REPUBLIC REBORN

Lucy Steigerwald has a thoughtful piece published at Antiwar.com, delving into the significance of friendships between members of the upper crust who superficially appear to have nothing in common. But they do have something in common, they are both initiates of the Political Class, a group for which party, policy, right and wrong have no meaning. Money, power, and influence is what matters to them.

Should war criminals be forgiven, or shown courtesy, if they can affect a hokey, warm demeanor? How much should charm be taken into account when weighing the amount of contempt directed at someone? Charming people can get away with a lot. Some can even get away with instigating a two-decade war of attrition against the poorest of the Mideast, as part of a national act of revenge.

Steigerwald makes an important point about guilt:

“Only a handful of people ever grasp that the small, bureaucratic parts they play in war or surveillance count as a moral failing. Whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg understood it, and risked his freedom for it. Chelsea Manning has sacrificed hers. Edward Snowden left his home, perhaps permanently, in order to try to save it from the war-fueled surveillance state. The late Congressman Walter Jones went from being the architect of the embarrassing “freedom fries” name change on the cusp of the invasion of Iraq to a man permanently guilty about his part in a terrible wrong – as he should have been.

This is not through a desire to see Jones (or anyone else) suffer. His guilt spoke to his character. He was a good enough man to realize that he couldn’t fix what he had helped break, but that it was an obligation to try to alleviate some of that subsequent suffering.”

A capacity for guilt, and the ability to face the actions that led to that guilt, is a hallmark of good character. Does Bush feel even a modicum of the guilt that Jones did? It is doubtful, and no amount of country charm can make up for it.

The end result of a continuous propaganda campaign on behalf of vaccines is this: someone who, even after experiencing a terrifying reaction, still urges others to get the jab and possibly experience the same reaction, but in a much more dangerous setting:

This right here is the power of propaganda on the human mind. This girl experienced first-hand what many have been saying for years: that vaccines can and do cause serious harm. In her case it’s not hearsay or misinformed moms chatting on a social network, as we’ve been told. She had a near-death experience as a direct result of a flu shot, and yet she continues to advocate for the very thing that almost killed her.

h/t Hear This Well

Pat Robertson is a perfect example of someone who professes a deep faith in God yet has made it his mission in life to do the Devil’s work. He has always loved war, and has loved it even more so when it’s been Republicans instigating and escalating it. He’s clearly insane, but has in the past been useful when the Christian conservative mob needed to be brought into the pro-war fold. Bush trotted him out occasionally to spread the Imperial gospel, which he did with fervor. Now he declaims that Trump will lose his “mandate of heaven” if he ends US involvement in the blazing dumpster fire that is Syria. Oh really. A war that has nothing to do with the security of the United States, a war almost of nihilism, and yet to Pat we must remain, and for him even God himself has some interest in the outcome. There is a point that a public figure reaches, when they’ve held views so utterly antithetical to their professed spiritual or moral beliefs, that at some point one can only conclude that they are entirely devoid of conscience or character. A person with a capacity for guilt, which I believe to be the defining trait of a true human, can’t keep up the act for so long. There would be a visible deterioration etched on their manner, and it would only end with a suicide or some grand repentance followed by monasticism. Pat, despite the encroaching dementia, is positively cheery when talking up war. He probably sleeps like a baby every single night. And somehow these are the psychopaths with access to the powerful.

A huge fuss is currently being made over the Constitutional rights of the “whistleblower” who outed Trump’s phone call with the Ukrainian president. That this concern is being felt by the corporate news media for some presently unknown individual should raise eyebrows. If they truly cared about the rights of a whistleblower it would definitely be a first, and that fact alone should make us hesitate before placing this person in the same hallowed group occupied by Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, Joe Wilson, John Kiriakou, and other actual heroes. The aforementioned were not treated well at all by the same media goons currently howling about justice over the White House leaker who of course turned out to be a CIA agent, and who is now safely nestled back at that murderous agency.

The corporate media doesn’t care about whistleblowers. In fact, they actively seek to demonize, smear, and convict them at every possible turn. That they are now coming to the defense of some individual whom they’ve deemed a whistleblower suggests that this person isn’t one.

How many corporate outlets reported on the September 27th death of Joe Wilson, the person who blew the whistle on the yellowcake uranium fraud used to con the public into supporting a tragic war in Iraq?

How many of these propagandists are using airtime to talk about Chelsea Manning’s plight, or that of Julian Assange? We know the answer, and we know why. Because they don’t care about true whistleblowers. The corporate news outlets serve the permanent structure of power, and they will defend any attempt at dismantling or exposing it. In this sense, then, the White House leaker is an anti-whistleblower, because Trump, at least in this case, is seeking to expose just one instance of the unbelievable corruption that is typical among our Political Class.

To label this CIA spook a whistleblower is to steal the valor of all the courageous whistleblowers who have sacrificed their freedom so that the American people would know the truth about the crimes their government commits in their name.

