"The Indoctrinated Brain" is richer than I had thought. Memories of the lockdowns. Expert weighs in on autism.

20240319

Everybody has their own profile for diseases. Though I never get the flu, and rarely get colds, I get strep throat quite frequently. I keep a package of amoxicillin in the medicine cabinet just for such emergencies. Oksana argues, and I cannot disagree, that taking antibiotics every time is probably not a good idea.

The nature of the bug has changed. Every succeeding case of the disease is milder. This time I don't even talk hoarsely. Mild though it may be, it still doesn't go away. I have a touch of a sore throat, a touch of fever, and fatigue. I'm also experiencing a bit of brain fog, the kind of thing that Michael Nehls describes in his book The Indoctrinated Brain. You may recall that the review I wrote of this book was the one that inspired Amazon to delete my 550 reviews on their site. In other words, it was on target. In related news Lauren Sanchez, the tart for whom Jeff Bezos left his wife MacKinsey, now the number two in the Amazon organization, is championing fake meat. Bezos is going off the deep end.

A lot of people having said good things about Nehls' book, I took the opportunity to reread it. It has characteristics of a work of genius, for better and worse. I felt obliged to rewrite the review, which you will also find below.  The book is full of sparkling ideas and strong opinions. Nehls is a great advocate of iodine and vitamin D, which he contends would go a long way toward raising intelligence in the global South. He contends so strongly that fish is about the only source of adequate amounts of omega-3 fatty acids that you would think those of us who prefer meat would be condemned to idiocy.  Моst sіgnіfісаntlу, hе bеlіеvеs аlоng ԝіth Nаоmі Ԝоlf, Місhаеl Yеаdоn, Реtеr Brеggіn аnd mаnу оthеrs thаt thе ԝhоlе Соvіd еsсараdе ԝаs а рlаnnеd еxеrсіsе іn rеduсіng thе ԝоrld's рорulаtіоn.  As I wrote yesterday, I'm watching that one from afar as I raise my kids to live in whatever world they're going to inherit.

Nehls wrote about the pernicious effect of the lockdowns on American society. It got me to thinking about what had happened here in Ukraine. Fortunately, having written this blog, I could refresh my memory quite easily. You can search on the keyword "lockdown" in my posts from January through March 2020 and then from April to the end of the year.  Reading them it is clear that it took me a couple of months to catch on to the scam.  You also see that our lockdown was fairly complete only from the second half of March through the end of May 2020. Eddie studied via Zoom. When school resumed in September it was classroom instruction. Also, although the major grocery stores were closed, nobody bothered me when I shopped by bicycle at the mom-and-pop markets. The kids and I were free to go for walks in the neighborhood. After about a month I started wearing my mask on my chin on the metro and nobody gave me grief.

Ukraine simply did not allow itself to be panicked in the same way as Western Europe and the Anglosphere. As best as I can tell only 30% of us are documented as having received the jab. Considering the number of people who told me that they were successful in getting vaccination certificates under the table, I would say that 30% is on the high side. At any rate nobody I know has told me about adverse effects.

On the subject of adverse effects, the guy who writes as A Midwestern Doctor is well served by his anonymity.  He writes long, well informed, well researched pieces on just about every topic. Today he has chosen the link between vaccines and autism. He opens with the observation that contrary to popular belief, there is actually a great deal of compelling evidence linking vaccines to autism.  For example, regressive autism always develops shortly after vaccination—but never before, something that cannot happen unless one causes the other. Likewise, there is a significant amount of evidence correlating vaccine uptake with autism rates.  His second point is that there is presently no accepted explanation for what is causing the explosion of autism we are facing.  He gets away with it – they can't cancel a guy that they can't see. Meanwhile, I have to thank God for the considerable number of problems I don't have simply by living here in Kyiv.

That's the news from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man barely notices his sore throat, but the fatigue, sniffle and brain fog remind him that strep is still lurking.

Graham

They are attacking your ability to reason – among many other things

This is the book review that got me kicked off of Amazon – all 550 reviews scrubbed. 

