Category Archives: Science

Covid Coincidence

“They” say there is no such thing as coincidence. They must have known about Covid-19, the political viral disease.

Is it a coincidence that the year of the Covid is also the year that scientific integrity died? Discourse is the lifeblood of science. I thought we had gotten past jailing or guillotining or dismissing as crackpots people whose scientific theories with which we disagreed. Many scientific mavericks were vilified: William Harvey describing the circulatory system, Ignaz Semmelweis’ advocating for simple hand-washing, Barry Marshall determining that H. pylori, not spicy foods caused peptic ulcers, to name a few.

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FDA is correct: I am not a horse

When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) learned that doctors were writing 88,000 prescriptions a week for ivermectin, mostly for COVID-19, it apparently felt it necessary to message the yahoos of America on Twitter.

From @US_FDA: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.”

I for one agree completely. I am not a horse. In particular, I am not their horse, or their cow, to be ridden, milked, or slaughtered for the greater good. They do not own me and have no right to decide that I must take the COVID-19 vaccine, supposedly to protect the vulnerable or the herd. By the way, it doesn’t.

The FDA also has NO authority to dictate or deny medical treatment. Once it approves a drug for safety for any indication, it does not have the legal right to tell physicians that they can use the drug for this, but not for that. Or veterinarians either. The only reason to go through a billion dollars’ worth of studies to get a new “on-label” indication is to allow a company to market a drug for that use. If it’s a cheap, non-patentable drug, why would a company make such an investment? But doctors are allowed to talk about it, and journals may publish articles. Normally, such discussions are not automatically smeared as “harmful misinformation” by social media fact-checkers.

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Not about Freedom or Personal Choice

Today we have two contrasting quotations from world leaders. One said: “Mandatory vaccinations will never be allowed because [this] is a free country and its people are sovereign.” The other said: “This is not about freedom or personal choice.”

The first was by Vladimir Putin. Russia, a free country! The second was by Joe Biden. The U.S. is no longer a free country, and the people are not sovereign. Nor are the once-sovereign states. If state governors won’t cooperate with him, “I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.” It is not clear exactly how he would accomplish that. Invade the state and occupy its capitol and its courts? Arrest the governor and perhaps the legislature and throw them into prison without bail like some January 6 demonstrators? Already, many states are suing — perhaps we will learn whether the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution has any meaning.

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JCPOA helping Iran nuclearize

Twenty years ago, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, that killed some 3,000 Americans, was a psychological shock comparable to Imperial Japan’s surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, that bludgeoned the United States into World War II.

Both 9/11 and Pearl Harbor resulted, to put it kindly, from profound failures in military intelligence and strategic imagination. To put it less kindly, 9/11 and Pearl Harbor happened because of arrogance, complacency, and willful blindness in Washington.

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Will the U.S. win the war on COVID-19?

As U.S. forces beat a chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, defeated after 20 years by the primitive Taliban, who clung to their guns and their faith, America’s invincibility as the “world’s only superpower” might be disputed.

Joe Biden told Americans, when speaking about his gun-control agenda, that to move against the government one would need F-15s and perhaps nuclear weapons. The Taliban lack those, although they have acquired a treasure trove of advanced weapons left behind by Americans.

Against Americans, the U.S. government might not deploy F-15s, nukes, bombers, or killer drones, but it has other means of compulsion, backed up by SWAT teams with assault weapons: prisons, ruinous fines, deprivation of licenses and permits, withholding of benefits on which one has become dependent, no-fly lists, or freezing one’s financial assets.

In the “war” against COVID-19, the government is showing its willingness to deploy all of these against anyone who might interfere with its strategy: lockdowns and mandatory warp-speed vaccine.

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