 1893 paper by the great American geologist G. K. Gilbert³ and the beginning of its broad acceptance to 1964 and the first returned photographs of lunar craters from the Ranger missions to the Moon. Both rejections stemmed mainly from the allegiance of geologists to the principle of uniformitarianism, which eschewed catastrophic events such as moving continents and colliding meteorites. Anthropogenic global warming offers a third example. First proposed by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, within a few years it had become almost universally rejected, based on a single, misinterpreted experiment.⁴ Its acceptance began with the first results of computerized climate modeling in the mid-1960s. The pioneer of climate modeling, Syukuro Manabe, won the 2021 Nobel prize in physics for his early work. Today we can only wonder what the effect would have been had scientists in the first half of the twentieth century retained AGW as a working hypothesis.

One would hope and expect that in the internet age, with its online journals, instant communication, and vastly improved scientific methods and instrumentation, premature rejection would be a thing of the past. The reaction to the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis (YDIH), introduced in 2007, shows that this assumption is incorrect.⁵ Within months of its appearance, two authors⁶ called the hypothesis a “Frankenstein Monster” and in 2011, the same two plus others⁷ compared it to UFOs and other examples of “pathological science” and wrote its “requiem.” Yet after a comprehensive review of the literature in 2021, Sweatman⁸ concluded: “Probably, with the YD impact event essentially confirmed, the YD impact hypothesis should now be called a ‘theory’.” The question this article seeks to answer is how scientists can so thoroughly reject a hypothesis, even write its requiem, only to have it emerge in little more than a decade strengthened and deserving of possible promotion to the status of theory.

 

It should have been clear to readers, including peer reviewers, that Pinter and Ishman had offered hyperbolic language but no actual evidence against the YDIH; that Surovell et al.³⁷ had failed to sample the YDB and/or made fatal errors in procedure; and that the samples reported by Scott et al.⁴⁰ and used by Pinter et al.⁷ and Daulton et al.⁴⁹ had not come from the YDB and therefore did not bear directly on the impact hypothesis. Instead of critically examining and rejecting these false claims, many geologists and impact specialists embraced them, thereby allowing an alleged absence of evidence to trump abundant, peer-reviewed evidence, even photographic evidence. Then a kind of “groupthink” seems to have set in, rendering the YDIH beneath further consideration.

 

The broader lesson from impact cratering, continental drift, anthropogenic global warming, and now the YDIH is that it is better to encourage further research than to prematurely condemn a novel, data-based hypothesis to the dust bin of science. Unfortunately, once a hypothesis has been prematurely rejected, even truly “extraordinary evidence” may not be enough to restore it to scientific respectability.

 

Graham Hancock: Archeologists Hate'Us Cuz They Anus....,

theconversation |  Netflix’s enormously popular new show, Ancient Apocalypse, is an all out attack on archaeologists. As an archaeologist committed to public engagement who strongly believes in the relevance of studying ancient people, I feel a full-throated defence is necessary.

Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilisation, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis. His argument, as laid out in this show and in several books, is that this advanced civilisation was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.

The survivors of this advanced civilisation, according to Hancock, introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, arts, maths and the knowledge of “civilisation” to “simple” hunter gatherers. The reason little evidence exists, he says, is because it is under the sea or was destroyed by the cataclysm.

“Perhaps,” Hancock posits in the first episode, “the extremely defensive, arrogant, and patronising attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility”.

In the opening dialogue of Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock rejects being identified as an archaeologist or scientist. Instead, he calls himself a journalist who is “investigating human prehistory”. A canny choice, as the label “journalist” helps Hancock rebut being characterised as a “pseudo archaeologist” or “pseudo scientist”, which, as he puts it himself in episode four, would be like calling a dolphin a “pseudo fish”.

From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilisation. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.

Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.

 

Was JFK's Assassination A Zionist Coup?

unz |  November 22, 1963 was a coup d’état. That is the premise from which any discussion about JFK’s assassination should start. The coup was invisible at the time, because Johnson created an illusion of continuity. What changed dramatically only became public knowledge in the 1990s. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs in 2009, we read that, “Lyndon Johnson Was First to Align U.S. Policy With Israel’s Policies.”

