I have not posted in a while. The news has been overwhelming.

20251029

There is also the question of, why should I? Most of what I post amounts to links to other posts and references to what I read. There is not much indication that you, my readership, very frequently follow these links.

I recently posted an exchange I had with Phil Strum about coral reefs, culminating with seven points that his nemesis Dr. Peter Ridd makes in his video on the Great Barrier Reef. Just taking one as an example, I asked if coral bleaching truly involved coral ejecting and replacing the algae symbionts that give it its color, without the coral dying. Phil, who frequently belabors me for not reading research papers, could have found this paper on the subject just as easily as I did. I am sure he has never read any of the papers to which he sent links.

But Phil, atypical in his lack of courtesy, his braggadocio and name-calling, is typical in his failure to read. Failure to read follows from a lack of desire for new information, which follows from his conviction that what he thinks he knows is the unassailable truth. He is not interested in conflicting stories.

This applies to not just Phil but most people, in most aspects of life. On the financial side, Andy Schechtman, Alasdair Macleod, Jim Rickards and many others describe the blatant manipulation of the prices of precious metals, highly visible in this week’s dramatic plunge in prices.

Quoth the Raven (Chris Irons) tells his life story. It is a history of confronting things that cannot be true. If you do so in the world of finance, you used to be able to make a lot of money. However, he says that the market no longer punishes people who are wildly wrong. Governments and central banks bail them out. Again and again.

Frank Wolff, a much less widely-followed YouTuber, has as good of an explanation as I have seen of this phenomenon. He notes that (as I copy from elsewhere) “The Buffett Indicator is the ratio of total US stock market valuation to GDP. As of June 30, 2025 we calculate the Buffett Indicator as 217%, which is about 2.2 standard deviations above the historical average, suggesting that the US stock market is Strongly Overvalued.” Its previous high was 115, on the eve of the 2000 crash. His thesis is that index levels are managed by huge players, central to which are governments and central banks. Thus, they no longer correspond to marketplace realities but to the story that the powers that be want to convey. It works because the investing public – whose savings and pensions are at stake, are oblivious.

The disconnect, unwillingness to think is visible in many other spheres. I often write about vaccines. You subscribers come down on both sides of that issue, but exchanges about the facts of vaccines are relatively rare. I do not know that anybody followed the links in what I wrote about Vaccines, Amen.

Or the many other books I have reviewed. Dr. Peter McCullough just published this meta-analysis of 130 studies on the correlation between vaccines and autism. True believers will of course not read anything that challenges their conviction that vaccines are an unmixed blessing.

Jessica Rose just released a study showing that mRNA affects the way people think. This is similar to Michael Nehls’ thesis in The Indoctrinated Brain, which review got me kicked out as an Amazon reviewer. Matias Desmet’s Mass Formation offers a thesis on the psychology of totalitarianism. Published during Covid, it attempts to explain how a majority could get sucked into believing what was being told.

I am reading Naomi Wolf’s Facing the Beast: Courage, Faith and Resistance in a New Dark Age. She sees this as a systematic problem. This generation of thinkers has abandoned the Enlightenment traditions. Even, or especially, the elites among whom she lived as a New York celebrity until 2019. She writes movingly about how almost all of them shunned and abandoned her because she would not be vaccinated or accept the stories about Covid.

I have admired Naomi Wolf since reading The Beauty Myth, long before I started writing reviews. The collaborative effort she pulled together – hundreds of people to produce War Room DailyClout Pfizer Documents Analysis Volunteers’ Reports Find Out What Pfizer, FDA Tried to Conceal is a tour de force.

Her motive must be primal altruism – the inborn desire to save her tribe from some looming danger. A strong streak of such altruism runs through the Jews’ 4000-year history. We Christians likewise adopted or developed a strong version of altruism. Good for the tribe, but often harmful for the individual.

Which leads to the question as to why I write this blog. Not for money. Not to further my genetic interests – it does my family no good to call attention to these things. I suppose I do it for an imagined reader who will follow the links I offer, form opinions similar to mine, and advance the interests of my tribe. Which begs the question: what is my tribe? It is in Ukraine. Nothing I write affects them much.

You will have to excuse me for spending an increasing amount of time looking after my family. Managing our finances. You can look for an upcoming blog with a title something like “Religious belief can make you rich – other people’s belief, that is.” As QTR writes, a smart investor can recognize other investors’ religious belief in the dogmas of global warming, vaccines, Tesla and such and bet with them in the hype phase, against them when their mistaken notions crash against reality. I’m going with that kind of religion with my investments in OKLO and SMR. Good companies, with good futures, but wildly overpriced. And getting more so, which is why I’m along for the ride.

We in Lake WeBeGone took advantage of this one-week school holiday to take the Mercedes in for service. Yes, Mercedes are expensive coming and going, but the garage seem to have done a good job and they got the car back to us in a day. It is amazing how dependent Oksana has become on a car in just two years. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy taking the kids where we need to go on the bus. We meet people, we see things and we can talk and sing together.

Graham