1. Health. What was once a fringe interest in medicinal uses of plants and herbs became a central pursuit. Seeking out what plants can do for health and well-being, I learned how to use their millions of years of experience fighting pathogens, for human health and well-being. Their existence today testifies to the rich store of wellness in their cellular makeup that ensures their continued survival. Making this wealth available with salves, teas, ultrasonic extraction, tinctures, and other simple methods appealed to me as a positive alternative to officially promoted drug abuse. Already familiar with growing fresh vegetables for their superior taste and nutrition, this new interest, spurred on by forced pseudo-antidotes, grew naturally from what I was already doing. The history and experience of folk remedies seems to me as valid a source of practical knowledge as medical-journal studies purchased by pharmaceutical suppliers. I am not in any way 'anti-science', but rather agnostic, preferring what works regardless whether it comes from a corporate laboratory or from my garden.
Seeing how little we really know, the standard model of medical intervention, positing a singular cause-and-effect, seems incredibly naive. Real-world biology is vastly more complicated than lab conditions, which intentionally isolate a few variables for intensive study. We take drug A because we've been advised, and we believe, that it will cure, prevent, or ameliorate disease B. But in living bodies (that we hope will continue living), neither drug A nor disease B works in isolation. We cannot possibly control the numerous interactive and systemic effects that inevitably occur. Even in the best-designed clinical trial, with large numbers of randomized, double-blind, and demographically matched voluntary participants, surprises occur. Indeed that is one of the goals of scientific research -- to produce unexpected results that we would not have otherwise known about. Drug companies often misuse clinical trials to confirm pre-determined results; that is advertising, not science. But the whole point of a clinical trial is to reveal problems not seen under laboratory conditions, before large numbers of patients are exposed to them.
A word here about 'experimental use authorization' (EUA): Until the advent of covid, this designation was only ever applied to drugs for individual patients at imminent risk of death, for whom all other treatments had failed. It made sense for them to choose an experimental drug because they had 'nothing to lose'. This was always, until covid, a carefully considered decision, adapted to each patient's individual medical condition and likelihood of benefiting. There were no 'protocols', no one-size-fits-all treatments, no standard dosages, only an experiment in which the dying patient agreed to try something where all other hope had been exhausted.
The EUA designation had never before 2020 been used for a mass-vaccination campaign. Computer models projected -- or actually assumed -- tens of millions of deaths from covid, but these numbers vastly exaggerated the actually fatality rate. Hence the relative risk assessment applicable to one dying patient could not with any pretense of honesty apply to entire populations. Only 0.015 percent of all covid-infected people are reported to have died of covid, and most of them actually died from multiple causes accompanying covid. This is common to all respiratory illnesses, in which breathing difficulties interact with reduced blood-oxygen transport, organ failure, and other terminal conditions. The purpose of a clinical trial -- to discover problems before widespread application to a large population -- is defeated if an experimental drug is initially administered to (or forced on) everyone.
The experiment did in fact disclose unanticipated consequences, such as heart attacks, strokes, blood clots, and other cardio-vascular damage, plus immune-system damage, adding up to all-cause mortality 10 to 20 percent above normal. These results were not a complete surprise to those familiar with mRNA technology and immunology, Drs Robert Malone and Geert Vandenbossche for example. For those devoted to the one-shot model of medical intervention, however, these extraordinary results are dismissed as 'side effects', as if such verbiage mattered to the people suffering them. The covid episode has shown that it is foolish to expect a quick and trouble-free cure from any medicine, especially one that is experimental and untried. I've revised my expectations of medical intervention, not downward, but more in accord with the way organic processes actually work -- interactively, systemically, and gradually. Herbal remedies typically don't produce sudden transformations in one isolated domain. That complicates the task of sorting out precise causality, but may promote better health. Green tea, to take a well-known example, is not only pleasantly refreshing, its polyphenols also induce apoptosis (cell death) in B-cell lymphomas and suppress plaque formation on teeth and in arteries. Mint has a variety of well-known effects: It calms an upset stomach, relieves pain, and increases blood flow to the extremities. It's hard to say what is the intended purpose, and what are the side effects; and it really doesn't matter. Many other examples of a series of positive effects could be cited, of foods and herbs acting as anti-oxidants, which in turn prevent inflammation, inhibit viral replication, repel harmful bacteria, and strengthen the immune system. I am happy to exchange the false prospect of a quick, single-point pharmaceutical cure for the incremental systemic improvements wrought by home-grown plants and herbs. In a real emergency, of course, I would not hesitate to use quick-acting remedies. Life is too short for dogmatic belief. But I am less inclined to leave such judgments entirely to experts than before the covid episode.
