With regard to the war in Ukraine, the New York Times said that Russia has prepared a list of candidates to install after they successfully invade. Needless to say, The Times did not cite its sources. I suspect people close to the 2016 Democratic presidential campaign.
The people named include Mykola Azarov, a former prime minister under Viktor Yanukovych, former chief of staff Andriy Kluyev, and Yevheniy Murayev.
These men were all tainted with the stench of Yanukovych, who was widely despised. They are known to be corrupt. Let me tell you about my personal experience with Kluyev.
When I came to Ukraine I taught English as a means of meeting women. I quit when I met Oksana, but the teaching companies still called me from time to time. About 2011 I got a call about a job opportunity teaching a three-year-old girl.
That turned out to be Kluyev's granddaughter. The daughter interviewed me in her penthouse apartment one block from the presidential palace. Although only in her early 20s, she was the coldest, most controlling woman imaginable. Good looking, but an ice queen. She started giving strict orders the minute I walked in.
She told me her philosophy was English immersion. The little girl should hear nothing but English. Nothing nothing. I attempted to share my knowledge of teaching, and she wanted none of it. She was going to tell me how it was done.
The little girl was quite shy and didn't want to talk to me. In the process of trying to warm her up, I said something in Russian. The mother jumped all over me. The little girl was put off by the whole performance and never did say a word.
I had gone on the interview largely as a favor to this employer whom I had liked, so I wasn't broken up that it appeared not to work. I did enjoy getting a look at how the other half lives. It was a luxuriously appointed 2000 square-foot penthouse. A lot of glass, granite and marble and other cold substances. Servants running around, responding to barked orders to keep the place immaculate. I cannot imagine kids being comfortable there.
I looked up the Kluyev brothers to find out who they were. Yanukovych had awarded a big contract to them to build a solar farm in Crimea, with a long-term contract to sell electricity to the government at exorbitant rates. This was certainly a bountiful cornucopia of corruption for construction, consulting, and of course the long term overpriced electricity.
In my mind there is not a chance in hell that Russia would be stupid enough to install these crooks even if they were to take over. I consider the Times article to be a product of American yellow journalism at its best.
I received the predictable horrified response to my post that I may not give my children the recommended childhood vaccines. Let's take a more nuanced view. Here are the facts as I see them.
1) We do not know how dangerous the vaccines are. We do know that the VAERS system dramatically under reports vaccine injuries. The reports of post-vaccine deaths are certainly more likely to be correct than the reports of long-term adverse effects such as autism.
2) The responsible government bodies have shown a studied lack of interest in any statistical analysis of vaccine adverse effects. Nonetheless these have been undertaken by others, and the results are not positive.
3) We do not know the lifetime outcomes of people who contract and recover from the diseases. Specifically, contracting chickenpox, which is not terribly dangerous, seems to protect against shingles in later life, which is dangerous. Childhood measles appears to be less dangerous than adult measles, which might be contracted when the vaccine loses efficiency.
4) We do not know much about natural immunity. One of you wrote that 50 Samoan children had died of measles. We know that most diseases that affect us originated in animal populations, and that we of European extraction have a higher level of natural immunity. The textbook example is the die off of Native Americans due to European diseases. This is probably true of the Samoans as well – they were isolated. I do not know – nobody has studied – how dangerous a specific disease is to my children.
5) We do not know about alternative treatments. The success of off patent small molecule medicines, vitamins, dietary supplements such as zinc, and monoclonal antibodies to treat Covid 19 has been an eye-opener. It is quite likely that similar interventions may work against the diseases against which we now vaccinate.
6) We do know that we cannot trust the large pharmaceutical companies with any vaccines. It is a matter of historical record that they have paid billions upon billions of dollars in fines for suppressing information about deadly medications. It is a matter of historical record that the Simpsonwood conference resulted in an industrywide decision not to admit the vaccine injuries due to mercury and aluminum inclusion in the products. Mercury was quietly removed – aluminum is still there.
7) We do not know about other vectors for delivering vaccines. There are subcutaneous and intramuscular paths if you are using needles. They work differently. Vaccines can be given orally or sniffed up the nose. These different paths would subject the body to different levels of substances such as mercury, fetal tissues from humans, genetic material from animals and so on. The pharmaceutical companies have not had an incentive to try to avoid injuring their customers. Lying and cheating has been cheaper.
Bottom line. Nobody can tell me the level of risks that childhood vaccines entail. It is clear that the pharmaceutical industry is actively interested in not knowing. It is clear that there are other avenues of approach that have not been tried because of the pharmaceutical industry domination of funding, dissemination of research results and data on adverse reactions. Perhaps that will change. It may well be that there are effective treatments for measles, mumps and polio that we simply don't know about. I expect these will be better researched in the short term.
I am making an informed decision based on incomplete data. I am certain that the incompleteness of the data is by design, not oversight or incompetence. I will bide my time and wait.
That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong men are back to work, the good looking women including the babysitter are back as well, and the kids will be studying again.