Walter Kirn Ponders this Moment

Walter is an excellent writer and my respect for him has soared based on his weekly conversations with Matt Taibbi. His recent Tweet:

I've done all I could this year, and perhaps more than I should have, to clarify the issues before us and characterize the nature of our moment. I didn't do it for the money, and there hasn't been any. In fact, I lost some. Happily. My personal American dream involved becoming a writer and an artist, see, and expressing myself as well as I knew how and as freely as I dared. This year, for the first time in my life, I saw that the opportunity to chase this dream was gravely, gravely threatened, not just for me but for the kids and young people who are much like I was once, an odd little kid who was trying to find his voice. To keep this great road of possibility open seemed to me the highest mission I could assign myself. I did. It's been an adventure. And such a pleasure.

But now it's time for words to turn to action. It's time for us to protect what we hold dear. For me it is our right to speak, think, and create freely, without fear, or at least without fear from the authorities and the moneyed interests and powers that lie behind them.

I hope I've made a difference in this cause. I hope I've convinced some others to join me in it. And to act accordingly, democratically, as is our right and duty.

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Why Martin Gurri is Voting for Trump

Martin Gurri's thoughtful analysis of the considerable flaws of both candidates. The Founders of this Country must be weeping in their graves.

"Kamala Harris or Donald Trump—the empty pantsuit of elitism or the eternal master of disaster? We must pick one or the other on November 5."

Here is Gurri's overview of the Democrats:

There are only two vital forces in American politics today: those who wish to control everything, and those who wish not to be controlled. The antagonists are roughly equal in number but vastly disproportionate in strength. True to its nature, one side controls virtually all the institutions that hedge the life of the voters. Also true to its nature, the other side spends most of the time fighting with itself.

The forces of control own the White House, the Senate, the media, the universities, the mainstream churches, the federal and state bureaucracies, most corporations, most digital platforms, and the entirety of American culture. Homegrown control freaks can also rely on assistance from Control International, the cabal of like-minded elites that runs the United Nations, the European Union, and any number of nation-states from Britain to Brazil.

Why the itch to control? Nietzsche would explain it as pure will to power, and that’s a perfectly adequate account.

The Democratic Party is the party of control.

Excerpt re Harris:

So here is the most compelling reason I will be voting against Harris and the Democrats in November. I was born in Cuba. I recognize the stench of hypocrisy emanating from those who conceal lust for power behind a buzz of salvationist jargon.

If the control accumulated by the administration had been used for good—if the world were calm and at peace, say, or the American public brought to unity as was promised—we might have been convinced it has some merit. But there’s a reason Biden is no longer on the ballot. There’s a reason Harris is running away from her administration’s policies. At home and abroad, the last four years have been a rolling disaster—and the voters know it. This crowd understands institutional control and nothing else. Out in the world, failure has been habitual, horrendous, epic in its dimensions.

Where to begin? For motives I am hard put to explain, the Biden-Harris people encouraged millions of illegal aliens to swarm into our urban centers. They mismanaged the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, relying (naturally) on harmful school closures, lockdowns, and mandates, all based on contrived falsehoods, and they utterly botched the persuasion campaign for the vaccines. They inflated, indebted, and overregulated the economy. They spent trillions but were unable to build or achieve much beyond a handful of charging stations: We can guess where the money went. They promoted grotesque stereotypes based on race and sexual preference, a policy that sowed division and reaped distrust...

China is aggressively expanding its military, particularly its navy, even as our own military has atrophied because of antique equipment and low enlistment rates. We can’t even deploy all our warships because we lack the personnel to do so.

There are too many leaks in the dike and not enough fingers—not to mention an absolute dearth of strategic thinking to identify where our priorities lie in a dangerous world.

This, then, is my secondary reason for voting against Harris. I’m not sure we can survive four more years of such toxic levels of incompetence.