Michael Nehl's thesis in The Indoctrinated Brain – How to Successfully Fend Off the Global Attack on Your Mental Freedom - is that the evil powers in the world are making a two or more-pronged attack.  First they are overwhelming us with fear porn, and secondly they are using diet, medicine, and social interventions to weaken our powers of thinking.

Nehls has the right background. Just two years a. he published The Exhausted Brain, describing how our mental capacities are simply being overwhelmed.

A part of Nehls's thesis is that the Covid 19 spikes (his word for the injections – they are not vaccines in any sense of the word, but there is no consensus on what to call them. Gene therapy injections? Jabs?) were designed to weaken our brains.

Nehls describes memory as a three-step affair. Thoughts are held momentarily as electrical impulses in the front of our brain. They are available for combining and for action, but they can be easily lost by a momentary distraction.

Next, they are temporarily stored in new memory cells in the hippocampus. Neurogenesis, the nightly "deep sleep" process of creating the cells within the hippocampus, is essential. A brain should retain its natural ability to create new cells throughout its life.  Nehls makes a distinction between our species' “natural” ability, which doesn't diminish, and “normal,” or average ability, which does. It is a function of the volume of the hippocampus, initially about 10 cm³ but shrinking down to half of that in the average modern person per the graph below.   

The "new coronary normal".dotted line in the graph is Nehls' projection of what is happening to hippocampal volume as a function of our moder lifestyle and since the rollout of the Covid 19 injections. There has not been enough time or research to know exactly what the data says, but the indications are clear.  There has been an abrupt increase in diagnosed depression.  Intelligence measures among schoolchildren have fallen.  New diagnoses of dementia have risen significantly.  As the diagram below shows, the normal curve has shifted left.

Many other writers such as Richard Lynn and Edward Dutton, writing about our falling intelligence, attribute it primarily to genetic factors.  Nehls' thesis complements theirs.  We modify our behavior as we change the environment in which we live.  Our social behavior has changes with the decline of family and community life.  Our levels of physical activity have declined with the machine age.  Our nutrition has changed with the increase of sugar and salt rich processed foods.

When we suffer a brain fog, the energy that would've been necessary to generate new memory cells and perform other brain functions is being sidetracked to fight disease. This 81-year-old reviewer is suffering exactly such a brain fog due to strep throat as I write this. It is frustrating to take two steps forward and one step back, but that's how it works.

Building on his thesis from The Exhausted Brain, Nehls goes back to Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow.  Our brain simply does not have the resources to think through the immense number of trivial problems it encounters over the course of a day. We rely on "fast thinking" to solve easy problems like whether to close a window when we feel a draft or wash our hands after changing the baby.

Our "System 2" logic kicks in only when we need to give original thought to something. Here's a case in point.

I give no thought to clearing the dish drainer, putting dishes away before I start to wash them. I need an empty place to put the wet dishes.  I habitually dry pots and pans in the process. There is not room to leave them in the dish drainer.  My mother-in-law tackles the same task, also without thinking about it. She never clears the dish drainer. She will pile dishes in a precarious two-foot stack in the dish drainer rather than put them away. She never uses a towel.

Both her approach and mine are the result of fossilized System 2 thinking from ages ago. She grew up with a kitchen too small for a place to put things away, and with too few dishes to bother with. I grew up as one of three kids whose rotating assignments were wash, dry, and set the table. The upshot is that I could never convince her that drying dishes made sense. I don't argue. I simply do it my way when I'm doing it and ignore her when she tells me I'm wasting my time and doing it wrong.

That's an example of System 1 and System 2 thinking. Fast and slow. Nehls’ observation is that modern life forces too much System 2 thinking on our exhausted brains, to the point that we take shortcuts and figuratively throw up our hands and say "whatever."

His thesis is that the perpetrators of the Covid Plandemic - you could call it as well plandemodium - intended to flood us with more decisions than we could possibly cope with and reduce us to accepting what everybody else was doing and what was being forced on us.

The public was deluged with instruction, advice, fear, apprehension and such about airborne germs, germs on surfaces, mutating viruses, asymptomatic transmission, killing grandma, herd immunity, sterilizing immunity, the dangers of vitamin D, hydroxychloroquine, handshaking and so on. Not only was there a continual waterfall of new information, but it contradicted itself day in and day out. Nehls’ thesis is that this was by design.

