Illustration: Holding Opposing Ideas in One’s Mind Simultaneously

Entertaining conversation illustrating this quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “[T]he test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." As Bill Maher argues, McDonalds tastes good even though it it not healthy food. BOTH of these things are true. Same thing for ice cream and many other foods. Most important these days, we can love other people even though we disagree strongly with some of their beliefs and opinions. Really.

But in modern times, many people are not admitting to things they know to be true because it is not approved by their respective tribes. We need to stop allowing emotions and social pressure to prevent us from saying things we know to be true. Only then will we be able to have meaningful conversations with each other.

As I've written repeatedly, embracing membership in a tribe reduces one's IQ by 50 points.

Additional note: I think Casey Means is courageous and brilliant. I highly recommend her new book, Good Energy.

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The NYT Presents the “News”

This paragraph from an article in the New York Times speak for itself:

Mr. Kennedy has singled out Froot Loops as an example of a product with too many artificial ingredients, questioning why the Canadian version has fewer than the U.S. version. But he was wrong. The ingredient list is roughly the same, although Canada’s has natural colorings made from blueberries and carrots while the U.S. product contains red dye 40, yellow 5 and blue 1 as well as Butylated hydroxytoluene, or BHT, a lab-made chemical that is used “for freshness,” according to the ingredient label.

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Bret Weinstein: Every Institution Dedicated to Public Truthseeking is Under Attack.

Bret Weinstein's presentation to Senator Ron Johnson's ROUNDTABLE-American Health and Nutrition - Expert Panel:

I believe we must zoom out if we are to understand the pattern that we are gathered here to explore, because the pattern is larger than federal health agencies and the COVID cartel. If we do zoom out and ask, what are they hiding?

The answer becomes as obvious as it is disturbing. They are hiding everything. It will be jarring for many to hear a scientist speak with such certainty. It should be jarring. We are trained to present ideas with caution as hypotheses in need of a test. But in this case, I have tested the idea, and I am as certain of it as I am of anything. We are being systematically blinded. It is the only explanation I have encountered that will not only describe the present, but also, in my experience, predicts the future with all but perfect accuracy.

The pattern is a simple one. You can see it clearly and test it yourself. Every single institution dedicated to public truthseeking is under simultaneous attack. They are all in a state of collapse. Every body of experts fails utterly. Individual experts who resist or worse, in an attempt to return their institutions to sanity, they find themselves coerced into submission.

If they won't buckle, they are marginalized or forced out. Those outside of the institutions who either seek truth alone or who build new institutions with a truth-seeking mission face merciless attacks on both their integrity and expertise, often by the very institutions whose mission they refuse to abandon.

There is a saying in military circles, once is a mistake, twice is a coincidence, three times is enemy action. I have no doubt that given an hour, the people on this panel could point to a hundred examples of the pattern I have just described, while finding even a handful of exceptions would pose a significant challenge.

We are left in a fool's paradise. Our research universities spend huge sums of public money to reach preordained conclusions. Professors teach only lessons that are consistent with wisdom students have picked up on TikTok, even when those lessons contradict the foundational principles of their disciplines.

Once proud newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post only report important stories after they have become common knowledge. Morticians must now raise the alarm over patterns missed by medical examiners. The CDC has become an excellent guide to protecting your health, but only for people who realize you should do the opposite of whatever it advises.

The courts, the last holdout in this ongoing inversion of reality, are now regularly used as a coercive weapon of elites against those who threaten them. We have literally witnessed the Department of Homeland Security attempt to set up a truth ministry and declare accurate critique of government as a kind of terrorism.

To my fellow patriots in the West, the pattern is unmistakable. I cannot tell you with any certainty who they are or what they hope to accomplish, but I can tell you that we are being systematically denied the tools of enlightenment and the rights guaranteed in our Constitution.

We, those who remain dedicated to the values of the West, must fight this battle courageously and we must win. For if we do not stem the tide, the result will be a dark age that differs from prior dark ages only in the power and sophistication of the coercive instruments wielded by those who will rule us.

The entire four hours of testimony here. Description of the proceedings:

Senator Ron Johnson and a panel of experts provide a foundational and historical understanding of the changes that have occurred over the last century within public sanitation, agriculture, food processing, and healthcare industries which impact the current state of national health.

List of Speakers:

Continue ReadingBret Weinstein: Every Institution Dedicated to Public Truthseeking is Under Attack.

Members of Congress Fall in Love with Ozempic

New drug, new numbers, same well-oiled corrupt path:

"Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:

Today, over 100 members of Congress support a bill to fund Ozempic with Medicare at $1,500 a month. Most of these members have taken money from the manufacturer of that product, a European company called Novo Nordisk. As everyone knows, once a drug is approved for Medicare, it goes to Medicaid.

And there is a push to recommend Ozempic for Americans as young as six over a condition, obesity, that is completely preventable and barely even existed 100 years ago. Since 74% of Americans are obese, the cost of all of them, if they take their Ozempic prescriptions, will be $3 trillion a year. This is a drug that has made Novo Nordisk the biggest company in Europe.

