Often wrong, but never in doubt. Health issues. Turtles all the way down.

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Whatever this man is smoking would put California weed in the shade.  These are the most imaginative, contrived excuses imaginable for Russia’s failures in this war.  America’s homegrown Baghdad Bob. 

Paul Craig Roberts’ certainty scares me.  So does that expressed by other media figures, certainly including Alex Jones, Rachel Maddow, Paul Krugman, and at times even Tucker.  Historians fifty years hence (assuming the world still exists) will certainly never find consistent explanations for this period of history, even after the evidence has fallen in place concerning Benghazi, Russiagate, January 6, the origins of Covid and this war, among other things.

Wisdom is knowing that we have to listen to voices from many quarters and act on imperfect knowledge.  It is also knowing when to simply shut up and watch. 

Subscriber Al sent me this link to a Washington Post article, the diary of a Russian soldier from Crimea talking about the multitudinous screw ups in the Russian invasion.  The first rule of war is that things never go as planned. The dogfaces in World War II developed the acronym SNAFU – Situation Normal, All Fouled Up. By the time I was in Vietnam it had evolved to FUBAR.  Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. WWII American Leadership from Eisenhower on down had commented on the magnitude of Russian ineptitude.  Roberts isn’t much of a historian if he can’t tell the difference between five dimensional chess and a colossal cluster foul-up.

Health issues come with the territory as you approach 80. I had my last wisdom tooth out yesterday.  Happy to say that giving up coffee, tea, soft drinks and fruit juices seems to have calmed my gastritis.  I’m dealing with vertigo, which as I read affects almost a third of people my age.  Don’t find as many doctors here as advertise in the US; it may be hit and miss getting treatment.

I’m practicing a review of Turtles All the Way Down to present as a speech on Saturday.  I’ll make a video as well.  Experience indicates that I should not upload it to YouTube, but I’m sure that I can find a home for it on the web somewhere. 

Interesting facts:

1)     None of the eleven vaccines on the CDC childhood schedule has ever been compared to a true placebo, ie, doing nothing, in any Phase 3 clinical test (Random Controlled Test – the gold standard) in the history of these vaccines.  It is always a comparison between the new and the old vaccine.  When there is no existing vaccine, they make one up.  But nothing at all (viz, a saline solution) has never been an option.

2)     There is no protocol for studying long-term vaccine injuries, such as autism, autoimmune disease and cancer.  Even glaringly obvious short-term injuries are often brushed aside.

3)     The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) and its overseas cousins suffer major design flaws. They are voluntary and passive.  More than that, VAERS is time-consuming and submissions are not even edited for proper format.  I, as a longtime systems designer and programmer, concur with the authors that the system’s weakness is far from accidental.

4)     There is no science, rhyme or reason to the timing of the children’s vaccines.  The interactions among them, and the cumulative effect of multiple different vaccines, have never been tested.

That’s only a short list.  The last chapter of the book helpfully includes this bullet-point summary. It will surly strain your eyes to read it here.  If you want, write me and I’ll send it in text format, or spring for $10 and buy the Kindle. It’s worth it.

The Turtles all the way down meme has a long history.  This account, not the one they cite,  is as good as any.

The following anecdote is told of William James. [...] After a lecture on cosmology and the structure of the solar system, James was accosted by a little old lady.

"Your theory that the sun is the centre of the solar system, and the earth is a ball which rotates around it has a very convincing ring to it, Mr. James, but it's wrong. I've got a better theory," said the little old lady.

"And what is that, madam?" inquired James politely.

"That we live on a crust of earth which is on the back of a giant turtle."

Not wishing to demolish this absurd little theory by bringing to bear the masses of scientific evidence he had at his command, James decided to gently dissuade his opponent by making her see some of the inadequacies of her position.

"If your theory is correct, madam," he asked, "what does this turtle stand on?"

"You're a very clever man, Mr. James, and that's a very good question," replied the little old lady, "but I have an answer to it. And it's this: The first turtle stands on the back of a second, far larger, turtle, who stands directly under him."

"But what does this second turtle stand on?" persisted James patiently.

To this, the little old lady crowed triumphantly,

"It's no use, Mr. James—it's turtles all the way down."

In this context it is a metaphor for the none of these 11 childhood vaccines, or any of their antecedents, ever having been tested against a real placebo - doing nothing.  They studiously don’t want to know.  Other, however, have made the study.  The results are just what the powers that be didn’t want to know.

Graham