Up to Johnson’s presidency, no administration had been as completely pro-Israel and anti-Arab as his. … Not only was he personally a strong supporter of the Jewish state but he had a number of high officials, advisers and friends who shared his view. … These officials occupied such high offices as the ambassador to the United Nations, the head of the National Security Council and the number two post at the State Department. They were assiduous in putting forward Israel’s interests in such memoranda as “What We Have Done for Israel” and “New Things We Might Do in Israel” and “How We Have Helped Israel.” … So pervasive was the influence of Israel’s supporters during Johnson’s tenure that CIA Director Richard Helms believed there was no important U.S. secret affecting Israel that the Israeli government did not know about in this period.[8]

Although Dimona was probably the most urgent reason for replacing JFK with LBJ, as Michael Collins Piper has shown in his groundbreaking book Final Judgment, it was not the only one. The problem of Dimona cannot be separated from the wider geopolitical context of the Cold War. For the Soviets were as worried as Kennedy about nuclear proliferation.[9] Against Piper’s theory, it has been argued that Kennedy had no power to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, and that there was therefore no necessity for Israel to kill him.[10] That may be true: the real danger for Israel was if both the United States and the Soviet Union joined their effort to thwart Israel’s nuclear ambition. When Khrushchev’s minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko visited the White House on October 3, 1963 to discuss ways of expanding the progress of the Limited Test Ban treaty, Kennedy tasked his Secretary of State Dean Rusk to bring up the issue of Israel’s secret nuke program with Gromyko in his evening meeting at the Soviet Embassy.[11] If Americans and Russians agreed to stop Israel from getting the Bomb, Israel would have had to comply.

But worst than the risk of being deprived of their “Samson option”, the nascent cooperation between Kennedy and Khrushchev toward détente presented an even more distressing danger: their common support of Israel’s greatest foe, Egypt. This point is well made by author Salvador Astucia in Opium Lords: Israel, the Golden Triangle, and the Kennedy Assassination (2002, in pdf here)[12]:

Both Kennedy and Khrushchev had stronger ties with Egyptian President Nasser than with Israel. Their befriending of Nasser, a living icon symbolizing Arab unity, was a signal to Israel that both superpowers had more interest in the Arab world than in Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish homeland, let alone its expansion into neighboring Arab territories.[13]

“In short,” writes Astucia, “détente would mark the beginning of the end for Israel as a world power because neither superpower had a strategic interest in Israel.”[14] What was urgently needed was to transform Egypt into a ground for confrontation rather than rapprochement.

Astucia published his book in 2002, and lacked hindsight on 9/11 to draw the parallel that can now be drawn between President Kennedy’s assassination and the false flag attacks of September 11^th, 2001. The parallel should be clear to those who now understand that 9/11 was both a massive psychological operation and a foreign policy coup aimed at drawing the U.S. on the side of Israel against its Arab enemies (see my previous Unz Review article). As I wrote for the film 9/11 and Israel’s Great Game: “In 2001, Israel’s reputation had fallen to its lowest level in international public opinion. Condemnations were voiced from all sides against its apartheid and colonization policies, and its systematic war against Palestinian leadership structures. The attacks of 9/11 instantly reversed this trend. Americans experienced the attacks as an act of hatred on the part of the Arab world, and thus felt immediate sympathy for Israel. … Overnight, after the 9/11 attacks, Western opinion had amalgamated the Arab world and the Palestinian resistance with Islamic terrorism.”

Mandate Ten Genders And Gay Pride In The Consciousness Of YOUR People, Not Mine....,

clifhigh | Personally, I stop dealing with people when I discover they are Name Stealers. They may be ‘regular jews’ who don’t know any of their connections to the Khazarians who started all the name stealing, and they may think that it is a ‘natural protective coloration’ that is ‘worn by jews’ to protect themselves from the hatred of the Gentiles, but they never examine why the ‘name stealing’ is so abhorrent to the gentile population.

Name stealing is word deception. This is basically, other than violence, and rage, the KEY weapon used by the Khazarian against you. The name stealing is being revealed along with the secrets of these past centuries. This will take us decades, if not centuries to unravel all the lies and deceptions and to place proper names on things, people and events.

To all those who think themselves to be jews, note this: if you practice the Kol Nidre, you are affirming that you are actively a name stealer. You are on the wrong side of this unfolding history. Be advised. The Kol Nidre is the formalization of Name Stealing.

“All vows, all obligations, oaths, and anathemas, whether called 'ḳonam,' 'ḳonas,' or by any other name, which we may vow, or swear, or pledge, or whereby we may be bound, from this Day of Atonement until the next (whose happy coming we await), we do repent. May they be deemed absolved, forgiven, annulled, and void, and made of no effect; they shall not bind us nor have power over us. The vows shall not be reckoned vows; the obligations shall not be obligatory; nor the oaths be oaths."

https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/9443-kol-nidre

The Khazarian Mafia are those people that we are calling the Ukrainian Nazis. These are the people that the Russians are now fighting. The Russians know this fight to be just a continuation of a war begun in 759 AD when the Khazars attempted to take over the Russ peoples (a smaller tribe at that time).

