Thinking Points, Feb. 16, 2022
Martial law in Canada, Naomi Klein cancels herself, new FDA boss same as the old FDA boss, those other narcos, Jennifer Margulis, cane toads, Matthew Yglesias, petting zoos, Scott Gottlieb lies again
Here are my latest thinking points:
Covid vaccines
A product so safe and effective that they have to impose martial law and seize people's bank accounts in order to get them to take it.
Naomi Klein cancels herself
Naomi Klein is one of the most important progressive public intellectuals in a generation. Her first book, No Logo took the world by storm and rode the wave of anti-globalization sentiment following the 1999 Seattle WTO protests. Each book she has written since has become a bigger sensation than the last — The Shock Doctrine in 2007, This Changes Everything in 2014, On Fire in 2019.
Klein’s books are an event — released simultaneously in multiple countries and multiple languages around the world, complete with documentary film tie-ins (her husband Avi Lewis is a filmmaker) to move her narrative into public consciousness.
When the left thinks of their brightest minds, Naomi Klein is always at the top of the list. She won the Sydney Peace Prize in 2016 (I attended her acceptance speech). In 2018 she received a three-year appointment as the inaugural Gloria Steinem Endowed Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutger’s University. She is now a Professor of Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia.
I’ve read all of Klein’s books, interacted with her online, and met her at a book signing for Shock Doctrine where she wrote, “Be brave” on the title page.
Over the weekend, supporters of the Pharma-fascist Trudeau administration in Canada organized a counter-protest against the truckers who are occupying Ottawa. The counter-protest was not a surprise, fascists often find ways to use citizens — whether through militias or thuggish fake protest marches — as their shock troops against freedom. The counter-protest was small and featured the hate speech we have come to expect from the Cult of Vaccine.
So imagine my horror when the most prominent anti-corporate strategist on the left, Naomi Klein, weighed in on the side of the reactionary fascist counter-protestors, against the working class truckers in Ottawa. She was downright gleeful that the bougie counter-protestors were trying to stomp on the working class.
The Covid pandemic is the quintessential example of Disaster Capitalism. Federal bureaucrats created the chimera virus in partnership with the U.S. DOD and a Chinese bioweapons lab. The state blocks access to safe and effective treatments, thus killing millions of people, in order to create the market for a vaccine. The vaccine does not work and comes with catastrophic lifelong side effects — for which Pharma will sell even more treatments and create a lifelong revenue stream from our bodies. Pharma pays politicians to overlook these crimes against humanity and regulators get rich through consulting deals, patents, and holding stocks in these companies. A revolving door with industry insures that bureaucrats get another massive payday after they betray the public trust by approving dangerous products. And yet Klein, the person who popularized political economy research into Disaster Capitalism, is unable to see any of this.
Klein apparently thought that she was exempt from the truism that “the base determines the superstructure.” Klein is part of the ruling class now so of course she wants to crush the peasants for getting uppity and not knowing their place.
With apologies to George Orwell, ‘if you want a vision of Canada’s future under Trudeau/Freeland (with whoops of support from Klein), imagine a Manolo Blahnik boot stamping on a human face — forever.’
As the left descends into self-parody, the Babylon Bee has become cutting-edge investigative journalism:
Noam Chomsky, Paul Krugman, all of the Obama alumni, everyone at The Atlantic, everyone at The New Yorker (especially James Surowiecki), and now Naomi Klein all jumped into a volcano because Pharma told them to. None of these people has ever read a vaccine safety study, interviewed someone who thinks differently than they do, or ever bothered to do even the most basic due diligence in evaluating the safety and effectiveness of Covid (or any other) vaccines. They took it ON FAITH that the Pharma felons were telling the truth, and they are catastrophically wrong.
The left is now a fascist wasteland.
Them days are over
The entire policy platform of the left has been replaced by Pharma Über Alles.
You cannot make this up
Robert Califf served as FDA Commissioner under President Obama from February 2016 to January 2017. During that short period of time he approved five new opioids even as the opioid epidemic was ravaging towns throughout America. Janet Woodcock served as his enforcer, pushing these deadly drugs through the FDA approval process.
