Subscriber Barbara recently took me to task for irresponsibility, suggesting that I pigheadedly fail to protect my family by getting them vaccines. And for good measure, failing to believe that climate change posed a great threat to us all. Longtime reader Al obviously doesn’t believe what I write – I got an email that he just got his seventh Covid booster. Katelyn Jetelina, a link to whom I provided in the post that triggered Barbara, is as wedded as ever to the Covid jobs.
It raises the question, how do we know? How do I know what I think I know? If what I think I know were true, I would have expected Al to have been overwhelmed by evidence from his own circle of friends as to the danger of the gene therapy jabs. Evidently not. Two people I know died suddenly, one of them my 39 year old daughter, but was is not proven that the jabs caused it. It was clear that nobody wanted to find out, and they didn’t.
Al carbon copied 17 of us with his message. Same 17 people as for the past few years. Obviously none of them died, and probably none are seriously injured. I wrote this cc list, asking “How about everybody else? Still with the program?” I have yet to receive a reply from any. I expect that they are all still healthy and simply don’t want to bother wasting time with a malcontent with whom they disagree. They are all of a liberal bent. I expect most of them continue with the vaccination program. And they are all still kicking.
It raises the question, how do I know what I know? Reaching back 60 years to my college days, I recall that the name of the science is epistemology. Here’s what Britannica says about it.
epistemology, the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge. Epistemology has a long history within Western philosophy, beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing to the present. Along with metaphysics, logic, and ethics, it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, and nearly every great philosopher has contributed to it.
I get what I know from reading, and analyzing what I read. As you recall, in the Jetelina piece I asked how anybody could claim that the Covid injections were safe, without even the caveat word “relatively” or mentioning the concept of risk versus benefit. And, as noted in a comment to Barbara, I continue to repost the reviews that Amazon deleted on my own website here. At this point I have most of them uploaded, though each appears in only one subdirectory. I need to index them so that a book on child development, for example, shows up under evolution, education and society.
It begs the question of why Amazon took down my 525 reviews. Why does Facebook forbid me to write about Covid? Why does YouTube reject posts that smack of disbelief in the mainstream narrative? They have unlimited tolerance for harmless quacks, but it appears that when I might be right they knock it down. It’s not just me of course – the leaders among the dissident faction, which Robert Malone and Jessica Rose call Team Reality, have suffered far more.
I agree with those who claim that our ability to find the truth is being thwarted by the more powerful members of society. That certainly includes the people who censor what I write. One of the most intelligent voices in the medical freedom movement, A Midwestern Doctor, writes that scientism, doctrine and dogma wrapped in the trappings of science, threatens our ability to find things out and, especially, to communicate what we find.
Why am I such a skeptic? I’m essentially conservative. I distrust change, particularly when that change is being forced on me, such as the personal protection measures during the Covid era were. And, I can add, all of the protocols whereby one must celebrate and genuflect before emerging genders, the climate change question, central bank digital currencies, 5G wireless, mandatory digital IDs and the whole thing. None of these solve what I perceive to be problems, and they all involve the sacrifice of individual liberty.
Many people relish change for the sake of change. They jumped all over the PalmPilot, forerunner of the smart phone, when it came out almost 30 years ago. They are lined up for 5G wireless, even though 4G and even 3G seem to do everything we need. They drive Teslas, marveling at their geewhiz electronic features, and sometimes even risk their lives using the autopilot.
Such people celebrate advances in medicine. They have been taking flu shots for the six decades they have been available. Have you noticed that nobody gets the flu anymore? They were enthusiastic when effective painkillers such as oxycodone became available. They were ecstatic when synthetic hormone birth control pills became available in 1960, and 2006 when the HPV shot to reduce cervical cancer became available.
I’m a conservative. I’ve been suffering for a month with a broken toe without touching the unopened bottle of ocycodiene a doctor prescribed eighteen years ago. I would rather have my old 1967 Volkswagen than a new car. I would especially like the reliability and the low maintenance costs. I trust my immune system, which took a billion years to evolve, over the offerings of pharmaceutical companies on the lookout for the next big thing to make a buck. I would like to be able to buy Levi’s the way they made them when I was a kid instead of the tissue-thin new ones that wear out after a year. My junior high school biology teacher, Fred Luke, had us eat bugs 60 years ago. Never again. I want to continue to eat fresh vegetables and red meat.
That’s my inclination. Most important of all, I think these matters should be my choice. I do not want my government or corporations doing their bidding to coerce, lie, shame and otherwise try to force me to change how I live.