The Khazarian Mafia was started in the 700s AD as a Kingdom, located where Ukraine is now, ruled by them was forced to chose a religion OTHER than the form of ‘elohim worship’ that they practiced. Their king chose Judaism for the kingdom as his best option. Thus the Khazarian Mafia was born as their religion buried itself.

 

HUGE Food For Thought As They Start Dispensing Newfangled Pox Jabs

amidwesterndoctor |  This is a supplemental addition to my previous piece.  I would strongly encourage you to read that article before reading this one as this one goes into more tangential and complex points that supplement the original, but many of you may find very insightful.  Many of the concepts here also appear to apply to the COVID immunizations, however for length considerations, I will omit most of those connections and leave you to draw your own conclusions.  All of the books I cited here can be easily found on Amazon and often as PDFs, but I avoided linking to them here and supporting Amazon. Lastly, as I did not want to further delay publication, a significant number of minor edits will occur in the next few days.

I did not expect to attract the viewership the original article received, or the follow-up by larger media outlets (Steve Kirsch’s newsletter, the Kate Daley show and mercola.com) and am sincerely grateful for your support, and those parties in particular in spreading this message.  As I now have many readers, I will try to produce quality content as my time permits (with work and all), as I want it to be worth your time to read what I produce.  For the time being I will focus on interesting bits of medical history (the next piece will be interesting lessons from the 1918 influenza I applied to my treatment of COVID).

Additionally, since my last publication a reader notified me of a short book written in 1889 and viewable online which concisely provides evidence for many of the points covered in Dissolving Illusions, such as the lack of efficacy from the vaccination, the diseases associated with its administration, the distortion of data used by government officials to claim benefit rather than harm, and false claim it reduced death in hospitals.

To be complete and illustrate the observed effects of the smallpox vaccines, this article is a bit longer than the previous.  I could have cited significantly more resources, but I aimed to cover one text that was representative from each major school of thought at the time.  Its sections are as follows:

-Introduction
-General Smallpox Observations
-Allopathy
-Naturopathy
-Homeopathy
-Osteopathy
-Traditional Chinese Medicine
-Modern Research

All One Hundred Seven Chapters Of The Book Of Enoch

Archeoacoustics: Megaliths, Music And The Mind

academia |  There is no question that something happened 11,000-12,000 years ago in Anatolia. By
putting Archaeoacoustics into the mix, we may have an answer.

Researching a subject about prehistory that cannot be photographed or handled requires input from a wide range of disciplines combined with informed observation. Those of us working with Archaeoacoustics: the archaeology of sound in ancient ritual and ceremonial spaces, have always thought that the next step was a collection of on-site biofeedback. Happily, Neuroscience is now filling in the gap of knowledge about the psycho-physiological impact of certain resonant sound which is present in the world’s oldest monuments. Add that to new discoveries in Anatolia, and a solution for the “Sapient Paradox” practically leaps right out of the stone.
 

A paper published in 2008[iii] is recognized as the first official source indicating an effect on brain activity of sound in a specific frequency that has been measured in various megalithic enclosures. While a range of 90 to 130 Hz is the target area, this report cites abrupt changes at 110 Hz in a small group of volunteers. Thanks to the internet, this number has taken on a cultish following and prompted wild speculation about all the ways and places that 110 might be significant. This is the sort of stuff television shows are made of, but it is not grounded in science.

What has been scientifically detected is a “megalithic range” for highest resonance between 90 and 130 Hz in stone chambers, which has also been confirmed in Malta’s incomparable Hal Saflieni Hypogeum. An estimated 2000 tons of stone were removed to create this place, by the same people who built the megalithic temples above ground on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo. By virtue of being undetected underground until 1902, Hal Saflieni is still acoustically intact. We hear sound in there today exactly as it was heard by the folks who were using it 5000 years ago, and it can be hair-raising.[iv] Since its discovery, a sort of mythology has been built up about the way sound behaves in Hal Saflieni. Echoes that last as long as 13 seconds and sound waves that circle around the walls create a sonic
atmosphere that is difficult to describe.

One chamber called the Oracle Room, functions as a giant resonator. There is a high carved out shelf curving around the dead end of the chamber that seems to serve no purpose but to channel sound waves. The remains of red ochre on the ceiling in this chamber are an intricate pattern of disks and curls that begin above a side compartment and spin out like some kind of prehistoric musical notation, stopping at the entrance portal that frames more finely carved halls beyond.

The side compartment was cut into the wall of the eggplant-shaped Oracle Room at face height. It has been said that a male voice speaking into this niche is heard throughout the three stories of the underground complex in a way that is far different from a female voice. There is a scientific explanation for it. Like Newgrange passage tomb and every other tested megalithic site, the range for standing wave resonance in Hal Saflieni is within the range of a bass baritone. Basically, it means that in Hal Saflieni, the echo of a deep voice is occurring at maximum strength in those pitches.

