Did the U.S. Government Engineer Lyme Disease?

As with many disturbing things these days, I don't know how to proceed. Once again, it is being creditably suggested that our government engaged in reckless or intentional wrongdoing. This latest concern about Lyme disease is being reported on X by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University), based on Bitten: The Secret history of Lyme disease and Biological Weapons, a 2020 book by Kris Newby.

This latest concern merely deepens my already deep suspicions about the conduct and intentions of the U.S. government, especially given the fact that the U.S. government, in coordination with the corporate media, has been caught red-handed engaging in pervasive dishonest narrative control regarding many topics, including public health. For a deep dive on the evidence that the United States has been illegally and pervasively censoring its own citizens through illegal "jawboning," see this 2023 opinion in the case of Missouri v Biden, by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Excerpt from Bhattacharya's Tweet:

I just finished @krisnewby's Bitten, which tells the history of the US government's secret program in the 1950s and 1960s to weaponize ticks to deliver deadly bacteria to incapacitate unsuspecting populations.

Newby, a talented journalist and science writer, structures her history around a biography of WIlly Burgdorfer, the Swiss-American scientist who discovered borellia burgdorferi, a spirochete bacteria often found in Lyme disease patients.

It's an incredible, infuriating, well-written book worth your time.

A few lessons:

1. The mid-20th century US biomedical research establishment was psychopathic, whole-heartedly embracing reckless, deadly investigations in the name of developing vaccines and bioweapons.

2. It is possible (& perhaps likely, though not proven) that the emergence and spread of Lyme disease may have been caused by this research program, which included large open-air testing of intentionally infected ticks on US soil.

3. The bioweapons program used combinations of viruses and bacteria infecting the same tick to hide the body's immune response to infection from detection by standard medical tests. . . .

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The Modus Operandi of the U.S. War Machine

In 2022, as the U.S. was ramping up its support for war in Ukraine and interfering with settlement efforts, there was a coordinated effort to keep you in the dark on this history of U.S. interference in Ukrainian politics, every bit of it true and well-documented. Now 450,000 Russian and Ukrainian soldiers are dead. None of this carnage was necessary. More than $100B of U.S. tax $ spent, much of it to line the pockets of U.S. weapons manufacturers. Joe Biden and his Iraq-failure architects, neocon advisors Victoria Nuland and Antony Blinken, have this blood on their hands, as do the U.S. corporate media on the left and right. The following video is short (less than 5 minutes) and it should be required viewing most Americans.

[Added Jan 6, 2024]

Biden's simplistic story about the Ukraine war is "Bad Putin." Now compare that fairy tale with the sprawling nefarious corrupt involvement of Blackrock, as discussed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.  Corporate greed is also working non-stop to keep Blackrock completely out of the corporate media headlines so you can continue to believe the story about "Bad Putin."

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Public: Trust in Corporate News Deservedly Continues to Plummet

Excerpt from "It’s Time To Save Civilization From The Pathocratic StateRescuing democracy and free speech from nihilism and psychopathologies will require new institutions — and your support," by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND ZAID JILANI at Public. . An excerpt:

[T]he events of the last year make clear that the media and political establishment in the US and other Western nations pose a far greater threat to democracy than the populist movements they relentlessly defame.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the release of the Twitter Files, and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit revealed how widespread and near-total the Western establishment’s control of the media environment was and is. The picture it presents of itself as neutral, objective, and balanced is a lie. The media and political establishment are anti-populist, elitist, and anti-democratic. They deeply resent the rise of new independent voices through social media because they have long held undeserved influence over what ideas can be discussed, what’s important, and who can hold elected office.

The single word that best describes the professional-managerial class-dominated “deep state” agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, FBI, and others, along with news media corporations that engage in character assassination and disinformation, is “pathocracy.” ...

The good news is that the public increasingly distrusts the news media. Just 32% have some or a lot of trust in the news media compared to 29% who report “not very much” trust and 39% who say they have “none at all.” Nearly every major media organization saw its digital audience decline 13% to 35%. News media corporations will lose $2 billion between 2021 and 2026 due to a decline of print advertising spending from $7 billion to $5 billion, and flat digital spending. And mainstream news media companies laid off 2,681 people in 2023, a nearly 50% increase from 2022.

Continue ReadingPublic: Trust in Corporate News Deservedly Continues to Plummet

The Social Costs of Sincere Truth-Seeking

I founded this website in 2006 primarily as my way of documenting my journey, my attempt to make sense of things around me. I've always tried to get things right, but that doesn't always work out. Looking back, I've found more than a few articles on this site where modern-day me disagrees with the me of the past. There is no way to get everything right, because truth-seeking is a never-ending task. 90% of the recipe is not giving up, staying in the game, not falling prey to tribal impulses.

We live in a tribal world, however. A world were powerful tribal forces are concocted not only organically, but by large media operations, often working in concert with the U.S. government, including the U.S. security state. Many people scoff that that. They are fish who fantasize that they are totally free, not constrained by the water in which they swim.

Many of the people I formerly spent a lot of time with have remained fully immersed in the left-leaning corporate news ecosystem. They grew up with the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They have trusted these news sources for many years and they continue to trust them because they see FOX as the only alternative. They have been convinced by corporate media that they must avoid all independent journalists. Most of them think they are already well informed, but they have a one-sided understanding of many salient issues of the day, including censorship and warmongering, issues the democrats of ten years ago opposed, but now they largely favor.

How could that be? If you ask them, they have no answer for why they have flipped 180 degrees over the last ten years. They cannot point to any new evidence that explains their enthusiasm for supporting the war, including the war in Ukraine. It was so utterly strange how so many of them got quiet about the war in the Ukraine as soon as the U.S. turned its military might from Ukraine to Israel. How was it that so many of those gold and blue flags quietly disappeared from social media and front porches, without explanation?

Many of these same people, formerly ferocious opponents of censorship, now advocate for censorship. So much so that many of them deny the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex, despite abundant evidence from the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger recently posted this graph on Twitter. Notice how Democrats have become big advocates for censorship:

Most people I know are intentionally and proudly ignorant of the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Missouri v. Biden. They are sure they don't need to know anything about this decision even though they no almost nothing about it.  They run away when I try to tell them about these dystopian findings by the Fifth Circuit:

The Individual Plaintiffs have not sought to invalidate social-media companies’ censorship policies. Rather, they asked the district court to restrain the officials from unlawfully interfering with the social-media companies’ independent application of their content-moderation policies....The Plaintiffs allege that federal officials ran afoul of the First Amendment by coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech],” including by “threats of adverse government action” like antitrust enforcement and legal reforms. We agree... [Article continues . . .]

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