If you are frustrated with the national "debate" on immigration, I invite you to list to this episode of "The Jury is Out," a podcast I co-host along with John Simon and Tim Cronin of the Simon Law Firm. Our guest for Episode 427 is Javad Khazaeli, a St. Louis attorney who has practiced in the field of Immigration law for years. He offers many stories about our massively dysfunctional immigration system, some of them jaw dropping. I guarantee that you won't be disappointed, no matter what you think you know about immigration. This is Part I of a two-part series, the second episode on immigration will drop soon.
Bonus: Watch and listen to Ronald Reagan and George Bush debate Immigration in a 1980 Presidential Debate. If you think you already know the kinds of things they will say, you are probably very wrong.
If you enjoyed this episode of "The Jury is Out," feel free to subscribe and listen to our show wherever you get your podcasts.
A love letter written with a typewriter today would be considered a romantic gesture, however in 1906 they were called the most “cold-blooded, mechanical, unromantic production imaginable" by one writer.
More tragically, the NIH has $42 billion. BARDA, which is part of the PAHPA Act, has another billion dollars and they couldn't do the most basic clinical research we needed done quickly to answer the basic questions to end the controversies and the conspiracy theories to finally get up the questions Americans were asking us: How does it spread? Is it from touching surfaces? Do I need to pour 20 gallons of alcohol on my groceries? Fauci was telling teachers in July to wear gloves and goggles. Or was it spread airborne? That could have been answered in 24 hours in one of our BSL4 labs? Or in one week of clinical research to answer the question: When are you most contagious? What's the peak day of viral shedding? How long do you have you have to quarantine for? Do masks work? We could have answered these with definitive basic clinical research early. They didn't.
And so I think it's fair to ask how did they do in preparing us? For the pandemic? We've spent over $20 billion on PAHPA over the last 20 years. What has that done for us? How many lives were saved during the COVID pandemic because of investments by PAHPA or BARDA? Now, they've done some good work. I've seen it. But regardless of one's political affiliation, they've got to acknowledge that we doctors in the public were flying blind. We had opinion ruling the day on what we should do or not do when we could have been governed by evidence. Policy driven by good basic clinical research. We didn't have that. And so we had a void of clinical research. And guess what filled that void over half a year? A year? Two years? What filled that void were political opinions. Those controversies could have been ended early. We had the money.
Chesterton's Fence is a principle that says change should not be made until the reasoning behind the current state of affairs is understood. It says the rash move, upon coming across a fence, would be to tear it down without understanding why it was put up.
Peter McCullough, M.D. was censored during COVID and he has since been proven correct on many of his positions. Yet he didn't become bitter (at least that I could see in public). Rather, he keep trying to communicate where we, as a society, have lost our way. McCullough keeps trying to shed light on the problems he detects, but I detect an ominous undertone in his writings, a sense that we are sustaining too much damage as a society and that we might no longer have the tools, as a society, to repair the damage. I increasingly detect that same feelings in myself. In a recent article, McCullough writes:
Once the belief in a country and institution has been lost, it is very difficult to rejuvenate it. This is the principle reason why most conservative commentators often come off as sounding staid and uninspiring to the young. It’s as though the spirit has departed from the body that no amount of edifying rhetoric can reanimate. As Hegel pointed out in the preface to his Elements of the Philosophy of Law:
Philosophy always arrives too late to teach the world how it should be. As the thought of the world, philosophy appears only in the period after reality has been achieved and has completed its formative process. This lesson, also taught by history, is that only in the late stage of reality does the ideal appear in opposition to this reality, grasping it in the form of an intellectual construct.
When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a form of life has grown old, and cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Owl of Minerva takes flight only as the dusk begins to fall.
That feeling that we might have crossed the event horizon has increasingly been expressed by people who inspire me, including (now deceased) George Carlin and Jonathan Haidt.
"'I am now very pessimistic,' Haidt said. 'I think there is a very good chance American democracy will fail, that in the next 30 years we will have a catastrophic failure of our democracy.'"
We might have fucked things up too much to ever fix them. George Carlin gets the last word here.:
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