His thesis is also that this was unique in degree but not in kind. Human society has been swept by panics throughout its history. Every communications medium has been put to use stirring up panic. Books, when they first came out. Pamphlets in the day of the American and French revolutions. Yellow journalism and newspapers by the Spanish-American war. Radio by FDR and the dictators of the 1930s. Television, of course, from its beginning in my youth. And now, social media is supplanting television.

The Silent Generation's fear of the Soviet Union was no doubt fanned by the CIA in much the same way as today's generation's fear of global warming and Covid. Along the way there was a fear of overpopulation which has led to a vast decline in birth rates. This is not the first panic, but as he points out, the engineers certainly built on what they learn from their past efforts.

Every generation has been stampeded by its government into decisions that go against its own self-interest. The calm, sure voices of people who are capable of examining the evidence and coming to and dependent conclusions have always been rare.

The calm, sure voices of reaction the current generation of the right may also not be totally on target. They seem overly preoccupied with the evil that has been done and less concerned with shaping our rising generations. Books about exposing and convicting the global predators sell far better than anything about how to raise your daughters to be good mothers. Which which will have more influence on the future of the world.

Nehls' book offers a good explanation of how the brain works. He has a plausible thesis for the ways in which the Covid spikes, quite likely intentionally, decreased human capability for rational thought and therefore for reasoned analysis of the changes being pushed on humanity from every direction.

Other books such as "Cause Unknown": The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 & 2022, Lies my Government Told Me and Covid 19 and the Global Preditors: We are the Prey, offer analyses of the many other implications of the spikes. They have raised all cause mortality. They have increased the incidence of spontaneous abortion and death among neonates. They have decreased fertility. They have changed the human genome in ways that may cascade down through the generations.

Nehls has a long section on the Korean War brainwashing victims – the incredible success the Chinese had an convincing American POWs that communism was the superior system. It is an example of the power of propaganda. Propaganda takes advantage of the limited capacity of the hippocampus.  There are only so many neurons available for indexing memory. Especially when the brain is exhausted, under stress, the hippocampus will overwrite existing memories with new ones. Memory can in fact be altered.

Children are especially susceptible. They have limited experience against which to compare novel experiences and new theses. They have evolved to put a lot of faith in the adults around them – parents and teachers. They accept without much examination the positions they learn from such people. Having once adopted and become comfortable with them, they are reluctant to change.

The children of my first family attended upscale public and private schools in very liberal Montgomery County Maryland.  Although I sat on the board up to the private schools, neither I nor any of the trustees paid much attention to the education being delivered. I got my wake-up call too late.  I drove my daughter (b 1988) to Walt Whitman during her junior and senior years.  Our conversation was a constant litany of the evils of the white man.  Slavery, Manzanar, Jim Crow, wife beating, lack of voting and property rights etc. etc.  Other topics she was taught never came up.  She wanted to make it clear to Dear old Dad what a troglodyte he was. 

She treated her high school boyfriend poorly.  She became the president of the school's GLBT club – only four letters back then. She joined her older sister and her cousin in condemning me for opining on Facebook that Angela Merkel had made a mistake admitting her million Muslims. At her mother's insistence she went on birth control at the age of 13 "to control her acne." She participated in a belly dancing troupe led by an ardent feminist as "a good form of exercise." It is not at all shocking that at age 35 she is bitter, unmarried and alone. As far as I can tell – she has not talked to me for 14 years.

In contrast, my son by my present marriage attends Kyiv's answer to NYC's Bedford Stuyvestant High School.  He is likewise full of questions.  About simultaneous equations, tangents to circles, inventions of the Medieval period, the effects of the Humboldt current on the abundance of fish and stuff like that.  It is obvious which messages he's getting from school – it is good to be curious, to find things out, to learn from the adults around you.

The most original, most useful part of Nehls’ book is his description of how memory works and how the Covid “spikes” and the global fear campaign appear designed to attack people’s ability to reason.