Putin turns it over to a janitor. Unvaxxed blessings.

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The CIA has confessed to lying, feeding false information to the news media about the war in Ukraine. They of course claim to have done it for the most innocent of reasons. Absolute nonsense. The CIA has not been neutral and balanced for decades. They do it to advance their own agendas.  Making their man Biden look good – or even plausible – is uphill work.

Things have slowed down compared to the dynamic moves of the first few weeks of the war.  Both countries are moving their armed forces toward the east, where the major battles are expected to take place.

Time would seem to favor Ukraine. The Russians are exhausted and overextended. Their soldiers, never enthusiastic in the first place, have been in the field for six weeks with little relief or rotation.

Meanwhile, in the few weeks since the Russian atrocities started receiving worldwide attention, increased support has been flowing into Ukraine. When and if the war heats up again the Ukrainians should have the benefit of new supplies of antitank weapons. More modern ones at that. Southern Ukraine's open steppes are tank country, and being able to neutralize them will be decisive.

Ukraine has also received anti-ship weaponry. Russian ship-launched cruise missiles have struck both military and civilian targets.   Russian marines, however, refused to attempt a landing at Odessa and a landing craft was sunk in Berdyansk harbor. 

It strikes me that an appropriately armed Ukraine could go for the jugular. Russia's main purpose in seizing Crimea was to secure the warm water port of Sevastopol. That harbor, loaded with warships, is about 200 miles from Odessa. That is not a great distance for a cruise missile. An appropriately armed Ukraine could wipe out a lot of very expensive equipment, embarrass Russia and nullify its rationale for hanging onto Crimea.

Edward Luttwack, the grand old man of strategic analysis, has a very unflattering assessment of Russia's performance in the war so far. Sheer incompetence. This incompetence has deep roots. As I have previously written, it was evident to Secretary of State John Hay during the Russo Japanese war, Western observers of the winter war in Finland, and anybody paying attention to the war in Afghanistan and even the war in Chechnya.

Most assessments of Putin's newly named general in charge, Dvornikov, project it will be more of the same. No subtlety, just brute force and atrocities.  A dvornik is a janitor; Dvornikov would be Son of a Trashman.

My shot record is quite complete. I got the full childhood schedule recommended in the 1940s, then everything recommended for living and traveling in the tropics, with a couple of flu shots besides.

I started to pay attention when the three children of my first family, the oldest now turning 40, turned out to be a little bit weird. As did a surprising number of their classmates.

It could have been anything: genetics, diet, or the pernicious atmosphere of Bethesda Maryland. It was permissive helicopter parenting all the way. One typical book emerging from that era was Finding Ophelia – about how girls' education was supposedly being ignored.  Christina Hoff Summers' The War on Boys, written in response, seem to me to better capture the situation. Diane Ravitch's Left Back – a Century of Failed School Reform describe the education my kids were getting and that I saw as a substitute teacher. In high school the kids were being instructed via bananas and condoms on the joys of homosexuality.

I didn't give vaccination much thought until the question came up for my second family. After it had become clear that my three adult children had resolutely and finally cut off communication, I had nothing to lose by writing down my recollections of how they had been in childhood. Which is to say, headed for disappointment even from an early age. Did vaccination play a role?

We had a choice with the new family.  Ukraine is ineffective in enforcement of its mandates for childhood vaccinations. I allowed myself to be swayed one time, with regard to a measles shot for Eddie. Talking with parents whose kids have autoimmune diseases and this and that dissuaded me from any others.

Because they were already more than a thousand reviews I did not review Vernon Coleman's Anyone Who Tells You Vaccines are Safe and Effective is Lying. I did take it to heart. I did review a more balanced book by a Danish guy named Peter Goetzsche, entitled Vaccines: Truth, Lies And Controversy, recommended by subscriber JoAnne.  He is not anti-vax, but tells you in very clear language that the pharmaceutical companies are totally corrupt.

This was on my mind as Covid 19 came on the scene. When Bill Gates talked enthusiastically about vaccinating the entire world population, and Judy Mikovits produced the movie Plandemic examining the motives behind it, I got scared.  I had been aware of the controversy surrounding Robert F Kennedy Jr., Del Bigtree and the movie Vaxxed.  I had had enough experience with doctors and drugs to be skeptical of the pharmaceutical companies.