2. I've always enjoyed visiting unfamiliar places, experiencing customs and sights I could not have imagined, and the spontaneous encounters that are for me the essence of foreign travel. Even equipped with maps and guidebooks, not knowing the territory or the most basic local essentials of commerce and transportation (not to mention language) places one in a peculiarly vulnerable position. This vulnerability brings out the best or worst in people one meets in the course of travel. Such experiences refine one's judgment of whom to trust or not.
Even before covid, air travel was a trial, or a series of trials to be endured, rather than an interlude of anticipation as it once was long ago, what with airport 'security theater', universal criminalization due to lack of passenger screening, being herded into serpentine lines at multiple checkpoints, the overhead-baggage scrum, seating amid passengers of such obesity that I wonder why airlines don't price their tickets by total weight, the interminable wait on the tarmac for takeoff, finally that thrill of G-forces on liftoff that prompts an exchange of home-currency for the odd Euros or Litts or Won saved from last time.
That was before covid! To this chamber of horrors, add forced inhalation of your own carbon dioxide for half a day or a full day, tests to prove your 'asymptomatic' condition doesn't conceal some hidden communicable illness, or worse, vaccine passports, and the inevitable disagreements with those of the clot-shortened-lifespan persuasion.
The odd thing that's changed since covid is that I haven't missed trips to exotic destinations. This mystifies me. It hasn't come from any comparison of the pleasures of Italy versus the pain of putting up with the aforementioned unpleasantness. Rather it's the travel experience as a gestalt. The airline industry refuses to return to its customary pre-covid role of subservience, and insists on taking over the whole experience. Will they let me return home? What if the (arbitrary) rules change? Is it OK to hug my relatives? Questions like these hanging over the entire trip blot out the thrill of foreignness, giving every place the same dreary character haunting the news media. There is no escape, so why bother going anywhere. When the mania of travel restrictions abates, when vaccine passports become collectable antiques, when the absurd face-coverings disappear, when the pervasive panic and fear fade into boredom -- in short, when the perpetual emergency finally gives up the ghost -- then perhaps the Alps, the Taj, Mesa Encantada will be re-invested with their previous glory.
3. The U.S. Federal Government as a criminal conspiracy against the citizenry is no longer a metaphor, it is an everyday reality. While in pre-covid times this relationship was commonly described as 'adversarial', that term now seems too legalistic, as if law still governed. It doesn't anymore. These are lawless times.
The American Founders tried to head off this tendency, of government to favor its own interest above that of the people, by dividing power among three branches. This textbook-Civics model has long been superseded by the rise of the administrative state, and within it the spy agencies and their servants among elected officials, the judiciary, and the media. The U.S. administrative state first exerted its authority at the dawn of the 20th century, with the national economy turned over to private bankers operating under cover of the newly created Federal Reserve (1913), and the Federal Government financed by a new claim on personal incomes. Thus began the notion of the Federal Government as the grantor of freedom and the pursuit of happiness, replacing the Founders' notion that their constitution merely codified these pre-existing natural rights.
Each national emergency -- WW1, Depression, WW2 -- justified further expansion of the Federal Government. The Cold War and the Soviet threat (1945 - 1989) established a structure of domestic surveillance by the spy agencies. The FBI under its first Director, J Edgar Hoover, specialized in finding dirt on prominent elected and appointed officials, using the threat of disclosure to extract ever-larger budgets, and occasionally to exact revenge on unfriendly officials. As a closet transvestite Hoover was ahead of his time, though his research methods were hopelessly old-school 'humint' (human intelligence) in comparison with computer-assisted techniques soon to arrive on the intelligence scene.
The CIA and other spy agencies exploited the 9/11 attacks (2001) to justify the vast expansion of their franchise into domestic spying. Exponential improvements in computation and micro-processor speeds, computer memory, and sorting/search algorithms gave them the tools they needed to realize their long-sought ambition of diving-deep into everyone's most private personal life. Social media enabled the spy agencies to obtain troves of personal information, voluntarily surrendered by means of ingenious psychological enticements.
And here we are in 2023, on the cusp of artificial intelligence enabling ever more finely-grained targeting of groups and influential individuals with subliminal messages and psy-op-slanted news to ensure cooperation or acquiescence with regime change and other ops the spy agencies and cooperating officials wish to implement. Field-tested in Libya and Ukraine, the Obama regime brought these methods to the United States, as if it were just another country to be knocked over and staffed with complaisant figureheads. The general public in these schemes is conceived as a passive blob to be manipulated, experimented on, distracted, and when needed, stimulated to act in ways contrary to its own interests, and to forget about any distinction between its own interests and those of the state. Privacy and personal autonomy became quaint relics of the pre-Internet era.
