Do you believe in magic? The wisdom of government? Fish stories.

20240520

The belief in vaccines is belief in magic. You believe that scientists have invented some magic gunk that they can shoot in your arm that will keep you healthy all of your life.

The reality turns out to be different. Scientists, and certainly the doctors, don't fully understand the gunk that they're injecting into you. It hasn't been thoroughly tested. They don't know how, and they have a pecuniary interest in not finding out.  There are adverse reactions. But it's a lucrative business. Kind of like bloodletting and opium-based medicines used to be.

I gave a Toastmasters speech Saturday entitled "That's Funny. It's about Forrest Maready's story about the history of polio in the United States, from his book The Moth In The Iron Lung, his. It disagrees quite significantly from the heroic story that we have been told. The thesis of the book is that polio was probably caused by pesticides lead arsenate and DDT for the most part.  Polio went away when we stopped using those pesticides.  The vaccines had very little to do with it.  By the way, the Rotary Club continues to work to make polio go away worldwide. It keeps coming back.  One of Maready's theories is that the vaccines cause it.

At any rate, Maready's thesis is that polio is a virus that is endemic to our gut. It only causes a problem when it gets into our body cavity and from there into the spinal cord, which happens primarily to children.  It gets there by leaking out of their guts.  A major cause of these leaky guts are insecticides, specifically in the first epidemic, arsenic based, pesticides, and then the second great epidemic. DDT.

That's a very short story. You can listen to the 15 minute version of the story in my speech here, or you can watch Maready himself on Dark Horse with Bret Weinstein here for almost 3 hours, or you can read his book.

I compose this speech a month and a half ago. This last week I received another book entitled Dissolving Illusions, about the history of most of the dread diseases of the 19th and 20th century and the vaccines and programs are used to address them. It's pretty much a catalog of all the diseases against which the CDC recommends vaccines in their 78-shot childhood vaccine regime, as well as those that have been discontinued, such as smallpox.

My evaluator at Toastmasters, Vera, is a scientist who is not totally convinced by my speech about Maready. Her critique was that you can't be sure, is not proven, it's only a theory. I have to agree with her. And this is something we all have to do. We have to weigh competing theories. I gave her the second book, Dissolving Illusions, which has a good, well-footnoted chapter on polio.

An investigator owes it to himself to look at all sides of an issue. I had not read a pro-VAX book, so I just ordered Deadly Choices, by Dr. Paul Offit, a pediatrician closely associated with the CDC. My challenge will be to as a layman to dispute his arguments. I am quite sure that he will cite sources that I don't have the knowledge refute, which I will have to do.  The counterargument would be sources that are cited by Forrest Maready, Suzanne Humphreys and others on the other side. So, I will probably encounter a kind of a who-shot-John situation. My hope is that I can find enough that I can understand, and both sides of the argument to come to a convincing conclusion. We will see what happens.

As a child I pondered the weird things that people did their bodies. My parents both smoked. I considered it unusual. Why would you do that? Cats and dogs don't smoke. Nothing smokes except people. How does it help? I got my answer after I started smoking myself. It doesn't. Another anecdote. Sam Nagle, Bobby and Davy's father, our neighbor when I was three and four, wasn't circumcised. I noticed something was different when he went to the bathroom. When I asked my mother about it, she told me about the operation. Why do you do that? There wasn't any good answer.

Late in life I figured out a good reason not to. When my father peed, and sometimes me as well, the stream split in two.  Some goes on the floor, and I have to wipe it up.  The Cleveland Clinic says that if I were intact, I would have a single stream. It's a minor annoyance.  My dad probably was too embarrassed to talk about it.  Written on the toilet seat in nail polish in my childhood home were the words "Aim. Catch the drip."  Mother may not have understood.  Circumcision could sometimes be a disaster.  A few times after the mohel's knife slipped they tried the first experiments in transgenderism, raising a little boy as a girl.  It never worked.

They automatically gave me a tonsillectomy when I was a kid.  Turns out that tonsils have a role to play in fighting disease.  Who wudda thunk that mother nature put them there for a reason?  As above, the thought of vaccines bothered me. Were we incompletely formed by God? How did we survive for the millennia before they invented vaccines? The question had no answer.  Now it does. 