Actually the acoustics of Hal Saflieni are even more complex, with a second peak and loads of low frequency vibration that is beyond human hearing, although one might be able to feel it.[v][vi] Try to imagine standing in that space in the presence of sound in the range of that standing wave. It’s like being inside a giant bell. The air is vibrating; the walls and floors and ceilings are vibrating; the sound is swimming all around and can be felt in the tissues of the body. There can be a sort of buzzing in the ears that one sometimes gets when singing along with the radio in the car, when a pitch has been exactly matched. It’s mesmerizing. When it stops, this writer always wants to say “do it again.”

5,000 years ago, visitors to this site shared it with the bones of their ancestors which were kept here, treated with red ochre and placed into communal beds, as if they were planted in some sort of rebirth ritual. That would fit the ideology of the time. Workers in the space, even talking to each other, would have been exposed to the acoustic effects. Quite a bit of the architecture in Hal-Saflieni suggests features of our performance spaces today. Considered with artifacts recovered from this site, it is clear that something more than interment of the dead was going on in here.

It is difficult to imagine that human beings would let the potential a sound phenomenon such as that in Hal Saflieni go unexploited. If it’s impressive today, for people who have answers for everything. the thought of what they might have created in here thousands of years ago is extraordinary. Were they listening for the voices of the dead, or perhaps spirits of the earth? There would have been an aroma, as well as an echo, creating a very sensory and emotional experience. We now know that while the goosebumps were rising, dopamine was being released in their brains.

"Food For The Moon" - How Much Suffering Is Being Harvested Now?

downthecupracabrahole | In 1958 radio broadcasting executive Robert Monroe suffered a series of bizarre events. At the age of 43, he began feeling a strong vibration deep within his chest. Suddenly the sensation grew so intense that he was forced to lay down. Once reclined, the typically rational businessman found himself hovering outside of his body. He immediately panicked thinking he had died but the crippling fear abruptly returned him to his physical form. Similar episodes soon followed in which he weightlessly floated around the room. A concerned Monroe visited several doctors and psychologists yet each medical professional determined he was perfectly healthy. Relieved by their positive diagnoses, the telecommunication executive decided to hone his newly acquired skill. Before long he left his comfortable corporate career and dedicated his life to the exploration of consciousness.
Hemispheric Synchronization

For the next three decades, Robert intently studied out-of-body experiences. His primary goal was to gather scientific evidence proving the existence of alternate realities. In hopes of making cosmic travel more easily attainable, he developed a technology called Hemispheric Synchronization. Also known as Hemi-Sync, this system utilizes audio patterns containing binaural beats to create harmonization of the brain’s left and right hemispheres. Independent clinical neurologists conducted extensive testing on participants engaging in the experimental technique. To their shock, the results were clearly visible on every EEG scan conducted. Both sides of the brain simultaneously measured equal in both amplitude and frequency. Monroe’s work was pioneering the path to tangible altered states.

Portals to Other Dimensions Closely monitoring the astral explorer’s groundbreaking findings was the US government. One day in 1978 representatives from the Central Intelligence Agency contacted Monroe. High-ranking officials invited him to join a highly classified military project. They wanted to implement his mind-expanding practice in attempts of sending soldiers into deep remote viewing sessions. Should subordinates succeed, America would have a huge advantage over Soviet enemies. Troops could be catapulted into past, present, and future timelines or even the multiverse. Given Robert’s extensive background and various patented applications, he was the perfect choice for this trailblazing operation. Hoping to obtain further credibility in the study of paranormal phenomena, Robert agreed to join them.

Since those involved were opening portals to other dimensions, researchers aptly named the assignment Gateway Process. According to declassified files, the program is “a training system designed to bring enhanced strength, focus and coherence to the amplitude and frequency of brainwave output between the left and right hemispheres so as to alter consciousness, moving it outside the physical sphere so as to ultimately escape even the restrictions of time and space. The participant then gains access to the various levels of intuitive knowledge the universe offers.” Discoveries listed in Commander Wayne M. McDonnell’s final analysis paper included detailed information about the nature of reality. Investigators ascertained we live in a holographic universe and waking life is a projected electromagnetic matrix.

Reptilians Emerge
To enter the unearthly realms, headphone-donning voyagers sat in isolated darkness while listening to various tones at specific hertz. Participants had no contact or communication with one another. After their journey was finished, volunteers would report what they experienced with staff members. According to Robert, subjects would often encounter interdimensional entities. Most frequently witnessed were reptilian humanoids. Viewers referred to the uncanny creatures as ‘the alligators’ due to their crocodilian features. Curiously, Monroe was already quite familiar with the unsettling breed. During countless expeditions, he observed identical saurian creatures. For over thirty-five years the etheric investigator gathered insight about these startling beings.