When Trump came to power, Califf left the FDA to go make a bunch of money serving Pharma and Big Tech.
When Biden came to power, Janet Woodcock was named Acting FDA Commissioner. But Biden could not get Janet Woodcock approved as full-time FDA Commissioner because of her role in promoting opioids, under Robert Califf’s direction.
Today Robert Califf was confirmed by a vote of 50 to 46 in the Senate to become the new FDA Commissioner!
Because Cartel.
One of Califf’s first tasks will be trying to get the Pfizer mRNA shot approved for kids under 5 even though the shot does not work and the clinical trial has failed twice.
Let’s welcome Robert Califf to his new job by flooding his office with letters telling him ABSOLUTELY NOT. He has not been sworn in yet but as soon as I can find his new contact information I will do a call to action. If you find it first please post it in the comments.
Speaking of drug dealers
Manuel Zelaya was a populist President of Honduras who wanted to usher in sweeping land reforms to make life better for the peasants. In 2009 he was overthrown in a coup d’état that was supported by the Obama Administration and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The coup created a power vacuum that was eventually filled by Juan Orlando Hernández who was President of Honduras from 2014 to 2022. But it turns out that Hernández was a narco-trafficker. Oops! Now the feds wants him extradited to the U.S.
Former Honduras President Detained After a U.S. Extradition Request
The request said Juan Orlando Hernández, who left office last month, was wanted in connection to a “violent drug-trafficking conspiracy.”
What people often forget is that the immigration crisis is fueled by the fact that the U.S. government overthrows any government in Latin America that tries to do right by its people. So U.S. foreign policy destabilizes countries, drug traffickers take advantage, and then people are forced to flee the violence and chaos by escaping to the country that started the problem in the first place. Policy is difficult, but bad faith makes it impossible.
Brilliant science journalist Jennifer Margulis is writing for the Epoch Times
I learned this week that prolific author Jennifer Margulis is writing a twice weekly health column for the Epoch Times. The articles are great! Margulis is the author of seven books, including Your Baby Your Way, The Addiction Spectrum (with Paul Thomas), and The Business of Baby.
Margulis is with us and what’s fascinating about reading her Epoch Times articles is that she asks questions and interviews people with a broad range of perspectives — as reporters used to do before the Cartel started demanding that everyone follow its script. We’ve all gotten so accustomed to seeing reporters pull their punches and take a dive in the face of Pharma’s extraordinary power, that it is surprising and refreshing to read an actual honest reporter again.
Definitely worth checking out and Epoch Times has some pretty good introductory offers if you want to subscribe.
This article is amazing
Cane toads were brought to Australia in 1935 in Northern Queensland to eat the sugar cane beetles. They originate from South and Central America although our first batch came from Hawaii. Today we think there are 200M of them.
They are arguably the greatest Australian ecological disaster. Basically, poisonous frogs that nothing wants to eat, because they are so poisonous, and that eat and have babies all day.
To add insult to injury:
the toad was generally unsuccessful in reducing the targeted grey-backed cane beetles…in part because the beetles live at the tops of sugar cane—and cane toads are not good climbers.[i]
Public policy is really really difficult to get right because life is filled with millions of factors, seen and unseen, that influence outcomes. In public health, medicine, and agriculture, “a disease of the remedy” is incredibly common — where the intervention leaves one worse off than doing nothing. The countless failures of supposedly enlightened public policy ought to produce humility. Instead, we are now afflicted with bureaucrats who know nothing who think that they are all-knowing.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day
Matthew Yglesias is the Dean of the Bougiecrats. He never met a technocrat he didn’t like. His Substack, Slow Boring, is exactly as the name suggests — an endless slog through progressive policy minutiae. His contrarian takes on the day’s news and droll humor are intellectual crack for fellow bougiecrats and he has an astonishing 600,000 subscribers, 10,000 paid. So I was startled to read a perfectly reasonable article from Yglesias today that explained that progressive apoplexy over “misinformation” is misguided and that his fellow tribe members need to take a deep breath and chill out.