The mass surveillance by the U.S. Government disclosed by Edward Snowden in 2013 alerted some, including me, to how far out-of-control by the citizenry these officials had become. The typical response seemed to be nonchalance: 'What have I got to hide?' But looking forward, it seemed to me that the existence of mass surveillance posed an implicit threat that people who had done nothing wrong could still be targeted. Plus, privacy is nice to have even if one has nothing to hide. And it's a fundamental Constitutional right as well.
So, keeping a massive database of private information on people without the slightest reason to suspect them of wrongdoing ('probable cause') was itself clearly illegal, unconstitutional, and implicitly threatening. Yet nobody purporting to represent ordinary citizens (elected representatives, that is) could stop them. Snowden, charged with espionage, fled (as he thought) to Ecuador, but wound up in Russia. As former Representative Ron Paul put it: 'My understanding is that espionage means giving secret or classified information to the enemy. Since Snowden shared information with the American people, his indictment for espionage could reveal (or confirm) that the U.S. Government views you and me as the enemy'.1 The spies have no legal, moral, or practical justification for their domestic spying. They don't care whether we approve of it or not, nor how such excesses damage national order and trust. It did not take long for the threat I had foreseen to become explicit. In the spy world, possession of private information is wealth, some with present value, some to be used as 'kompromat' against top officials when needed.
Prominent public officials who cannot be threatened with compromising material or dirt, or revelation of embarrassing or criminal behavior, are extremely rare in the United States (and in other countries). They all operate in a kind of 'mutual assured destruction' limbo typical of criminal enterprise. The spy agencies, as the chief owners of such information, bring the full fury of the entire U.S. Government down onto anyone who breaches their territory. Espionage charges against Edward Snowden were so extensive, and the likelihood of conviction so certain, as to make it impossible for him to return to the United States. Julian Assange, who published emails from the Democrat National Committee taken with a USB memory device by a DNC employee (Seth Rich, who was later murdered), found temporary refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London; With a regime change in Ecuador, that nation's president changed his mind and booted Assange out of its London Embassy. Coincidentally Ecuador had just become the fortunate recipient of a billion-dollar grant from the International Monetary Fund. Lieutenant-General Michael Flynn, who discovered and reported in 2012 that the Taliban had fired a U.S.-made Stinger missile (diverted from Benghazi) at a U.S. helicopter, was later relentlessly prosecuted for routinely meeting with Russian Ambassador Kislyak during the December 2016 presidential transition period. Thus Senator Charles Schumer's warning to incoming President Trump on January 3, 2017, 'You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you' was both correct and prophetic.
Donald Trump broke the mold of U.S. presidential candidates. He upset the spies who were accustomed to calling the shots, not because he was absolutely free of 'kompromat' -- he wasn't -- but because he didn't care. He calculated that the dirt in his past wasn't serious enough to damage his candidacy, partly because the electorate, mostly, didn't care enough about it to vote for his opponent. So, when the 'October surprise' pussy-grabbing tape was aired, it fell flat. Single career women who already hated Trump just hated him more. The Russia-collusion story was more serious, but a failed Moscow real-estate deal didn't seem likely to motivate election interference by the Russian Government. Besides, the other candidate had favored Russia more lavishly than Donald Trump had ever done or proposed, giving Russia control of 20 percent of America's uranium supply, in exchange for a donation to the Clinton Foundation.
Russian oligarchs had in fact saved Trump from bankruptcy, which might have yielded more readily exploitable material, but they were business people with zero interest in American elections. But Trump's talking about 'getting along with Russia' caused the spies' antennae to twitch. That would interfere with their war plans which were already underway with the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. The spies proceeded to seek out any 'kompromat' on him that might resonate with the U.S. electorate.
Finally in the waning days of the Obama Administration, they patched together a story that, like a Hollywood movie, had all the formulaic elements of a big hit -- election interference, lurid sex (the 'golden showers'), together with (presumably as quid pro quo) cancellation of Obama's last-minute (December 29, 2016) sanctions against Russia. Alert readers will have already recognized this combination as the Steele Dossier, purchased by the Democrat National Committee with funds laundered through the Perkins Coie law firm and and opposition-research (dirt mining) firm called Fusion GPS, and diligently distributed to Congress by the FBI.