What Are The Ubaidian Lizard Figurines?

quora |  Al Ubaid archeological site in Iraq is a gold mine for archeologists and historians. It has yielded numerous objects from a pre-Sumerian time called the Ubaid period (5900–4000 B.C.). Strangely, just as with the Sumerians, the origin of the Ubaidian culture remains a profound mystery for modern-day scholars. It is as if these ancient cultures came into existence one day and disappeared the next.

 ell al-'Ubaid (Tell al-'Ubaid - Wikipedia

A small mound of about half a kilometer in diameter and two meters above ground, the site was first excavated by Harry Reginald Hal in 1919.[1] Subsequent excavations were conducted by C.L. Woolley in 1923 and 1924[2] followed by Seton Lloyd and Pinhas Delougaz in 1937, the latter working for the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago.[3]

The lower level of the site featured large amounts of Ubaid pottery and associated kilns. Evidence for Ubaid period pottery manufacture has also been observed on the surface of the site.[4] The size of the surface scatter indicates that pottery production was a specialized craft, and this confirms finds from other Ubaid sites like Eridu.

The site also yielded a cemetery and some finds from the Jemdet Nasr period. The temple of Ninhursag at the summit was on a cleared oval similar to that at Tell Khafajah. The wall surrounding the temple was built by Shulgi of the Ur III Empire.[5]

Interestingly, according to scholars, it was during this period that numerous advancements were made by Ubaid communities. During this time, our ancestors started acting and thinking differently. Ubaid Culture started building large unwalled settlements, mainly characterized by their multi-room rectangular mud houses. This culture is also credited appearance of the first temples of public architecture in Mesopotamia, with a growth of a two-tier settlement hierarchy of centralized large sites of more than 10 hectares surrounded by smaller village sites of less than 1 hectare.[6]

Archaeologists firmly agree that it was during the Ubaid Period when society began the transformation towards social, cultural, political and economic complexity..[7] The Ubaid Culture built incredible T-shaped houses, open courtyards, paved streets, and used food processing tools.

However, some of the earliest 'Ubaid artifacts are quite unnerving. Excavators unearthed caches of 7,000-year-old artifacts - humanoid figurines with lizard-like features. These male and female lizard-like humanoid figures exhibit unique, unceremonious poses, dramatically different from the Venus statues and Mother Goddess and fertility figures of the preceeding periods. Some appear to be wearing helmets, while others have shoulder padding. Other figurines hold a scepter or staff, while other female statues breastfeed or hold infants possessing reptilian features as well.[8]

We Need Multidimensional Portraits Of Ancient Peoples...,

ineteconomics  |   Napoleon Bonaparte asked, “What is history but a fable agreed upon?” Graeber and Wengrow come in to shake off the spell of prevailing fables — not as armchair theorists snatching ideas from thin air but as reviewers and synthesizers of a plethora of tantalizing recent discoveries, along with the work of neglected thinkers who (hello, feminist scholars) who drew ire for their attention to glaring inconsistencies in the established narratives. In doing so, they recover frameworks for the way ancient peoples experienced their world that help us to see that we could be organizing ourselves – socially, economically, politically — on principles much different from those that seem inevitable today. This is heartening.

Among the propositions of Graeber and Wengrow are these:

• We barely have the language to express what our remote ancestors were up to 95% of the time.
• The Agricultural Revolution wasn’t a revolution at all. The real story is much more complex – and interesting.
• Ancient peoples lived with a rich variety of social and political structures, even varying according to the season. (Very flexible, those folks).
• Humans aren’t just pawns on a chessboard of material conditions. We’ve been actively experimenting from the get-go.
• Inequality in large-scale human communities isn’t inevitable, nor is it a product of farming. Ditto, patriarchy.
• Past societies that valued women were happier places to live. (Duh).
• We can do better. We have done better.

The authors begin by pointing out that eighteenth-century theories of human history were partly a reaction to critiques of European society offered by indigenous observers. Consider Kandiaronk, a Wendat chief so skilled in debate he could easily shut down a Jesuit, who blew the minds of listeners with penetrating insights on authority, decency, social responsibility, and above all, freedom. Kandiaronk’s critiques, presented in a dialogue form by the Baron de Lahontan in 1703, sparked a whole genre of books voicing criticisms from a “primitive” outsider. Graeber and Wengrow illuminate how profoundly these products influenced Enlightenment thought and helped give rise to social and political experiments (including the U.S. Constitution), as well as defensive strategies to discount such perspectives (also including the U.S. Constitution).

