“Since this body belongs to me for however long I have it….” —Cher
Colin Powell was crucial to creating the mass perception of credibility that allowed Bush and Cheney to sell the lie of WMD in Iraq used to justify the invasion (War Hawks and the Ugly American). So perhaps it is with some irony that his death from COVID-19, despite being fully vaccinated, represents another blow to the credibility of those who claim that, even while admitting the vaccine does not stop transmission of the virus (the main reason for a vaccine), it will still protect you from severe disease, hospitalization, and death. Not if you have the comorbidities associated with hospitalization and death in those who have not been vaccinated.
The establishment press warns that the political right is misusing Powell’s death to spread misinformation about the vaccine. They would like for you to deal in the removed world of statistical inference, in the abstraction calculations of risk. To be sure, risk assessment has its usefulness. Indeed, if you step back and look at the actual risks of this disease, you may start to consider why your freedoms are being systematically taken from you. But, in the end, each person is a concrete reality. Each vaccinated person who is injured by the vaccine or who gets sick, hospitalized, or dies despite having sought out or submitted to the jab is a concrete reality. Each concrete person should be in charge of their own health care decisions.
The news of Powell’s demise comes on the heels of the recent admission that, despite having known about this since August of this year, the efficacy of Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine in preventing viral transmission is the neighborhood of 30 percent. The good news is that the immunity is more durable than the mRNA vaccines (and a bit higher, as new evidence on Pfizer reveals). In other words, these mRNA vaccines are really crappy if Johnson & Johnsons is more durable. These statistics are worse than for the flu vaccine, itself a crappy corporate product the crappiness of which many of you have experienced first hand.
Mandating vaccines with poor efficacy and poor outcomes makes no sense. Not from the standpoint of the concrete person. These vaccines will not end the pandemic. The only thing that will end the pandemic short of the virus mutating into a harmless bug (which it already is for the vast majority of the people it infects) is natural-acquired herd immunity, which provides north of twenty-five times the immunity that the vaccines provide. Natural immunity is more durable. Moreover, it is an immunity trained on the entire viral signature, not just a protein strand of one component (spike). A significant proportion of healthy people are just going to have to get this thing—and the younger the better.
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I was trying to help people understand this on another thread but they kept doing what Gupta does in this video. When I watch this I don’t understand how Gupta, who should understand this, and if I am charitable, cannot wrap his head around something so simple. If hardly any young men go to the hospital for COVID-19 complications of every sort, but 85-90 percent of those young men who suffer heart-related complications from the vaccine wind up in the hospital, then it is obvious that the vaccine is more dangerous than the disease for this age cohort. Remember, the younger ages were only relatively recently permitted to get the vaccine. The casualties of COVID-19 have been mounting from the beginning—which the media won’t let you forget. If folks can’t see that the argument is over at this point, then continuing the argument is pointless.
Rogan is right. I am right. You don’t have to be a doctor or a scientist to understand simple things like this. Others can see this, too—but they will have to quit rationalizing. And stop shilling for Big Pharma. This vaccine is injuring people who don’t need to take the risk. We have to say this. It’s a moral obligation.
Gupta is perfect for CNN, the greatest source of trusted misinformation in operation today. Have you seen the video compilation of the lies they told about Rogan and ivermectin? I share it below CNN is a 24-7 misinformation machine. Why is it on just about everywhere you go? It’s like Big Brother. There are households with CNN on constantly in the background. Turn it off. It’s making you stupid.
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I understand that Merck is set to receive 712 dollars per treatment course for its COVID-19 antiviral pill from the US government—which means from the US taxpayer (past, present, and future). I also understand that the pill costs a fraction of that amount to produce and is reportedly on track for a price of $12 in India. You could, of course, take ivermectin or HCQ, but you will need to move to Nebraska where they allow doctors to treat patients.
What you need to understand is this: US citizens, by paying so much more than cost for heath care in the United States, subsidize cheap health care around the world. “Why can’t we have socialized medicine in the United States?” Because you have to pay for socialized medicine for Europeans. And you have to carry wealthy elites on your back. And you have to open your borders and take in the Third World with all its health care needs, which immigrants receive for free.
Healthcare in the United States is for-profit. And there is no market, so prices are set for reasons other than competition. You live neither under social democracy nor free-market capitalism. You live in a corporate state arrangement, a liminal state between proletarian and serf. This is late capitalism. It’s not sustainable. And we’re on the road to serfdom.
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This is in the style of testimonials religious converts and addicts in recovery share. Please know that I am not knocking religious conversion or addiction work. I am making a social psychological observation. Being white is not a problem as long as society is going to treat people in terms of their racial categories. The problem is treating people in terms of racial categories.
Another problem is the explanation of critical race theory I share below. As I have shown readers of Freedom and Reason, critical race theory is not Neo-Marxist (see Awakening to the Problem of the Awokening). It’s Neo-Hegelian. It’s not aimed at cultural revolution to advance the socialist agenda. Quite the contrary. CRT is a rearticulation of that old tactic of manufacturing racial divisions for the sake of perpetuating capitalist power.
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FAIR has become fringe (for a while now). See this article, for example. The organization have lost touch with the ordinary working class American. The framing of this story is highly revealing. The way progressivism, a projection of corporate governance, is portrayed as somehow on the side of workers, that organized labor represents the interests of the working class as a whole rather than serving an extension of the establishment to manufacture consensus among the middle-class professional fraction of the proletariat (represented by the Democratic Party in the US and Labour in the UK)—this is a project to deepen corporate hegemony.
All the assumptions underpinning the frame are no longer valid in a world where transnational capital controls what appears as mass leftwing politics. This piece is an instantiation of my point about the importance of understanding the real bifurcation in western politics as between populism (democratic, liberal, republican) and progressivism (technocratic, authoritarian, globalist). This piece is establishment propaganda. Perhaps unconsciously. But nonetheless in practice.
Related. Must see TV:
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Samuel Huntington, famous (or notorious) for his “clash of civilization” thesis, in his 1968 Political Order in Changing Societies determined that the United States and the Soviet Union represented successful models of imposing order on their populations, in contrast to underdeveloped countries, where the lack of stable authority explained their relative lack of economic and technological progress. Indeed, there was much to admire in the Soviet model, according to Huntington. In contrast, the United States, as evidenced by the chaos of the 1960s (anti-war protests, race riots, second-wave feminism, student radicals), was a nation in decline, and liberty and democracy without authority and obedience was the reason.
Based on these insights, Zbigniew Brzezinski of the Trilateral Commission tapped Huntington to pen a chapter on the “excess of democracy” for The Crisis of Democracy, published in 1975. Huntington stated directly what conservatives mean in their appeal to military prowess, law and order criminal justice, and the unitary executive: the problem is not “the authority of central government institutions” per se, or its analogs in the corporate world, but the character of the authority that’s emplaced.
The actual concern of the rightwing of the establishment then was not that the cultural left would unleash human nature, which their Hobbesian formulations seemed to suggest, the existence and character of which they accuse the left of denying (not without reason), but that it will substitute one overarching authority with another. Now that the establishment has incorporated the cultural left into the transnational project, the overarching authority comes wrapped in what the cultural conservative feared. And so populism has become a space for refugees—and an opportunity for what remains of the authentic left to expand its working class ranks. (I thought I might end on a hopeful note.)
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