The Obama group delegated FBI Director James ('A Higher Calling')2 Comey to deliver the goods to President-Elect Trump on January 6, 2017, two weeks before Inauguration. Trump must have recognized it as blackmail, but, with his showbiz background, was probably mystified as to what purpose such an amateurish and absurd concoction could possibly serve. But Washington DC plays by different rules from those of Hollywood; in Washington they don't need verisimilitude or plausibility. The campaign to defeat Trump in the 2016 election continued unabated in 2017 through 20203.
I had an uneasy feeling at the time that something unprecedented was going on here. The FBI is supposed to investigate crimes, not commit them. And the CIA is supposedly confined to foreign surveillance, forbidden to spy on Americans in America. Yet the FBI was circulating a deeply-flawed third-hand 'dossier' financed by one political party to discredit the candidate of the other political party. And the FBI sought and obtained permission from a secret Court for a politically motivated campaign to make an elected president out to be a traitor, on the basis of these demonstrably false allegations paid for by a political opponent. The CIA used a Washington listening-post of Britain's MI5 to make its surveillance look international. Meanwhile not three weeks of the newly elected Administration had passed when the CIA was 'taking the kill shot4' -- not on a foreign terrorist, but on NSA Director Michael Flynn. At the same time, plotters inside the Trump Administration and in Congress were coordinating plans to impeach him, from his first day5 in office. There being not enough of a record of 'high crimes and misdemeanors' to warrant impeachment that early on, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein helpfully proposed to 'wear a wire', in other words stealthily record a conversation with President Trump designed to prove he was nuts, so he could be removed under the 25th Amendment which specifies a procedure for removing a president for incapacity to serve. In the end, Rosenstein and Congressional leaders settled on a long investigation by former FBI rector Robert Mueller, which produced nothing, but segued, as if on autopilot, into an impeachment anyway, and then a second impeachment after the first one failed. Finally election year 2020 rolled around, and with it a global plague that justified 100 million mail-in ballots, most of which had (according to Jovan Pulitzer6) never seen the inside of an envelope. With this and at least a dozen other strategems, the outcome of the 2020 election was foreordained: President Trump's opponents had conducted a four-year-long putsch to force him out of the office to which he was twice elected.
As I was piecing together the Timeline, it seemed to me America had reached and passed a point of no return in its political and social makeup. Though I am not a lawyer and was not especially given to following procedure for the sake of procedure, I noticed that one of the virtues of legal procedure is its neutrality. The Constitution and the laws are so written as to favor no party or candidate. Numerous violations of the Constitution and of law crystallized the position of the Federal Government as a party in its own interest, against the entire citizenry and electorate, including those who hated Donald Trump and wanted him gone. The 40-city summer and autumn of violence by what was effectively the unofficial militia of one party drove home the realization that opposing their preferences could be physically dangerous. Finally, the blatant suppression of factual information proving criminal and anti-American conduct by the beneficiaries of the flawed 2020 vote-count further cemented the impression of a 'fatal, unrecoverable error'.
I concluded that regardless of officials' preferences for violent or peaceful methods of governance, they had 'no choice' but to opt for violent means. They had, in other words, exhausted all the available legal and Constitutional resources for doing whatever they wanted to do. All government is to some extent coercive. At its best, we need government to force all to accept unpleasant things like taxes, on the principle that everyone else is subject to the same obligations. But the 2020 election was clearly so far over the top, and so self-evidently in violation of the Constitution and numerous election laws, that any Administration so installed could only keep itself in office by a combination of force, psy-ops, and censorship.
Covid and its hastily produced pseudo-antidote offered the perfect opportunity to extend Government coercion into new territory. Medicalized tyranny brings Government from the realm of external affairs into one's own body, directly affecting one's own health and survival. It is one thing to demand passive acquiescence to a regime possessed by a noxious ideology, even payment of taxes to support its operations and pervasive surveillance of both on-line and off-line activity. These are intrusive, but can be dismissed as somehow 'external' to our physical and mental existence. It is quite another thing for Government to demand injection of a drug, especially an experimental drug with unknown effects either on the object of its somatic action or on personal health and survival. This demand turned every human being on the planet subject to its enforcement into lab rats, unwary participants in the biggest clinical trial ever. Informed consent was almost entirely abolished by a massive campaign of fear, reassurances from medical and public health authorities that turned out to be false in every respect, and herding of the populace into house arrest while disrupting ordinary social and economic life.