Madame de Graffigny’s epistolary novel of 1747, “Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (1747) tells the story of an Incan princess who rails against the inequality she observes in French society – particularly the ill-treatment of women. This volume, in turn, helped shape the thinking of the economist A.R.J. Turgot, who responded by insisting that inequality was inevitable. He outlined a theory of social evolution posited as progress from hunters to pastoralism to farming to urban commercial civilization that placed anybody not at the final stage as a vestigial life form that had better get with the program. Turgot’s scheme of social evolution started popping up in lectures of his buddy Adam Smith over in Glasgow, and eventually worked its way into general theories of human history proposed by several of Smith’s influential colleagues such as Adam Ferguson.

The new default paradigm formed the lens through which Europeans viewed indigenous peoples the world over; namely as childish innocents or brutal savages living in deplorable static conditions. Everybody was to be sorted according to how they acquired food, with egalitarian foraging societies banished to the bottom of the ladder. The Kandiaronks causing anxiety by pointing out the grotesque conditions of so-called civilization — from the large numbers of starving people to the need for two hours for a Frenchman to dress himself — could now be dismissed. This mindset became prevalent in the emerging field of archaeology, where practitioners churned out biased interpretations of ancient societies that rendered them non-threatening to the modern, capitalist way of life.

Teleological history was the name of the game, and scholars played it endlessly.

When Will The Undisputed Facts Of Gobekli Tepe Breakthrough The Myths Of Antiquity?

Quora |  Göbekli Tepe is a phenomenal time capsule of discovery and insight. We are faced with an untouched, and relatively intact window into a culture that has refused to be forgotten. Göbekli Tepe stands as a reminder that there is grand folly in making any final determinations about who we are, how we lived and where we came from. Göbekli Tepe also shows that there is profound arrogance to call any prior culture, a primitive culture, by any measure or standard. History books will need a complete rewrite as well as Wikipedia's various citations on ancient history. Sadly some of this data is 20 years old and is still not cited nor put in the proper context.

I have posted on this subject before: What are the most fascinating known unknowns?. I hope to give more details on this amazing discovery with Some information that is not yet easily available (on the internet) or otherwise Peer Reviewed published (Eg: Beer/Bread production, Written Language/Symbols, Plant domestication). However none of this data is unannounced or otherwise proprietary unreleased data. Please see notes at the end of the paragraphs for more detail.

Most of this data is still being uncovered and thus will be published in Peer Review publications when appropriate. Some of this data comes directly from Professor Klaus Schmidt, the chief Researcher and Archeologist on site, in updates to academics that are following his work. Professor Schmidt came to Turkey in 1978, but it wasn't until 1994 that he felt sure enough of the data he collected to begin to publish. Professor Schmidt is academically quite conservative and faced the undesirable task of putting archaeology on notice that general assumptions held very tightly were, just wrong. It took him many years of checking and then rechecking before he would publish his discoveries as he knew they were highly controversial. Thus it may be a few years before we see some of what I mention here fully published and accepted. This is an early view and have no doubts is very, very controversial.

Warning: I have a clear bias here that I must warn the reader about. I feel very, very strongly that academia has not given proper encomium, citation, commendation and tribute for Professor Schmidt and his 30 years of work at Göbekli Tepe. I feel rather strongly that this position of academia has caused many discoveries of similar magnitude to be stunted by little to no funding. Please forgive a bit of cheerleading for what I believe is one of the most important discoveries in human history.

All Too Human

I must point out that one of the most difficult things about Göbekli Tepe has been the Historians and Archaeologists that have invested so much into a paradigm of human development, that they found it nearly impossible to accept the realities that Göbekli Tepe presented. This has hampered progress, funding and peer review of Göbekli Tepe. This shows how even the most empirical Researchers and Scientists are all too human and fall prey to the fear of a rewriting of history to a more accurate context. It is my profound hope that Göbekli Tepe helps to change this point of view in some material way.

Here are just some of the new insights Göbekli Tepe has produced:

The Nazi Past Shaped Our Dystopian Present

Annie Jacobsen's Operation Paperclip Focused On Chemical, Biological, and Medical Weaponeers

historynewsnetwork |   The journalist Annie Jacobsen recently published Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown, 2014). Scouring the archives and unearthing previously undisclosed records as well as drawing on earlier work, Jacobsen recounts in chilling detail a very peculiar effort on the part of the U.S. military to utlize the very scientists who had been essential to Hitler’s war effort. 