…is from a 2001 article, “Personal Hygiene and Life Expectancy Improvements Since 1850: Historic and Epidemiologic Associations”, appearing in the American Journal of Infection Control:

“Between 1850 and 1900, the commonly recurring epidemics of cholera, smallpox, malaria, and typhoid were gradually brought under control. During the next 50 years, gratifying victories over such endemic diseases as tuberculosis, diphtheria, measles, and scarlet fever were witnessed. These diseases were less dramatic than epidemics, but each was among the leading causes of death before 1900. By the middle of the 20th century, except for the 1918 influenza pandemic, death from infectious disease in Western industrialized countries was no longer a major component of mortality statistics.”

Vaccines have today been mythologized, and it is just assumed that they saved humanity from infectious disease. The historical record, never referred to by the acolytes and evangelists of the vaccine mythology, contradicts that assumption. Vaccines had nothing to do with the sudden, dramatic decline in infectious disease. The true cause of the decline was the enormous advances in hygiene and sanitation that occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The purification of public water supplies that was widely adopted after 1910 in the United States caused an immediate and dramatic decline in mortality rates of such waterborne diseases as diphtheria, typhoid fever, cholera, and others.

Yet the pushers of vaccine myths are not in pursuit of truth, but of power. The public mythologizing of vaccines serves an agenda, one that, in turn, serves industry, and the various agencies that protect it.

California doctor Charity Dean will now oversee vaccine medical exemptions in the state, as well as lead the witch hunt against the doctors who have issued them.

Apparently Alexa plays 20 questions with the children of these smart device owners, asking intrusive questions that might not appear so to a child. According to a mother who called in to NPR, her daughter was asked by Alexa, regarding her father: “Does this person inoculate all of the children in his house?”  The NPR episode here. The entire episode is worth listening to, but the mother calls at 10:54.

There is no point in bringing these small avatars of the surveillance state into your home. They are clearly surveillance devices, spying on you and your family, and nothing good will come of owning one. Amazon has already admitted that Alexa recordings are saved indefinitely, even in the Alexa owner “deletes” them. They data will be saved, and probably sold/given to various state and federal agencies to use. Every interaction in your house will be eavesdropped upon.

The supreme irony lies in the fact that no piece of legislation was even needed to mandate the installation of an in-home surveillance device, many people are doing it of their own free will.

H/t to the Facebook group, ‘Vaccine Damage, I Believe in Science’.

Oklahoma Republican state rep. Kevin West held an informal meeting on vaccine safety last month that quickly drew jeers from the pedigreed multitudes of the Medical Establishment, including this statement from one Larry Bookman, president of the Oklahoma State Medical Association:

“Before vaccinations were readily available, thousands of Oklahoma’s babies, children and adults suffered from dire complications from serious diseases such as measles, mumps, scarlet fever and polio. The reason this is no longer an issue is because America’s childhood immunization efforts are one of the most effective public health programs in history…

“Despite the effectiveness of these life-saving vaccines, there remains a vocal, misinformed minority who are working to chip away at this essential program. With this in mind, I’m calling on our state leaders to embrace the facts regarding the safety and effectiveness of vaccines. And, on behalf of our nearly 4,000 physician members, I encourage parents who are nervous about vaccine safety to have an open, honest conversation with your family physician,”

I would say that if Bookman here wants to talk about honesty, he should practice what he preaches. There is no vaccine for scarlet fever, and he, as president of his venerated institution, should know.

It is significant for our understanding of the cause of the dramatic decline in infectious disease that there was never a vaccine for scarlet fever in wide circulation. The disease was a feared killer up until the early 20th century, racking up a body count far higher than even smallpox. Yet, by 1940, scarlet fever had virtually vanished in the United States and England. And now, in the present, when someone contracts scarlet fever, it manifests as nothing more than a benign sandpaper rash that lasts less than a week.

How? Why? Haven’t we been told that vaccines saved us from the ravages of infectious disease? That this this greatly-feared infection burned out in such dramatic fashion should be grounds for intense historical interest. But it isn’t.

If there was no vaccine in use, how did this killer disease, feared for centuries, suddenly vanish within the span of 60 or so years? The answer lies in the myriad sanitation movements that arose in England and the United States in the mid- to late-ninteenth century. Clean water, nutritious food, innovations in plumbing, an awakening to the benefits of handwashing and general hygiene. These were things hitherto never given the time of day. The power of hygiene is illustrated in the graph above. It dealt a mortal wound to a feared, invisible killer that had previously wiped out entire families, cutting through communities, and sending nations into panics. The most dramatic decline in mortality appeared in children under 1 year of age.

No one learns of the sanitation movement in school today, despite its enormous historical significance. It is lost history. In its stead, we have acolytes and propagators of actual misinformation like Larry Bookman, and the seemingly endless drones just like him who mindlessly parrot all the same phrases when defending the cult surrounding vaccines.

Fair question. And, of course, the answer is obvious. If the roles had been reversed, the murderer would’ve received, at the very least, a life sentence. He wouldn’t get a hug from members of the victim’s family, nor would he receive a bible from the judge.