Year: 2023

It’s Not Over

A vaxx skeptic attends the 23rd World Vaccine Congress and shares his general impressions:

  • The majority of attendees truly believe they are doing the right thing.
  • The majority of attendees look no further than recommendations from agencies of public health to guide their opinions. In other words, they fully believe COVID-19 mRNA (and other) vaccines are exceedingly safe and have saved millions of lives.
  • Beyond members of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) and officers from the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), few, if any, are aware of vaccine trial and post-marketing observational data around COVID-19 vaccine safety and efficacy.
  • The keynote speakers and expert panel moderators who raised the topic of “vaccine hesitancy” were dismissive of those who managed to avoid vaccination and were openly contemptuous of those who encouraged others to do the same.
  • Except for a few instances, the tone of the presentations and round table discussions were collegial. Aside from the pointed questions that Mumper and I were able to pose, there were no open hints that any of the attendees questioned the conventional narratives around the COVID-19 pandemic response.
  • One-on-one exchanges revealed encouraging signs that not everyone there has bought the conventional narratives around the pandemic.
  • Calls for public-private “partnerships” were a common theme.

Dr. Gregory Poland, director of vaccine research at the Mayo Clinic, set the tone for the four-day conference in the first 10 minutes. In his mind, the COVID-19 pandemic was halted through the hard work of our regulatory agencies and the remarkable products borne of the mRNA platform.

The only failure came in the form of “inexplicable” vaccine hesitancy, a phenomenon driven by anti-vax pseudoscientists who are profiting from spreading baseless, fear-driven propaganda.

Combatting vaccine hesitancy, he said, is as big a challenge as protecting the world from the next deadly pathogen. Indeed, a significant portion of the events focused on strategies to dismantle the troubling “anti-vaxxer” movement.

Marks supported Poland’s position that the vaccine-hesitant are irrational, “It’s crazy that they don’t get how great vaccines are,” he said. “I am past trying to argue with people who think that vaccines are not safe.”

This remark was particularly disquieting to me. What is it going to take for the director of the FDA’s CBER to ever reassess the safety profile of the mRNA shots, especially if he no longer wishes to engage with those who disagree with him?

The panelists expressed shock that some states (Idaho and North Dakota) are considering bills making the administration of COVID-19 mRNA vaccines illegal.

“How can we get the public to understand that science is iterative?” Heaton asked. “COVID vaccines save lives!”

Poland responded: “Can we get an amen?!!”

Marks, flanked by his partners — I mean counterparts — in industry let the audience know what the future would look like. “I am not going to hold my breath waiting for a sterilizing vaccine, protecting against severe disease is enough,” he said.

Marks predicted COVID-19 vaccines would be administered annually or even biannually.

Translation: this isn’t over. It’s not even close to over. This will continue until the Sino-Russian alliance destroys Clown World. So stay strong, stay openly contemptuous of the literal retardery of anyone who is stupid enough to even consider accepting any vaccine, and do not imagine for one second that the war on the human immune system is over.

We’re long past arguing with retards who still, despite all of the available evidence, insist that vaccines are safe or effective. If people prefer to reduce their life expectancies and render their children infertile rather than doubt the Narrative, so be it. The future belongs to those who show up for it.

Never, ever, accept the mainstream narrative. It is a false narrative constructed by liars and deceived ignoramuses who labor on behalf of literal demons. And remember, the reason they consider us to be dangerous because we stand in the way of their satanic objectives.

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They May Not Be There

Amazon follows up its closure of Book Depository by announcing that it is shutting down Digital Photography Review as well. Given the observable pattern here, it’s really not looking good for GoodReads.

The demise of Digital Photography Review: I have written this column for over 20 continuous years and this is the saddest news I have ever had to report. Digital Photography Review is closing down and as of April 10, 2023 the site will be locked and no new content will be added. More ominously, the site states “The site will be available in read-only mode for a limited period afterwards.” That is a businesslike way of saying the site and all its content will soon disappear for good.

Amazon is responsible for this. They purchased the site in 2007 and now that it does not fit in their business plans, they are going to erase it. This is despicable given the cost of keeping the site available in static form is infinitesimal to a company Amazon’s size.

