For whom the scribe toils. Appetites in reading.

20230103

A writer needs to constantly ask himself the question “For whom am I writing?” I have to have an image of my readership as I put this stuff out.

I, as you know, read a number of other blogs and a great number of books. I have to reflect on these authors’ estimate of who I and their other readers are.

Intelligence has a lot to do with it. In the roughest of approximations, intelligence is half verbal and half mathematical. In this age of television, Twitter and Instagram the average consumer of written material has about a 10 second, 140 character attention span.

These are the majority of voters, the people who have opinions about the war in Ukraine, the people who have to decide whether or not to get vaccinated and boosted. The news is hemorrhaging from books by Robert Malone, Matt Taibbi, Whitney Webb and every pore of Twitter that our government has cynically but accurately assessed our average intelligence and crafted lies that will appeal to us. Those of us who assume we are talking sense to everybody are in fact speaking to only a thin wedge of that public. Government psychological operations people own the majority.

“The Past Is a Future Country” includes this passage on the decline of intelligence.

We can think of a pyramid of invention. The inventor of the car is cleverer that the developer of the car. He is smarter than the person who can manufacture and fix the car, while he is more intelligent than the person who can maintain the car, and he in turn is brighter than the man who can merely operate the car. Each generation, the top level is boiling off, meaning we are living in an increasingly over-promoted society.

There is a parallel pyramid in writing.

·        At the top of the pyramid would again be inventors – the people who originate concepts. These may be guys like Kary Mullis with the PCR tests and Robert Malone with the mRNA process, or thinkers like Mattias Desmet.
·        In the second tier would be other scientists and academics who test, validate and expand on the theories. They all read each other’s work, and therefore most span both tiers one and two. They often write to explain the theories to the wider communities of scientists in other fields and literate public.
·        At the third tier would be people like me, reading people like Jessica Rose, Judy Mikovits and Igor Chudov and attempting to accurately tell what their books are about or restate their findings in for a general readership.
·        The fourth tier would those whom I envision to be my readers.

Of course the paradigm is far from exact. Sometimes a true genius – Richard Feynman comes to mind – is able to express complex ideas so clearly that ordinary readers can grasp them. But whereas the brightest of people will read everything, the dullest of people cannot write everything.

Dutton’s halfwits and witless having been captured by Tik-Tok and Instagram, the expected intelligence of all four levels who actually read would be above average. I’m writing for mid-wits and above – people who went to college.

I read a lot of material that I don’t fully understand. Some of it I could if I invested the time, other would remain above my head in any case. I like to provide links, given that many in my heterogeneous readership will want more depth than I offer.

My reading this morning offers some examples. Joseph Mercola, no doubt an extremely bright guy, has the gift of writing for the hoi polloi. I expect that just about all of my readership will be able to easily grasp this morning’s piece about declining life expectancy.  Government figures show that life expectancy in the United States has fallen from 78.8 to 76.4 years over the past three years. The plunge did not coincide with the emergence of Covid, but with the widespread administration of the vaccines. The age groups with the highest increases include working age adults, 25 to 54, and children under 4.

A Midwestern Doctor, no doubt also somewhere in the genius category, writes for guys like me. The length of his pieces would put off the average mid-wit, and he assumes a level of familiarity with the Covid story that they would typically not possess. This piece this morning is about the degree to which the American public is waking up to the dangers of the vaccines.  Pollsters have finally overcome their fear of angering the government by asking questions about the common man’s observations. The number of people who report serious adverse reactions, and who know people who have died from the vaccines, is now being tallied.

The Ethical Skeptic writes for an even more rarefied readership. I appreciate the gist of what he says, but it would be an effort for me to absorb the entire arguments to the point of being able to repeat them. Here are links to the first two  parts of a three-part series on the otherwise inexplicable increases in seven of the major eleven International Classification of Diseases codes tracked by the US National Center for Health Statistics beginning in the first week of April 2021.  His conclusion is that there is no plausible explanation aside from the injectable biological products being pushed as vaccines.

Jessica Rose is another of the rarefied readership gems. As an immunologist, she reads and appreciates the literature, several over the past couple of months on IgG4, the most recent entitled “IgG4 and pregnancy,” in which she cites and explains an article from the Journal of Immunology.

Summing it up, my writing this blog is an offshoot of my general curiosity. I started writing Amazon reviews in the late 90s simply as a vehicle for collecting my reading notes. You don’t really understand the subject unless you can express what you know in writing. As one of you remarked in the comments yesterday, there are a good many links to books I have reviewed in the pieces I posted. I had, as you might imagine, reviewed my notes and gone back to the books to make sure I got it right.

Closer to home, I’m trying to instill that curiosity in Eddie. He is reading a lot, but he also wants to be read to. His favorite at the moment is O. Henry. It takes us a while to get through the average story because there is so much to be explained, like this from the first half page yesterday.

·        Plutonian – related to Pluto. God of the underworld.
·        Writing about submissions of stories to a magazine editor, “The destination of such contribution depends only on the question of the enclosure of stamps”
·        “Thus is truth held in disrepute. But in time truth in science and nature will adapt themselves to art. Things will happen logically, and the villain be discomforted instead of being elected to the Board of Directors.”

By the time we get through a story like this he has absorbed quite a bit of paternal wisdom. In a haphazard fashion. He will have forgotten the names of the characters in the story, but he will remember what a Board of Directors is.

That’s the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the good-looking woman has exiled me to my office while she conducts a music lesson for Marianna and her age mates. Eddie’s friend Artem spent the night, and Zoriana is probably bothering them and wishing she hadn’t been so standoffish when I offered to take her shopping instead of hanging around the house.

Graham