Of course Yglesias adds his own misinformation by claiming that these vaccines are safe and effective when they are not. It’s clear that, like the rest of his tribe, he is deathly allergic to reading original source documents or engaging in critical thinking. Keeping his platinum membership card in the bourgeoisie is the only thing that matters to these people. But his slight nod toward decency in public discourse was surprising and welcome nonetheless.
Smirky McSmirkFace
They are just straight up trolling us at this point
Petting zoos are the new cattle cars.
Scott Gottlieb is lying, but the question is why?
Former FDA Commissioner and now Pfizer Board Member, Scott Gottlieb, went on CNBC and lied.
Pfizer director Dr. Scott Gottlieb: Shots for kids under 5 delayed due to low Covid cases in trial
The Pfizer clinical trial in kids age 5 to 11 did not produce any clinically significant health outcomes. So Pfizer and the FDA switched to serology — looking for antibodies in the blood, as a proxy for health outcomes.
The Pfizer clinical trial in kids under age 5 was not even looking at health outcomes. We already knew back in December that Pfizer was only looking for antibodies in the blood (as a result of their shot) and that these antibodies did NOT appear in significant numbers.
Going forward, there will be even fewer Covid cases in kids because the Omicron wave is subsiding. In the interview, Gottlieb is claiming that a single case, one way or the other (in the treatment or placebo group) is enough to sway the outcome. But by definition then he is describing results that are NOT statistically significant (because of tiny sample sizes).
And why did they send out Gottlieb instead of Pfizer CEO Bourla?
Pfizer and the FDA knew on Dec. 17 that the clinical trial in kids under 5 had failed. They are not even looking at health outcomes, only bloodwork. On January 31, the FDA publicly told Pfizer to submit an Emergency Use Authorization application anyway. Then on Feb. 10, twelve-hours before the meeting materials were to be released, Pfizer called the FDA and pulled its EUA application.
So here’s the question: what happened between January 31 and Feb. 10 to make Pfizer change its mind and pull its application? It was not a low number of Covid cases (we already knew that). It was something else. A death in the treatment group (was that the “one case” that Gottlieb is referring to)? Myocarditis rates? Skyrocketing rates of other adverse events? We know that Pfizer was going to lie about the serology. What was so bad in the data that they could not cover it up with their usual lies?
Okay those are my thoughts.
Blessings to the warriors!
Pray without ceasing for the truckers! 🙏
In the comments, please let me know what you think Pfizer is hiding — or anything else that is on your mind.
What’s with the shock on Naomi Klein? She’s an awful human being. And has been all along. Time to stop branding everyone ‘for the people’ just because they say they’re ‘for the people’. She never was. She always was a globalist.
She and her husband ran a lot of the AIDS in Africa program. I’ve worked with AIDS patients. You live a very very healthy constrained life, or you die. During this time I was reading horrible stats out of Africa - 30% of this country suffering from HIV etc. One day out of curiousity I checked the death rates from these African nations with massive HIV rates. A slight slight reduction in population increases in the heavily AIDS ridden countries. Where they should have been showing giant drops in population, in the order of 20-30% population decreases, they were showing 3.7% increases compared to 4% increases in low hiv areas. This made no sense. My friend’s stepdaughter was in Africa at the time working on AIDS research. I told him their numbers are being exaggerated by 20x. He scoffed at me. He checked with his step daughter. She scoffed at me. Two years later she told my friend to call me and say the AIDS incidence has been quietly downgraded by 95%. My point of this? Avi and Naomi were in charge. They pooled money to treat X numbers of people. Yet only 1/20 of X was needed. Where did the money go? I have contended the massive Left wing funded NGOs, including all of Obama’s orgs got their seed money from the vastly overstated AIDS in Africa program monies.
Great information on Klein. I am both shocked and not. Has there been any other statements from Klein confirming her 180 degree turn around?