Surely Amazon can be a good corporate citizen and keep the site up in read-only mode, for the good of everyone? It would be wonderful if a white knight came in and saved DPReview, but that is looking less and less likely. Online commentators are calling the upcoming site deletion “cultural vandalism” and “book burning.” I am with them and in terms of book burning, in the realm of photography it is like burning The Library of Alexandria. The significance of dpreview.com to the industry and photographers everywhere cannot be overstated. There are in-depth camera reviews going back to 1998 along with a comparator that allows you to compare test scene images from almost every camera they have ever tested. There are also forums with sample images and discussions containing millions of pages of content. Despite only being around 25 years old it is probably the most important and comprehensive photographic resource that ever existed.

If these is a takeaway from all of this, it is about big companies taking things away. That is a lot easier for them to do today than in years past when we relied on physical books, magazines and packaged media for reading and entertainment. While I enjoy streaming and it has a place and a purpose for those who enjoys television, movies and music, I have long been a proponent of physical media for the image and sound quality as well as its immutable nature. I have more to say about this and will continue the discussion in a future column. In the meantime, be warned and if there are movies, TV shows, and music that is near and dear to your heart, get yourself a hard copy. It may not be there for you tomorrow.

This is precisely why it is so important to subscribe to Castalia Library and Castalia History. Remember, I’m not the one pointing this out, this is some random audio expert to whom I have no connection who is observing Amazon’s recent actions and reaching the same conclusions I reached when Amazon first launched Kindle Unlimited and I did the math concerning the huge reduction of ebook compensation for the authors and publishers.

The observation that this is about the corpocracy “taking things away” is very astute. This is the complete erasure of a knowledge base, and if the author’s opinion about the importance of the site is correct, the erasure of a significant one. While Amazon has apparently backtracked from its original intention of erasing the site due to the backlash and now intends to archive it, there cannot be much doubt that the company will eventually eliminate the archive as soon as it feels that it can get away with doing so.

This is why the new Castalia Library site upon which we are now working is intended to include a free digital library that will be funded by the Library operations, beginning with the Library and History books we are publishing, rights-permitting. Look for more announcements on that front in future Castalia newsletters.

I anticipate that we will eventually need to launch a book review site to which only subscribers will be permitted to contribute, similar to the design concept I produced for a hypothetical book award that was subsequently proved necessary by the convergence of the Dragon Awards. While it may be too soon for the West to need physical monasteries to preserve the knowledge of the past, it is not too soon to begin building them.

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Why Mexico Turned to China

After turning a blind eye to the Mexican invasion of the USA for the last 40 years, Republicans now want to invade Mexico:

US Republicans are increasingly warming to the idea of waging war against Mexico’s powerful drug cartels, according to Politico, which spoke to several lawmakers in the party about the controversial idea.

Former president Donald Trump is eager to send “special forces” south of the border to take out the cartels, according to Rolling Stone, whose sources claimed the 2024 Republican frontrunner was asking for “battle plans” to engage traffickers. Trump, they said, has been complaining about “missed opportunities of his first term” and is surrounded by people “who want fewer missed opportunities in a second Trump presidency.”

But the ex-president is far from alone inside his party. Republican congressmen Dan Crenshaw and Mike Waltz are pushing legislation that would seek an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) targeting the cartels, accusing them of “turning Mexico into a failed narco-state.”

Waltz agreed that it was “time to go on offense” against the traffickers, echoing his colleague’s comparison to the banned terrorist group. “We need to start thinking about these groups more like ISIS than we do the mafia,” he told Politico on Monday.

A group of 20 Republican congressmen led by Texas Rep. Chip Roy last month introduced a bill that would designate the Gulf Cartel, Cartel del Noreste, Cartel de Sinaloa, and Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations.”

Republican senators Lindsey Graham and John Kennedy unveiled a similar bill last month calling for a task force dedicated to cartels and drug traffickers and naming nine such organizations to be designated as terrorist.

What they’re leaving out is the fact that the US military trained the cartels. The cartels are genuinely analogous to ISIS, in that ISIS was a US creation utilized to justify the US military intervention in Syria. First they create the problem – ISIS, the cartels – and then they offer the solution, which is always a military intervention.

But whereas Russia stepped in to prevent the US from effecting regime change in Syria, I think we can expect China to step in to prevent the US from effecting regime change in Mexico. I also suspect that the “young Chinese men of military age” reported being seen in Mexico by Michael Yon are not there to prepare for a Chinese invasion of the southern border, but rather, to build the Chinese military bases that will be used to defend the Mexican government from the US military.