As I read your book I started thinking about the various Nazi genre films such as; The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, and Marathon Man — they all hold to a similar premise, key Nazi’s escape Germany after the war and plot in various ways to do bad things. Apparently truth is stranger than fiction. What was Operation Paperclip?

Operation Paperclip was a classified program to bring Nazi scientists to America right after World War II. It had, however, a benign public face. The war department had issued a press release saying that good German scientists would be coming to America to help out in our scientific endeavors.

But it was not benign at all, as seen in the character of Otto Ambros, a man, as you explain, was keen on helping U.S. soldiers in matters of hygiene by offering them soap, this soon after they had conquered Germany. Who was Ambros?

Otto Ambros I must say was one of the most dark-hearted characters that I wrote about in this book. He was Hitler’s favorite chemist, and I don’t say that lightly. I found a document in the National Archives, I don’t believe it had ever been revealed before, that showed that during the war Hitler gave Ambros a one million Reichsmark bonus for his scientific acumen. The reason was two-fold. Ambros worked on the Reich’s secret nerve agent program, but he also invented synthetic rubber, that was called buna. The reason rubber was so important — if you think about the Reich’s war-machine and how tanks need treads, aircraft need wheels — the Reich needed rubber. By inventing synthetic rubber, Ambros became Hitler’s favorite chemist.

Not only that when the Reich decided to develop a factory at Auschwitz, — the death camp had a third territory, there was Auschwitz, there was Birkenau — they did it in a third territory called Auschwitz III also known as Monowitvz-Buna. This was where synthetic rubber was going to be manufactured using prisoners who would be spared the gas chamber as they were put to work, and most often worked to death by the Reich war machine. The person, the general manager there at Auschwitz III, was Otto Ambros. Ambros was one of the last individuals to leave Auschwitz, this is in the last days of January 1945 as the Russians are about to liberate the death camp. Ambros is there according to these documents I have located in Germany, destroying evidence right up until the very end.

After the war, Ambros was sought by the Allies and later found, interrogated and put on trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted of mass-murder and slavery. He was sentenced to prison, but in the early 1950s as the Cold War became elevated he was given clemency by the U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and released from prison. When he was sentenced, the Nuremberg judges took away all his finances, including that one million Reichsmark bonus from Hitler. When McCloy gave him clemency he also restored Otto Ambros’ finances, so he got back what was left of that money. He was then given a contract with the U.S. Department of Energy.

He actually came to work in the United States?

Otto Ambros remains one of the most difficult cases to crack in terms of Paperclip. While I was able to unearth some new and horrifying information about his postwar life, most of it remains, “lost or missing,” which I take to mean classified. We do know for a fact that Ambros came to the United States two, possibly three times. As a convicted war criminal traveling to the United States he would have needed special papers from the U.S. State Department. The State Department, however, informed me through the Freedom of Information Act that those documents are lost or missing.

The Origin Of All Political Power Is In The Barrel Of A Gun

thesenecaeffect | The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed "the first multinational corporation" in history. 

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term "pauperes" (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them. 

At that point, the Templars attracted the attention of the king of France, Phillip IV, in dire need of money, as kings normally are. In 1307, he ordered the arrest of all Templars and the confiscation of their properties.  Most of the leaders were burned at the stake after that they had confessed under torture all sorts of evil misbehaviors: spit on the cross, deny Christ, engage in indecent kissing, worship the devil, and other niceties. 

As exterminations go, this one didn't involve large numbers: we read of 54 executions in France in 1310. Probably there were more in other countries, but the total cannot be higher than a few hundred. Nevertheless, it had a big impact: it is said that the fame of Friday the 13th as an unlucky day originates from the date of the arrest of the Templars: Friday, October 13, 1307.

The question is, of course, can it happen again? How about our class of hyper-rich, the "100 billion dollar club," that includes well-known names such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and a few more? They are clearly going to become trillionaires in the near future. But a house full of gold is hard to defend, as we read in the Tao Te Ching. Could our Internet barons follow the destiny that long ago befell another class of financial tycoons, the Templars?

As usual, the key to the future is in the past. Examining the destiny of the Templars, we may understand the factors that may lead to the extermination of a powerful (but not enough) financial guild. 

First of all, why were the Templars exterminated? I argued in previous posts (one, two, and three) that certain categories of people can be exterminated and their possessions confiscated when they are 1) wealthy, 2) clearly identifiable, and 3) militarily weak, The Templars clearly satisfied the first two rules but not necessarily the third: after all, they were a military order. Yet, when the King of France descended on them, they didn't even try a military reaction. It may be that the prowess of the Templar Knights was much overrated: they were more like a private police force for a financial organization, not a real military force. But it may also be that it was exactly the presence of this force that hastened their downfall. Sometimes, a little military power may be worse than none at all, since it invites a decapitation strike. This is probably what happened to the Templars, exterminated just to make sure that they would not become a threat. 