As news of horrific cardio-vascular damage and death caused by these Government-promoted (and in many cases Government-mandated) mRNA injections filtered through the miasma of false claims and censorship, I realized I was witnessing something fundamentally different in the character of official behavior. All U.S. Federal agencies, many of America's State and local Governments, and those of its allies, and even those of its enemies, engaged in this mass hysteria directed against their citizens and residents. They openly threatened people's livelihoods, in some cases corralled them into concentration camps, cancelled the bank accounts of those who objected, illegally forced private employers to force employees to be injected, all in the name of public health and safety. But it became increasingly evident, indeed obvious, that the public health emergency merely serves to justify an extension of Governmental control into our physical existence. It actually threatens the life of everyone subject to its diktats (including me).
Despite the apparent unanimity of these forces, their consensus is illusory. Otherwise no censorship would be necessary. Their hyper-sensitivity to the slightest hint of dissent betrays the fragility and vacuity of their warped perspective. It is unsustainable, and therefore must be propped up with a series of contrived emergencies. So, while realization of the life-threatening character of an out-of-control Government may seem discouraging, in reality it is the first step in reclaiming our freedom. Knowing or surmising what their strategy is, large groups of people acting together can activate their own strategies, free of the false belief that Government represents them, or is 'on their side'. A few public officials may articulate their constituents' wishes, and perhaps others sympathize silently, but such wishes will only be enacted into policy if and when those responsible for massive and serial abuses of public trust are replaced.
In my case, then, the covid episode and its pseudo-antitdote have thus 1) prompted greater self-reliance in health, 2) curtailed foreign travel, and 3) crystallized a view of the U.S. Government as a criminal life-threatening entity. I merely relate here my own responses, with no argument about their validity for others. Whether these responses are unique or shared by many is of no consequence; I am merely observing responses that have occurred, as if from outside myself. Further downstream effects include: Strained friendships, greater attention to end-of-life concerns, and practical and philosophical preparations for a radically different future. Surprisingly, what seem like end-times thoughts incidentally unearth clues about how to live better in the here-and-now. These will be considered in a future post.
Ron Paul's official Facebook page, 2013.
§7a. A Higher Calling, January - June 2017.
§6b. The Insurance Policy, Post-Election, November 2016 - January 2017.
§6b. The Insurance Policy, Post-Election, November 2016 - January 2017.
§6b. The Insurance Policy, Post-Election, November 2016 - January 2017.
§9c. Hijacking the Presidency, November 2020 - January 2021.
Thanks Samantha. I tried to think and write 'outside the Internet'. It's hard to do that! It's wonderful that you grow your own seasonal produce and herbs. It's not primarily about saving money or even about self-sufficiency, as important as those are; the taste is so utterly different from store-bought, that's the thing. And of course you can grow a lot more variety that doesn't have to survive shipping. That's interesting about pomegranates. They have a long history, you know, dating back to Biblical times. Your experiences and observations are amazingly similar to mine.
Hi Peter -- I enjoyed reading this as it reads almost like a view into your thought processes before COVID and after, which came together to solidify where you stand now.
We grow all of our own seasonal produce as well as an extensive herb garden. While we don’t have a pomegranate tree, I’ve been learning quite a bit about the wonders of this fruit, including the peel and pith from Jennifer DePew’s Substack. I’ve even dehydrated the peel and pith from several poms and I often add some to my morning tea.
Even pre-COVID, our family didn’t much rely on traditional medicine, though we needed it on occasion.
This COVID debacle has also curtailed our foreign travel, but we’re traveling far more around the US and have plans for Canada as well, provided they’ve stopped requiring all who enter to show proof of the death jab. That said, we went to Atlanta for a week recently and domestic travel is still a pain in the a*s!
Edward Snowden had a huge part in changing how we view our government and the intelligence community specifically. The Seth Rich murder still hurts my heart to this day. He resembles one of our sons, so I think that’s why it still bothers me so much -- that and the fact that it was senseless and brutal.
Trump had his past issues with women, sure, but he doesn’t drink at ALL, doesn’t do drugs, etc., so pinning him down with a blackmail was difficult. Which brings me to the FBI...it’s disappointing that they have become largely a crime syndicate that perpetrates crime on American citizens, while hiding the crimes of other Americans. They aren’t fit to tie the shoes of the likes of Elliot Ness.
In Texas we never had mask mandates. Some businesses enacted their own mask mandates, so we just avoided shopping at those. We attend a small country parish church about 45 minutes from our home. It never shut down, no social distancing, no masks. I am so grateful for that.