It's a Danish company, but the Danish government does not recommend it. It recommends a change in diet to treat obesity and exercise. Virtually Novo Nordisk's entire value is based upon its projections of what Ozempic is going to sell to Americans. For half the price of Ozempic, we could purchase regeneratively raised organic agriculture, organic food for every American three meals a day and gym membership for every obese American. Why are members of Congress doing the bidding of this Danish company instead of standing up for American farmers and children? Because Novo Nordisk is one of the largest funders of medical research, the media and politicians and the medical schools all go along with them.

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Sharyl Attkisson Discusses the Widespread Corruption of American “Science”

Fascinating and horrifying discussion here. The woman being interviewed by Jan Jekielek is Sharyl Attkisson, author of a brand new book that I have ordered but not yet read: Follow the Science: How Big Pharma Misleads, Obscures, and Prevails (2024).

If we are not collectively (as a country) able to care about our children becoming sick or dying from preventable causes, we have fallen more deeply into nihilism that I could have ever imagined. We seem to be subject to the whims of medical rent seekers, people and companies who are completely willing to accept short term profits in return for hurting and killing millions of Americans. And they know no bounds. They (especially Big Pharma and the federal agencies it has captured) are willing to propagandize and censor researchers and all of the rest of us to keep the money flowing.

I created a transcript of this interview, but I would urge everyone to watch it (it's only 9 minutes) and to consider buying her new book.  Here is the transcript:

Sharyl Attkisson 0:15 I call him the frog professor in that chapter. And it's a fascinating story, because over 25 years ago, this man was hired by a chemical company to study a chemical that, sadly is in most of our drinking water. It's run-off from crops used on a lot of corn. The company was hoping to prove it was safe and not causing problems, because the EPA was going to be analyzing it and taking a look at regulations. And unfortunately for him, he found it was feminizing. In his words, frogs, taking frogs that were male and turning them, in essence, into female, or having frogs not develop testes or develop both testes and ovaries at the same time. And a host of other research has built upon this. It turns out, it impacts all vertebrates, basically, in some form, in negative ways, many different ways, besides this feminization.

But what happened to him when he tried to simply report what he had learned, I think, is a lesson for all of us to how studies and sciences skewed today are skewed today because the company had a button-down contract, he wasn't allowed to report the negative findings. And people don't realize, pharmaceutical industry hires academics, but the contracts now will say, in essence, if you find something negative, you can't publish. It used to be everything got published. So to his credit, he went independent. He quit that job, repeated the research independently so that he could publish it, and again, it's been built on over the years with a lot of powerful research, but what the company did to try to destroy him. The tactics that they deployed to try to get him fired, to controversialize his research, investigate him, investigate his wife, psychoanalyze him. And this was all confirmed with documents that were released as part of a lawsuit. When the company was sued over allegedly adulterating water in various cities, they paid a huge settlement without admitting fault. But I think it's an instructive lesson in what happens to you as a researcher, if you unfortunately happen to be off-the-narrative of what powerful interests may want you to find, how you can suffer and pay the price for that.

Jan Jekielek 2:25

I think we have a bit of that sort of idealized view of of or at least have had a overly idealized view of research as being kind of something pure. And of course, one would want to keep it that way at some at some level, but tell me a little bit about the sort of the general picture then,

Sharyl Attkisson 2:46 Sadly, the scientific industry has been so corrupted by money sources that even the people that you'd like to think would defend, for example, the scientific journals, have thrown up their hands and said much, or most of The science printed in the journals that your doctor rely relies on today is not to be believed because it's been so corrupted. And I was stunned, because I'm one of those people that used to think, "Hey, you read something and it's in a peer reviewed, published journal." Everybody always says, that's the gold standard. That's it.

Come to find out, Dr Marcia Angel, former head of the New England Journal of Medicine, said that she learned, as editor in chief, she could not stop the bad studies with the bad information in them, that were hopelessly tainted by the pharmaceutical industry. She said she lost that battle. The current editor of the British journal Lancet has said much the same. Dr Richard Horton: he in a stunning editorial some years ago, he said that much of the science is not to be believed, and then many studies have been built upon that sense that give high percentages of information in medical journals that are not to be believed because they've been corrupted by the scientific, you know, money interests, basically, let's say, pharmaceutical and chemical industries.

And there are a lot of tactics that I learned they use that are invisible to us, such as ghost writing. A study that looks like it's it's signed by an independent doctor who's paid for the use of a signature. But the article was actually written by the drug company, or a middleman hired by the drug company, not disclosed in the article in the scientific journal, and it's being used to pump up the need, or supposed need, for a drug that's going to be introduced, or a medicine that they currently make, or to make it look like the medicine works very well with no side effects. And people have no idea this material, not only the studies, may be tainted, but they're literally being written by a drug company when not disclosed necessarily in the final product. Those are just some of the conflicts that happen today.

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