Harris is not helped by her recent interviews. Brett Baier tells her the numbers: 79% of Americans think the country is on the wrong track and you and Joe Biden have been in charge for the past 3 1/2 years. Harris: It's Trump's Fault.

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Huxley’s Prediction

Huxley clearly saw it coming:

"Under the relentless thrust of accelerating over-population and increasing over-organization, and by means of ever more effective methods of mind-manipulation, the democracies will change their nature . . . the quaint old forms... elections, parliaments, supreme courts and all the rest... will remain.

The underlying substance will be a new kind of Totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly like they were in the good old days. Democracy & freedom will be the theme of every broadcast & editorial, Meanwhile, the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite will quietly run the show as they see fit."

—Aldous Huxley, 1962

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You Absolutely Need to Take the Flu Vaccine is another Modern Fable

Every day, it seems, I discover that something that was indubitably true is not true at all. Many of these discoveries are in thd area of public health arena, where I depended completely on "experts" to do their jobs. Today's topic is the flu shot, the vaccination that (I've been told for years) is a life-saving necessity for everyone, especially senior citizens.

Sharyl Atkisson is a 5-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for investigative reporting. She's a NYT bestselling author, managing editor of the TV program “Full Measure. Her article is "Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All." Excerpt:

"Over 20 years, the percentage of seniors getting flu shots increased sharply from 15% to 65%. It stands to reason that flu deaths among the elderly should have taken a dramatic dip making an “X” graph like this (refers to graphic). Instead, flu deaths among the elderly continued to climb.

It was hard to believe, so researchers at the National Institutes of Health set out to do a study adjusting for all kinds of factors that could be masking the true benefits of the shots. But no matter how they crunched the numbers, they got the same disappointing result: flu shots had not reduced deaths among the elderly.

In fact, the researchers said they could not correlate flu shots with reduced deaths in any age group.

It’s not what health officials hoped to find. NIH wouldn’t let us interview the study’s lead author. So we went to Boston and found the only co-author of the study not employed by NIH: Dr. Tom Reichert.

Dr. Reichert: “We realized we had incendiary material.”

Dr. Reichert said they thought their study would prove vaccinations helped.

Dr. Reichert: “We were trying to do something mainstream. That’s for sure.”

Sharyl: “Were you surprised?”

Dr. Reichert: “Astonished.”

Sharyl: “Did you check the data a couple of times to make sure?”

Dr. Reichert: “Well, even more than that. We’ve looked at other countries now and the same is true.”

That international study, soon to be published, finds the same poor results in Australia, France, Canada and the UK. And other new research stokes the idea that decades of promoting flu shots in seniors, and the billions spent, haven’t had the desired result. The current head of national immunizations confirms CDC is now looking at new strategies, but stops short of calling the present strategy a failure."

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Some of the Reasons Why Public Health Officials Have Completely Lost my Trust

I never used to think about vaccines. I trusted public health officials and I willingly let them put 3 COVID shots into my arms. But now I regret that. In fact I'm furious that we were all lied to and misled by an artificially concocted false consensus that the COVID vax was "safe and effective." Now it is clear that our public health officials lied about almost everything and are still withholding the data about all-cause mortality. Lied about EVERYTHING? That sounds like hyperbole, but here's a starter list.

To me the most concerning issue is a lot of what was considered misinformation was and is true:

    • vaccines don't halt transmission
    • the virus came from a lab
    • cloth masks don't work
    • closing schools is a bad idea
    • toddlers shouldn't masks
    • natural immunity exists

We could add many other items to this already-disturbing list.

And then I learned about this shocking insurance industry data:

The man giving this Congressional testimony isn't some random person. As you can see from the chyron, Edward Dowd was formerly a senior investment advisor at Blackrock.

My mistrust is made even worse thanks to revelations like this on by John Leake, in an article he titles: "The Greatest Coverup in History: NIH Director Francis Collins on EcoHealth Alliance/WIV partnership: "There's a lot more to this story than we have been able to talk about." Here's an excerpt: [More . . . ]

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