From what we know about the immune system – and our knowledge is now at least acknowledged to be very incomplete – it usually works better without vaccines in the way to confuse things.  In most cases vaccine protection is temporary.  Natural immunity is invariably better. Protection in one place opens up vulnerability someplace else.  Vaccinate a child against chickenpox or measles and you subject him to a worse outcome later in life.  Vaccinate momma against measles and she has no immunity to pass on to her far more vulnerable infant.

President Jimmy Carter, known for his intelligence if not his wisdom, made one wise and memorable quote.  "If it ain't broke, don't fix it."  Medically induced problems are the third leading cause of death in the United States.  Nobody knows how much damage the supposedly benign procedures described above have caused.  I'll keep my body the way God gave it to me, thank you, and I'll strongly resist any government that presumes to know better than me what is good for it.

Now a fish story. Oksana wanted me to buy some dorado to make a fish soup.  Note – it is not what we in America know as dorado, dolphin or mahi-mahi. It is bream. The kids and I went to the Podil market. It is a sad shadow of its former self. A neighborhood market needs to attract enough traffic that a shopper typically patronizes several vendors. There are now so few left that there is not enough business to support them. It used to be that they had a couple of rows of fish vendors. Now they are down to two stalls. And they're kind of lonely at that.

The two fish vendors had only expensive wares such as sturgeon and salmon, and no customers.  They did have our dorado. The price, however, was seven dollars a pound, twice what it costs in the Lisova market where I last bought it. I decided that we didn't need it. Our local Livoberezhna market, where I have been buying my produce from Tanya for as long as we have lived in Russanovsky Sad, is also failing. Kiosk after kiosk has folded, and there isn't enough business left to support her. The sad consequence is that she has to charge more in order to make a living, and her produce is not as fresh.

We are fortunate that there are a few local markets further to the east that are still active. One is the Yunost market, which includes the hardware vendors that I frequent, and the other is the Lisova market, out at the end of the Metro line. I am afraid that I will avoid Tanya and do my shopping in these places. I fear that they too are living on borrowed time. The whole world is moving into supermarkets  with big parking lots and impersonal service.

Another fish story. Oksana has been buying salted salmon for $12 a pound. It occurred to me that we could do our own. A month ago, I bought a 3 kg farm-raised Norwegian silver salmon $5.25/lb and salted the whole thing following recipe on the Internet.  It turned out just fine. Moreover, with an adequate supply in the house the kids' mentality has changed.  No longer a rare and expensive treat, they have stopped wanting it so much. That one fish will last a month or so.

The Midwestern Doctor offered the opinion that only about 20% of people think for themselves, the rest follow the herd. His lament in his recent column was that he is writing for that 20%, and he often loses sight of the 80%. He notes, however that the 80% is now coming to believe that Covid was a big hoax and that the shots don't work, as evidenced by the declining rate of vaccination. He expressed some hope that this attitude is bleeding over into vaccines. In general, not just the Covid vaccine.

I would extend this line of reasoning to investment. I'm not too often prescient, but my last post I said that gold, silver and Bitcoin had been taking a fairly long rest and were probably going to jump soon. They did not wait, rising about 2% on Friday. More and more pundits are saying that precious metals and Bitcoin are the only easily available inflation protection available.  I think that the 80% is finally figuring out that fiat currencies are all in trouble, that inflation is here to stay, and that real estate is not the safe haven it used to be.

I should add another note about real estate. Real estate has a disadvantage I had not mentioned in that is not portable. The name for it in some other languages is "immovables." Нерухомість, Immobiles, immobilier.  You can't take it and go if the neighborhood gets bad, and you can't run away if the local government gets too oppressive. It's a sitting duck for the tax man, who is increasingly hungry as deficits spin out of control. Even now people are finding that they can't afford their property tax.  It is not unheard of to simply walk away from a piece of real estate rather than cough up accumulated property taxes. 

Portability is a major advantage of precious metals and bitcoin.  I recently read, to my surprise, that as long as you declare it you can usually take large amounts of gold coins on an airplane.  I would still trust Bitcoin more.  Neither customs nor the airline people even know you have it as you cross borders.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the kids are all healthy in their last week of school.  Our plans for the summer are to spend time in our dacha, bicycling, swimming, barbecuing and going to the park.  It is our good luck to live here year round.

Graham