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Pfizer Pfaked the Clinical Trials

In which we learn why science in the absence of Christianity or some other external standard imposing honesty on the process and the profession is doomed to inaccuracy and being used as a basis for bad policy:

There were 31.2% higher deaths in the “gold standard” Pfizer Phase 3 clinical trials.

There is only one way to know whether or not the vaccine caused any of the deaths in the 21 vaccinated patients who died: proper histopathology.

Pfizer never did it and the FDA never asked for it.

This was the biggest mistake in the pandemic and nobody has acknowledged that or lifted a finger to correct it. Had they done the proper testing on the 21 deaths, the vaccine would never have been approved.

In lieu of the proper tests, there were assurances from Pfizer that nobody died from the vaccine. That’s absurd. We need the tests, not assurances. The tests are cheap and dispositive.

We can fix this in a New York minute, but nobody wants to know the answer.

Today, only Ryan Cole is doing the proper histopathology and in 100% of the cases he’s been asked to look at, he can attribute the deaths to the vaccine.

In other words, the scientists did the trials, a number of people died, but the scientists falsely attributed the deaths to some other factor than the vaccine being tested.

We knew it. We absolutely KNEW it, but we didn’t have the conclusive evidence to prove it. Now we do. The vaxxes were never safe nor effective. And for many, it was a fatal mistake to trust the science.

Scientody is not only not a reliable mechanism for determining truth, in its corrupt modern form, the scientific method is absolutely guaranteed to be abused and used to mislead and deceive those who are foolish enough to trust the scientists.

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No Point in Talking

China has realized that Russia is correct and there is absolutely no point in communicating with an enemy party that is agreement-incapable.

Beijing’s current aversion to sustained high-level engagement underscores the particularly fraught nature of U.S.-Chinese relations over the past few months. What was a two-sided desire to stabilize an increasingly volatile relationship is becoming much more about Washington reaching out and the Chinese government demurring.

Beijing is increasingly resentful about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan and official contacts that China says encourage Taiwan’s pro-independence elements.

There’s always a certain degree of diplomatic theater to the canceling of high-level meetings between the United States and China. But ensuring stable communications with major adversaries like China and Russia has long been a U.S. preference. Some U.S. officials worry Beijing’s thin-skinned diplomacy is hampering crucial communication between the rivals in a way that could have global fallout in a major crisis.

“The Chinese have been reluctant to engage in discussions around confidence building or crisis communications or hotlines,” National Security Council Indo-Pacific coordinator Kurt Campbell said at a Center for a New American Security event last week. “Given the fact that our forces operate in proximity, we’re going to have increasing challenges.”

If one reads the English-language Chinese media, such as Global Times and CGTN, it quickly becomes apparent that China neither fears the US military nor respects the US government anymore. While the Chinese are still wary of the power of the US military, particularly the sea power of the US Navy, it is evident that the Chinese are aware of the way in which US diplomacy is no longer in line with actual US military capabilities, as well as the fact that no agreement with the USA is worth the paper on which it is written.

No doubt this serious concerns those whose influence rests on their ability to confound others with their word-spells. But you can’t bamboozle those who won’t even talk to you. Russia Today notes the recent Chinese indifference to US diplomacy with a noticeable degree of satisfaction.

China has demonstrated immense diplomatic patience towards the US over the past few years, even as Washington has been venting relentless hostility towards Beijing, including, but not limited to:

  • accusations of genocide;
  • blacklisting numerous technology companies;
  • attempting to crush China’s technological development;
  • backtracking on its commitment to the One-China policy;
  • spreading conspiracy theories over the Covid-19 pandemic’s origins;
  • building new military alliances such as AUKUS, with the intention of containing China;
  • coercing third-party countries into blocking and rejecting key Chinese investments;
  • forcing other countries to take sides in an attempt to create a Cold-War-like climate;
  • whipping up anti-Chinese paranoia and vilification of China in US domestic politics.

The list is not exhaustive, yet once upon a time, China genuinely believed that these hostile policies were a ‘glitch’ of the Trump administration, and sought to engage Biden positively to try and establish a course correction. It was wrong, it was very wrong. The Biden administration has not only embraced the foreign policy consensus which former President Donald Trump created, but has doubled down on it uncritically and made things even worse. This has empowered hawks in Beijing, including President Xi Jinping himself, who has now directly called out the US, to arrive at the conclusion that the relationship with the US is beyond saving. The domestic political climate within the US is so toxic that is questionable the Biden administration even controls its foreign policy at all. 

World War III has already begun. And the imperial USA is going to lose that war.