The story of the Templars is just an example of a power struggle that has very ancient origins. One of the earliest written texts we have was written by the Sumerian priestess Enheduanna who complained with the Goddess that her temple had been desecrated by a local warlord. Enheduanna does not say if the warlord was after the temple's money, but we know that, at that time, temples were also banks, a tradition that remained unchanged for millennia. For instance, as late as during the first century AD, we have the record of a local leader who raided the temple of Jerusalem and attacked the resident bankers, most likely in order to finance an armed insurrection against the Roman governor. 

Temples and warlords remained in an uneasy relationship with each other during the Roman Empire, but a few centuries later, raiding Pagan temples became the normal way to finance the Roman armies, a tradition started by Emperor Constantine 1st ("The Great") during the early 4th century AD. Less than a century later, Emperor Theodosius 1st ("The Great") was the last emperor who still could find Pagan temples to raid for their gold and silver. Then, no more temples, and no more Roman Empire.

This Has Happened Previously Before Settling Down To Become A Common Cold...,

I have been doing a great deal of research about a past pandemic which I have never spent much time investigating – the Great Russian Flu of the 1890s. This has always been thought to be an actual influenza – but recent genetic and virologic studies are showing us that this was very likely the introduction of Coronavirus OC43 to the world.

Many physicians at the time were chronicling that the symptoms of this “flu” were different than any other influenza had ever been. Even Sir William Osler, in written statements in his textbooks of Internal Medicine, was of the notion that the symptoms exhibited by patients during that pandemic of the 1890s were really not like the normal flu. His books were written in the decades immediately leading up to the “real” influenza pandemic of 1918. And the one symptom that over and over described by numerous physicians that were writing at the time, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, was depression. This just does not happen to any degree in true INFLUENZA and many remarked on the difference.

It must be noted that the word “depression” is a rather modern word and a modern construct. This construct is from our very reductionist, form-filling out, check the boxes modern medicine. “Depression” today is a drop bucket of multiple different diagnoses of the past. FYI, there are many things like this in medicine, not just depression.

Conan Doyle and Osler would have used more prominently the diagnosis “melancholia” to describe what we commonly use as “depression” today. But interestingly enough, contemporaneous medical writers of the 1890s often used a completely different word with a completely different diagnostic meaning to describe what they were seeing in patients of that pandemic. That word is ACEDIA. I have seen it used repeatedly in my research of the pandemic of the 1890s.

The difference is completely lost on us today – but it is actually a very important distinction. ACEDIA is an old medieval concept which is very difficult to describe. Basically it means a depression of the soul. A SPIRITUAL depression. While melancholia was more of a behavioral depression. Mainly having to do with living with consequences of behavior or reaction to events in a patient’s life.

Interestingly, when I am really talking to these POST COVID patients today – it is indeed more consistent with the spiritual and soul exhaustion of ACEDIA – and not behavioral or reactive like most depressions are. I have occasionally seen this ACEDIA type of depression before, but it is now just one patient after the other. I am also seeing ACEDIA like depression repeatedly in patients who have never had COVID. It is a sign of the times. In the days of Osler and Conan Doyle, they had no way to test patients for the presence of the virus and just assumed everyone had been infected by the miasma. I think today I am seeing this in POST COVID patients and non-infected as well.

The writers of that era in the 1890s were unequivocal in what they were seeing in their coronavirus pandemic – an epidemic of ACEDIA in those who had had the illness. I find it profoundly fascinating that the exact same type of thing is happening in our coronavirus patients and our COVID world today.

If indeed it was OC43 the infection rate is now 100%.

It sweeps over the earth and we all get it every other year or so.

That is what the concept of endemic status is.

Endemicity isn’t necessarily a good thing. Many endemic infections still kill millions yearly malaria and AIDS being the ones that come to my mind instantly. There are many others.

We should obviously try as hard as we can to limit casualities. But at some point, we as humans will need to come to grips with the fact that these pandemic introductions are one of the costs of the privilege of living here. It is part of life.

There is possibly nothing we can do about it. We have repeatedly tried in both human and animal outbreaks and have never been successful even once. I have my doubts we will succeed this time. It will however eventually calm down and behave like its cousins like OC43.

Unlike the mantra of modern neoliberalism, we as humans are not in charge.

When you read contemporaneous writing from politicians and medical people both in the 1890s and 1918 flu you instantly realize that they were doing their best to make citizens understand this simple concept. The hubris approach of modern times that we are in charge would have been unthinkable then. We will see how it all plays out. I have my opinion that they were much more wise during those earlier pandemics.