Psychometricians say that conservatism is heritable. When one of our ancestors would hear a strange noise in the bushes, he could choose between investigating or running away. Though it resulted in a lot of unnecessary exercise, running allowed them to become ancestors. Though this is not a good season for skeptics, my bet is that we will prevail in the end.
My Toastmasters speech Saturday was entitled “Travels with my father,” about a two-week 1999 vacation during which my dad showed me the American west. With my mother’s having passed, the two of us could at last converse without interruption. It gave me all the more appreciation for what he had given up of himself in marriage and raising three children. It came into focus when we passed through Portland and visited the Reed College campus, where I had studied forty years earlier. My fellow students’ focus had been on their own pleasures, among which was that of sneering at a rube such as me who still held traditional American values.
Which brings me to another of those Greek words, one rarely heard at Reed College. Teleology is the study of the purpose of things, one such thing being our existence itself.
teleology, (from Greek telos, “end,” and logos, “reason”), explanation by reference to some purpose, end, goal, or function. Traditionally, it was also described as final causality, in contrast with explanation solely in terms of efficient causes (the origin of a change or a state of rest in something). Human conduct, insofar as it is rational, is generally explained with reference to ends or goals pursued or alleged to be pursued, and humans have often understood the behaviour of other things in nature on the basis of that analogy, either as of themselves pursuing ends or goals or as designed to fulfill a purpose devised by a mind that transcends nature. The most-celebrated account of teleology was that given by Aristotle when he declared that a full explanation of anything must consider its final cause as well as its efficient, material, and formal causes (the latter two being the stuff out of which a thing is made and the form or pattern of a thing, respectively).
Each individual is free to choose his own purpose of life. The constraint is that if society is to perpetuate itself, if our species is to continue to evolve, there are severe limits on the scope of that choice. In addition to bearing and nurturing the rising generation, he must imbue them with a sense of their own purpose in life, one which also includes perpetuating family and culture.
When I’m through restoring my reviews, and perforce having recently looked at them, I’ll write at more length about my project, that named in the above paragraph.
Meanwhile, the good looking woman just returned from her first solo outing in the new old car. She went into town, about three miles, taking her mother and Zoriana to lunch and doing some shopping. Much as I stressed that our primary purpose was to make Oksana familiar with driving so she could do it if we ever needed it, I can see already that the battle is lost. Time to thank God that we were able to get along fourteen years without a car.
For those who believe that Global warming is a threat, consider this. In the Middle Ages, from about 1000 to about 1300, there was a thriving Viking colony on Greenland, in places today that are uninhabitable. The Viking colony was in decline after the onset of the Little Ice Age. I was reading about this colony today, and their diet consisted primarily of cattle, goats, and sheep, plus of course seafood, but they also grew grain on their farms. According to my sources, the temperature was 0.5 degrees to 1.5 degrees warmer in the Medieval Warm Period than it is today. When you hear the Secretary General of the UN say the earth has reached global boiling, you've got to ask yourself what is his agenda? How does a moron become the head of a global agency? Who is paying him off for lying? Take a look outside right now if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. It's cold, there's snow on the ground, and it ain't boiling.
Some dispute this evidence that it was warmer in the Middle Ages than it is today by claiming that it was regionally warmer, and it is not consistent in the rest of the world. I offer this evidence in rebuttal to those who claim it was only warmer in parts of Europe. In China, at the same time as the onset of the Little Ice Age, the canals froze, there were terrible harvests, the population starved. The Yuan Dynasty was in power (the Mongols of Kublai Khan) and that dynasty fell because weather conditions turned against them and they were replaced by the Ming Dynasty. To be clear, the Yuan Dynasty began in 1271 and fell in 1368 primarily because the Mongols had lost "the mandate of Heaven," Chinese for the conditions turning bad. The first census of the Ming Dynasty shows that half the population died compared to the last census of the Song Dynasty.
In Europe, the population of the continent fell by almost 50% in the same period, starting with the onset of the Little Ice Age followed 20 years later by the Black Death. I wonder how many people actually died from the Plague and how many died from starvation or deterioration of health after years of malnourishment? In Chaucer's many works, he used the word "sterve" (starve) interchangeably with death. So much for our history books. Nobody makes the connection between the deteriorating weather conditions and the ravages of infectious disease.
While dropping off my son at school this morning, I watched a teen-age driver trying to park daddy's Mercedes and I thought of Oksana's solo trip into town. I've felt a twinge of uneasiness over these youngsters allowed to drive alone too soon. I've wondered if some parents aren't shoving their kids into cars early just to be rid of the driving to school chore.