Thinking Points, March 4, 2024
Dragons, Kennedy, apotheosis, peace dividend, belonging, farce, PREP Act, the role of empire, universal truths, checks and balances, Winnie the cattle dog is back!
Here are my latest thinking points:
Dragons
We live in a time of dragons. It’s not enough to retreat. To survive, one must slay the dragons.
This Kennedy video is a home run
You can also watch it on YouTube. If the W.H.O. Pandemic Preparedness Treaty passes it’s game over for humanity.
Apotheosis
I’ve long said that “Covid is the apotheosis (highest expression) of neoliberalism.” But recently I learned that the word apotheosis is so much more interesting than that:
Apotheosis, also called divinization or deification, is the glorification of a subject to divine levels and, commonly, the treatment of a human being, any other living thing, or an abstract idea in the likeness of a deity.
Apotheosis is driving much of the current madness. Vaccines are deified. Virology is deified. Scientists and doctors are deified in our national secular Cult of Pharma. It’s sad really — the arrogance, the hubris, and the destruction caused by their attempts to become God.
Peace dividend
When the Berlin Wall fell there was supposed to be a “peace dividend.” Military contractors were supposed to convert to civilian projects (for example tank makers would produce electric buses). INSTEAD, the military industrial complex set its sights on destroying the U.S. population. Wild.
Belonging
What’s striking to me about Covid is that, at the end of the day, most people fall in line to support empire, no matter how ruinous it is to themselves or others.
I think it’s 80/20. 80% of people will side with empire no matter what. And 20% of people are capable of thinking for themselves.
A tragedy disguised as a farce
Covid was the first genocide in history where people were like, “Woo hoo, I get to genocide myself today, let’s go!” Three years later as their friends are dropping dead left and right they’re still like, “Woo hoo, 9th booster, just had a stroke, bladder cancer, and cardiac arrest, let’s go!”
Intended consequences
The PREP Act creates the perverse incentive for the U.S. biowarfare industrial complex to unleash endless bioengineered pathogens on the U.S. population because the law requires that there shall be no consequences, only profits.
Rethinking the last seven centuries
The Black Death killed somewhere between 1/3 to 1/2 of the population of Europe from 1346 to 1353. It turns out that killing the cats that ate the rats was a very bad idea.
After that, peasants distrusted authority and had much more power relative to feudal lords. So they pushed for reforms that eventually led to the political and economic liberalism that we cherish today.
But! Liberalism did not really take off until giant ships crossed the Atlantic and the colonies were established in the New World.
What that means is that feudalism was replaced by a system that made some people (the bourgeoisie) better off and left some people (the slaves in the New World) much worse off. This is not a small matter. Ever since, the political right has celebrated those who were made better off and the political left has highlighted (attempted to organize and sometimes exploited) those made worse off.
Liberalism has always depended on empire — it’s the source of capital that buys the leisure + learning time required for innovation.
One can make a case then that the Covid crisis stems from the fact that global empires ceased after WWII and certainly after the Vietnam War.
Lacking an endless flow of ill-gotten wealth, the ruling class went looking for new territory to conquer and discovered the human body and the DNA of the citizenry. So that’s the territory that they seek to colonize now via bioweapons (gain-of-function viruses and vaccines).
Heretofore I massively underestimated the role of empire in economic history. It makes everyone involved feel like a winner (at the expense of everyone else). Our DNA as terra nullius to be colonized is definitely what I think is going on here.
Universal truths
I’m struck by this fatal contradiction at the heart of modern progressivism.
On the one hand, following Foucault, they argue that there are no universal truths, only individual perspectives.
On the other hand, following Pfizer, they argue that junk science vaccines are a universal truth that must be mandated for the whole population.
My hunch is that progressives never really believed the postmodern claim to no universal truths.
Postmodernism is just a crowbar to destabilize the truth claims of one’s opponents.
Underneath it all progressives are deeply authoritarian and believe that they have a monopoly on truth and thus have the right and responsibility to rule over others.
Checks and balances
For almost 80 years, the postwar international institutions were expensive and mostly useless, a sinecure system for bureaucrats displaced by the end of empire.
But then the robber barons figured out how to capture these institutions.
Now they are nakedly and aggressively fascistic.
Which shows that our founding fathers were more right than perhaps they realized. In the absence of checks and balances, ANY institution that accrues power will become corrupt.
With no direct elections, no system of courts, nor means to ask for redress, we should have known that the international institutions would always regress to the basest of human instincts — power, greed, and control.
Unfortunately I do not think they can be reformed and I believe that they must be abolished.
Nationalism was bad. Global fascism is worse.
Your moment of Zen
Winnie the cattle dog is back! This is my idea of heaven. About halfway through the race Winnie looks over and says, “Is that all you got!? Watch THIS!” and then shifts into a higher gear!
Winnie’s human reports that her top speed has been clocked at 36 mph! She even made Newsweek for her mad dashes against the backdrop of a setting sun!
Blessings to the warriors. 🙌
Prayers for everyone fighting to stop the iatrogenocide. 🙏
Huzzah for those who are building the parallel society our hearts know is possible. ✊
In the comments, please let me know what’s on your mind.
As always, I welcome any corrections.
"Lacking an endless flow of ill-gotten wealth, the ruling class went looking for new territory to conquer and discovered the human body and the DNA of the citizenry. So that’s the territory that they seek to colonize now via bioweapons (gain-of-function viruses and vaccines)."
Dr. Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Constitution, said: "Unless we put medical freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship to restrict the art of healing to one class of Men and deny equal privileges to others; the Constitution of the Republic should make a Special privilege for medical freedoms as well as religious freedom."
THAT DID NOT HAPPEN...
("Lacking an endless flow of ill-gotten wealth, the ruling class went looking for new territory to conquer and discovered the human body . . . ") - spot on.
Back in the 1990's as the prison-industrial complex was taking off in the U.S. I was living in the remote Upper Peninsula of Michigan - a region that had been plundered by then of all its old growth pine trees, its copper and its iron ore, leaving a population of unemployed poor people no longer needed or useful to the wealthy in order to make money. Then suddenly I noticed that every little community in the region was falling all over itself to give the best "tax breaks package" so it could land the "new prison" for the "jobs" that prison would provide a destitute community. I couldn't help thinking at the time that with the old growth forests gone, the copper and iron gone, all that was left as grist for the mill of exploitation was "human bodies" - in this case poor people caught up in the drug war for simply using drugs to narcotize their own pain and disenfranchisement.
So we had the painfully ironic situation of poor destitute young people in rural Michigan becoming employed in the role of prison guards housing other poor destitute young people from largely urban areas of the State - for the profit of wealthy investors in far away places. With nothing else to exploit locally - human bodies simply replaced the timber and copper as the new "resource" to exploit for profit. The "genius" of unfettered neoliberal capitalism is that it isn't the least bit concerned if in the end we are all reduced to selling one of our kidney's in order to survive and put food on the table - as long as the "market" approves, and profits are accrued by the few at the top.