The logic behind forcing children to get the vaccines on the childhood schedule, and now adults to get the Covid 19 jabs, eluded me. If vaccines do what they're supposed to do, people should take them for their own protection. The vaccinated should have nothing to worry about from the unvaccinated. There is no need to force people.

The coercion had been there when my first family got the full schedule in the 1980s. They could not participate fully in school or sports unless they were jabbed. I resented it, but I accepted it. 

Then it came to Covid 19.  Demanding that I take a drug that had not completed clinical trials, using a totally novel technique that many experts were saying was dangerous, struck me as madness. I wanted no part of it.

A vaccine is a kind of insurance policy. With insurance you pay a known amount, the premium, to protect yourself against an unbounded downside, the cost of a catastrophe. With vaccines you take (what should be a) known risk of an adverse reaction to protect against the (supposedly unknown) outcome of getting sick.

I'm a mathematician. All of my life I have avoided buying insurance. Every time I do the math, it comes out that self-insuring will be more cost-effective than paying some insurance company. They have a lot of costs to cover: salespeople, actuaries, adjusters, advertising, executives, and of course their profits.  They also have to factor in people who don't take as good care of themselves as I do. Life insurance, health insurance, collision insurance and travel insurance never made sense. At this point in my life I'm a few hundred thousand dollars ahead of the game not having paid the premiums. 

Ministries of health throughout the world keep track of the incidence of diseases such as measles, polio, whooping cough and the like. The WHO consolidates the numbers and rolls them out to convince the populace that they need to get vaccinated. Sometimes they exaggerate the threat in order to compel people to take the jabs.  Here is what I blogged last June, before joining Substack:

One of you readers mailed me a piece of fear propaganda claiming that "Measles killed an estimated 207,500 people last year after a decade-long failure to reach optimal vaccination coverage, resulting in the highest number of cases for 23 years, the World Health Organization (WHO) and US Centers for Disease Control (CDC) said in a joint report on Thursday."  Do your own search and you will find this article.

My research showed the deaths in the top four countries they listed, Madagascar, Ukraine, India and the Philippines, came to about 1600. That's more than two orders of magnitude off. These people contradict each other shamelessly. Here's another official organ making the same claim but with a number only half as big. Bottom line – they have been telling whopping lies about measles, mumps and rubella for a long time. Is there any reason to expect they are telling the truth about Covid?

My conclusion with regard to my children was that governments and the pharmaceutical industry were systematically lying about the dangers of the vaccines. It was impossible to gauge the extent of the lies. On the other hand, the danger of remaining unvaccinated against every disease in question was measurable and not very great.

We know the downside of not getting vaccinated. You might get the disease. Sometimes diseases kill you. We don't know the downside of the vaccinations themselves. Vaccines are meant to permanently alter the human organism. The supposition is that the change is all for the good. But is it?

Since we cannot anticipate everything that might go wrong with the vaccines, the best measure is lifetime outcomes. Are vaccinated people by and large healthier than unvaccinated? Or is the reverse true? The pharmaceutical companies and the governments have steadfastly resisted asking this question.

Some people, however, have asked. The Control Group found a population of totally unvaccinated Americans and compared their overall health with that of vaccinated people. They found that the unvaccinated group was significantly healthier than the vaxxed by almost every measure.

Of course, this will get fact chokers all over the world out of their chairs to point out that the analysis was flawed in every conceivable way. Let that be. Why haven't the agencies with the professed mission of protecting our health asked the question themselves? If they quibble about these results, they should do their own.

Meanwhile, Toby Rogers, blogging as uTobian, has this interesting piece of advice for the investment community. Dump the shares of pharmaceutical companies, because the population is getting wise to their games and is going to sue them to their eye teeth for vaccine injuries. I hope he is right.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the men are innately strong, with no thanks whatsoever to the pharmaceutical industry, the women are innately good looking, no help needed from the weight watchers or suntanning industry, and the government leaves the children alone, which works just fine with us.

Graham