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Monday Arktoons

THE WISE OF HEART Episode 17: 17 Sue Morgan Testifies

VEGFOLK FABLES Episode 217: Side Trip

INVASION ’55 Episode 39: Storied Past

NEURAL NETWORK NOVELLAS Episode 5: The Bum

CHUCK DIXON PRESENTS: COMEDY Episode 86: Love Poem

FULL OF EYES Episode 31: Both At Once

BEN GARRISON Episode 100: Happy Easter!

CLASSIC BIBLE TALES Episode 91: The Greatest Commandment

CHATEAU GRIEF Episode 225: All Relative

EVIL MONKEY MEMES Episode 85: Donate Life

RIOT TOWN, USA Episode 14: Texas Traffic Stop

REBEL DEAD REVENGE Episode 60: Out of the Fryingpan

The Decline of the Newspaper

It is not to be mourned, but rather, celebrated, given the complete irresponsibility and outright wickedness of the media institutions:

The country’s largest newspaper company, Gannett, is once again forecasting it will sell off more of its daily newspapers. Since its merge with newspaper company GateHouse Media in 2019, Gannett has closed or sold hundreds of papers and slashed staff by more than half, and that is projected to continue. Joshua Benton has been writing about this for the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, and he joins me now. Welcome.

JOSHUA BENTON: Good to be with you.

FLORIDO: Joshua, Gannett had 25,000 employees at the end of 2019, and less than four years later, it has just over 11,000. It slashed staff by more than half. I mean, newspaper revenue has been steadily declining over that time but not by that much, not at that rate. So what’s going on here?

BENTON: The Gannett that we have now is the result of the merger of two very large companies. The idea was an individual newspaper might struggle on its own, but if you buy enough of them, you can extract as much of the cost of producing the newspaper from the local community as possible. You cut down on print days. You have the page layout and editing done elsewhere. The thought was you could achieve these economies of scale and make a profitable business. The problem is, as part of the merger, Gannett took on a lot of debt, and they have to pay off that debt. So they need revenue. And the way that they have been doing that is by cutting costs to the bone. That means cutting staff and cutting the quality of their newspapers.

FLORIDO: I guess it goes without saying that print circulation of newspapers has plummeted in recent years. It’s been on the decline for decades, actually. And today, most people get their news online. Is it just the case that these Gannett newspapers aren’t managing to get people who used to subscribe to their print paper to subscribe to their digital product instead?

BENTON: Yeah. Newspapers have generally given up on the idea of creating new print readers. They’re not really making new print readers anymore. So the idea has been to shift to digital, and Gannett claims some degree of success in doing that. But even when that does happen, newspapers generally make significantly less money off of a digital subscriber than they do from a print subscriber. The other problem is that there are lots of other free alternatives for a lot of local news and information, and people will be happy to consume those without bothering to subscribe to the local daily.

Better uninformed than misinformed and propagandized by the corpocracy. The only real loss is historical, but that was inevitable once paper moved to digital. It will be good when government-funded media institutions like NPR and the BBC eventually fail as well. No one’s lives are enhanced or improved by learning very important information about a deadly hurricane in Bali or a fatal shooting in Chicago, or by being told lies about war, geopolitics, and the economy.

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Liars Protest Truth

The BBC and the British government are offended by Twitter accurately describing the British Broadcasting Corporation as “government-funded media”:

Elon Musk has risked a row with the BBC by labelling it as ‘government-funded media’ on Twitter.

The Corporation is mainly funded by British taxpayers, who pay a £159-a-year licence fee.

Although the government sets how much the licence fee is, not everyone has to pay it, and households pay directly.

When someone clicks on the BBC’s new label, it brings them to a page about government accounts and state-affiliated media accounts. Twitter described state-affiliated media accounts as: ‘Outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.’

The page does not include a definition for its ‘government-funded media’ label.

A BBC spokesperson said: ‘We are speaking to Twitter to resolve this issue as soon as possible. The BBC is, and always has been, independent. We are funded by the British public through the licence fee.’

There is nothing “independent” about the BBC. If a British person does not pay his licence fee, it is a criminal act with a penalty that averages £176 with a legal maximum of £1,000. The fact that the tax is paid directly to the corporation rather than going through the government does not change the fact that the funding for the BBC is imposed on the British public by His Majesty’s Government with the power of the law.

In summary, Twitter is entirely correct to describe the BBC as “government-funded media”, because without the threat of government force, the funding would not be provided to the corporation.

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