While Excess Post-Pandemic Deaths Soar, Corporate News Organizations Pretend Not to Notice

Russell Brand recently quoted distressing statistics from insurance companies.  As you can see from the following video, there are large numbers of excess deaths in the United States, even though the pandemic is over.  These numbers have been announced by bean counters employed by insurance companies, not politicians and not the public health "experts" who got almost everything wrong during the pandemic.

Brand explains the problem:

All of a sudden, we now know, as a result of the release of insurance premium figures, that excess deaths in America are beyond even the peak of the pandemic even though the pandemic is over. We are aware now that in the first nine months of 2023--I can't believe that this is true but it is--there's as many young Americans who have died as died in all the American wars from Vietnam to present day. The only reason that we know this information is because insurance companies have reported on it...

Why would the legacy media not investigate [unexplained sudden deaths of young healthy-seeming people] with the same vigor that they've applied to a variety of other subjects that appear to enhance their ability to control dissenting voices and shut down counter narratives? Why is there a demand for censorship to be enshrined in law from the EU, to Ireland, to the United Kingdom to the United States of America to Canada? ... I'm not suggesting for a moment that all of those athletes died or all of those athletes were suffering as a result of particular medications, but the data is available now. Excess deaths are rising, the life expectancy in the United States of America is falling and it isn't because of COVID. Comparable figures are available in the United Kingdom. And once again, the same is true: sudden deaths, unexpected deaths, excess deaths are rising and it isn't because of COVID.

Curiously, there is a total lack of appetite to investigate this even though it seems like there's ample evidence to warrant an investigation. Health Agencies are not investigating it. Legacy media organizations are not investigating it. Elsewhere, we've reported on the kind of relationships that exist between big pharma and cable news media who received the vast majority of their funding not only from big pharma, but specifically from Pfizer, just one organization.

Have you ever seen Albert Bourla contend with a single difficult question except for when he was chased by Rebel News from the snowy streets of Davos? Of course you haven't. You've just seen him in puff piece after puff piece. Independent media is vital because it allows these questions to be asked. We're not for the valuable voices in this space, you wouldn't have a COVID inquiry in the UK. You wouldn't have any dissent at all. You wouldn't have no uptake for the latest COVID booster shots because none of this information will be available.

The real power is with you, your independent thoughts, your ability to choose. That's what they are trying to shut down and control. They do not want an awakened dissenting population investigating the high levels of corruption in their own state, in their own media and in particular in globalist corporatist agencies and financial entities, because if people become aware to that we would oppose it. They want to control and regulate a population that is mistrustful of its media its judiciary as law enforcement agencies and in particular, the establishment interests that appear to be able to coordinate all of them.

You've just seen with your own eyes sufficient evidence to warrant a serious investigation into the impact of the pandemic era distinct and separate from the impact of COVID itself, whether that's as a result of the rise of heart disease, or people taking their own lives or mental health or the collapse of small businesses or the impact on children's education, and certainly, and perhaps most importantly, the possible impact of certain medical interventions that were highly propagandized, the message of which was amplified. Questions weren't asked the sand was shut down. The gym experts were shamed and smeared and shut down and dissenting voices were attacked. This is time for a global reckoning. Let's make sure that 2024 isn't like 2023 a year where ordinary people's views were oppressed. So the establishment power could be continually magnified.

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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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About Parenthood

Geoffrey Miller and Diane Fleischman have discovered the transformative miracle that parenting is. Before I became a parent, I didn't understand that having daughters was going to change me so dramatically and so positively. Parenting was equal amounts of hard work and joy. Among the many other benefits, it was my chance to be a kid again. We all grew up together. And now that my daughters are young women, I continue to appreciate being a father more and more each day.

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Robert Malone’s Bleak Assessment of Where We are Headed

Compare this bleak assessment by Robert Malone to the fairy tale version of how government works that many of us learned in grade school. I wish I could disagree with Malone. I see no reason that any of these things are going to get any better, despite the fact that many intelligent and good-hearted people are out there fighting for free speech and government accountability.

Functionally, unlike either industry (market forces) or the military (failed wars), there are no external forces currently limiting the expansion of the dysfunctional, counterproductive and (frankly) parasitic behavior of today’s Executive branch. Legislative branch oversight has been emasculated by consent with lobbyists collectively clamping down the Burdizzo, and in 1984 the Judicial branch conceded its authority to serve as a functional check on Executive/administrative branch arrogance via the Supreme Court Chevron Deference decision. And like the Federal Reserve, the informal “fourth estate” (corporate media), which historically provided a separate and semi-autonomous oversight function, has also been captured by this permanent bureaucracy.

The administrative and deep state has been so successful in capturing and manipulating media and related communication (largely via CIA, FBI, CISA and intelligence community infiltration) that they are able to seamlessly deploy advanced modern propaganda, PsyWar technologies and financial giveaways to control all narratives and information which might otherwise cause the majority of the electorate to check their actions, and in this way they completely avoid accountability. The CIA, FBI, CISA and intelligence community have become enablers of administrative and deep state excesses and overreach. With this corrupted information ecosystem, there cannot be any accountability of the administrative and deep state. In cooperation with a variety of corporate and NGO partners via “public-private partnerships”, the executive branch has completely captured and co-opted all oversight mechanisms which could enable or enforce checks and balances. The “ballot box” is well on its way to being a mere inconvenience, because for the majority of voters the synthetic false reality projected by captured media is the only political “reality” they encounter.

This is how modern nation-states abruptly collapse. As one recent example, recall the history of the USSR and most of the former communist Eastern European states. Modern nation-states fail by suffocating under the weight of bloated unaccountable bureaucracies whose primary objectives are to serve and sustain themselves rather than to promote and defend the general welfare and security of the citizenry. The social contract is stomped into dust by the boot of an uncontrollably arrogant, authoritarian, self-serving bureaucracy...

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About Friends and Trust

Brett Weinstein, speaking about the stress-testing of friendships (on the October 29, 2023 episode of his podcast with guest, Joshua Slouch):

I've now been through several of these events in my own life. And I've noticed a pattern, which is that in every case, these divisive crises reveal people's character. And each time I've seen the same pattern: there are people you thought you could trust who absolutely disappoint you. And then there are people that you never expected, maybe you didn't even know them ahead of time, who rise to the challenge and they shine. And you see that somebody, maybe you didn't know their name, but they turn out to have tremendous strength of character and insight, and they stand up at the right moment and defend you for no reason. Right? No reason other than that it's the right thing to do. And so each time I have lost friends, and it's painful. And I have gained people who are much higher quality. And I call this "painful upgrade," Right? It keeps upgrading your social circle.

And I now have to look back on the world. Before I had been through any of these and realized that I was walking around with trust in people that carried with them the ability to absolutely betray under the worst possible circumstances, and that that's dangerous. You are far better to know who actually has the strength of character to face these things. And to limit your significant interactions to that pool of people. Right? It is a gift to know who cannot be trusted with your well being. And I don't like to say that, but I think people need to be alerted to this. Because, you know, people are not labeled. They don't even know themselves whether they're capable of this until they're faced with the situation. It's the crisis that reveals it. And it's the silver lining of these terrible chapters that it does tell you who's really on your team.

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