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The Definition of Insanity

AARP: “Keep getting boosters even though previous ones didn’t work.”

BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | JANUARY 9, 2024

This morning someone sent me a link to Alex Berenson’s post about the AARP advising its nearly 38 million members to get another COVID-19 booster shot, even if they have already had five boosters.

This prompted me to visit AARP’s website, which features an entire category of content titled Scams & Fraud—that is, warnings to older people about all the predators out there who wish to manipulate and deceive them in order to steal their money.

Under the category Caregiving is posted an articled titled COVID-19 Nursing Home Deaths Climb Ahead of Expected Winter Surge.

The article laments that nursing home residents and staff have lost interest in getting the latest booster, and suggests this is a likely explanation for why COVID-19 mortality in nursing homes has risen in recent months as we head into winter.

The author, Emily Paulin, does NOT mention the common experience of older people repeatedly falling ill with COVID-19 even after receiving multiple boosters. She also doesn’t mention a word about TREATING nursing home residents who fall ill with COVID-19. Four years after this mess began, an AARP writer about nursing home policy still has nothing to say about treating the illness.

Reading this article reminded me of a Joe Rogan podcast I watched yesterday in which his guest—an earnest and callow young man who says “like” every fourth word—asserts the following two propositions:

1). Most popular sports were conceived and developed to give men an advantage over women. For example, in basketball, “the way the ball moves” gives biological males an advantage.

2). Biological males who receive gender reassignment procedures to become women have NO advantage over women in sports.

The same kind of insanity is also evident among the foreign policy crowd that continues to advocate the war in Ukraine. No matter how many hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are run into the meat grinder of Russian defensive positions in the eastern part of the country, these lunatics continue to insist that the Ukrainians KEEP DOING THIS until they get their desired result.

All of the above is further evidence of the mental illness underlying what I call the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle:

1). COVID-19 vaccines are saving mankind. Anyone who questions the safety and efficacy of the vaccines is guilty of heresy.

2). The U.S. proxy war in Ukraine is a sacred mission and NO negotiated settlement with Russia shall be countenanced. Anyone who criticizes the Ukrainian and U.S. governments, and any attempt to understand the war from the Russian point of view, is guilty of heresy. Indeed, as Ukraine’s American, transgender military spokeswoman asserted back in September, journalists who question this article of faith should be hunted down and killed.

3). Human induced climate change will soon destroy the earth if trillions aren’t spent to overhaul our entire energy policy. Anyone who questions this proposition is guilty of heresy.

4). The concept of biological sex is a mere “construct.” Skilled surgeons and endocrinologists can transform a boy into a girl or vice versa. Anyone who questions this assertion is guilty of heresy.

For my part, I have lost all patience with people who subscribe to the Holy Quadripartitus of Piffle. In my view, they have become indistinguishable from sleep-deprived children. There is no sense in trying to have a conversation or reason with them. I can only hope that their insane assertions and conduct will ultimately be rejected by the great majority of adults in the United States and the rest of the world.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

CDC study concludes most young children hospitalized for COVID were unvaccinated — after enrolling 7 times as many unvaxed kids in study

By Angelo DePalma, Ph.D. and Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 9, 2024

A U.S. government-sponsored study published late last month in The Pediatric Infectious Disease Journal reported that most young children hospitalized for acute COVID-19 had not received an mRNA COVID-19 vaccination and were sicker to begin with than vaccinated children.

The authors’ conclusions are true on the surface, but their analysis ignored that more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated children were enrolled in their study.

Only 4.5% of trial subjects completed primary COVID series

Investigators led by Laura Zambrano, Ph.D., a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention epidemiologist, recruited 597 children ages 8 months through under age 5 hospitalized for COVID-19 at 28 U.S. pediatric hospitals between Sept. 20, 2022, and May 31, 2023.

Unvaccinated subjects outnumbered subjects who had received at least one COVID-19 shot by 528 to 69, a more than 7-fold difference.

Children were grouped by demographic factors such as race, sex and geographic location, vaccination status (no vaccine, incomplete vaccine series or fully vaccinated) and underlying non-COVID-19 illnesses, or comorbidities.

Only 4.5% of the subjects had completed their primary COVID-19 vaccination series and 7% had received at least one dose.

Cases varied widely in severity, with 174 (29.1% of all subjects) admitted to intensive care and 75 progressing to life-threatening illness.

Fifty-one (8.5% of all subjects) required life support via invasive mechanical ventilation, and three required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation, a life-support treatment involving a heart-lung machine.

Based on results from both vaccinated and unvaccinated groups, infants 8 months to under age 2 were more vulnerable to serious outcomes than children ages 2 to 4 years.

For example, the youngest subjects had more life-threatening illnesses and the greatest need for high-level respiratory support involving vasoactive infusions — intravenous treatments to maintain normal blood pressure and heart rate. Yet they also had shorter hospital stays.

Investigators concluded that most children hospitalized for COVID-19, including most children with underlying medical conditions, were unvaccinated. On that basis, they called for “strategies to reduce barriers to vaccine access among young children.”

Researchers tested kids for COVID but not other respiratory infections

Zambrano et al. also compared the Pfizer mRNA shot to the Moderna product. They found that children who took the Moderna product were somewhat more likely to experience a serious outcome, however, the numbers from both groups were small and the authors did not subject them to statistical analysis.

Based on their analysis they also calculated and reported, in their “results” section, that mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were 40% effective in reducing serious outcomes. However, in their discussion (several sections later), they admitted that “vaccine coverage in this population was too low to evaluate vaccine effectiveness.”

There were two notable limitations to the Zambrano study. Even though the researchers recruited children who were only partially vaccinated the study’s design excluded children who had received any vaccination fewer than 14 days before hospital admission. Therefore no short-term post-vaccination adverse events were included.

Another limitation was that children were tested for COVID-19 but not for all possible respiratory infections, meaning “it is possible that RSV [respiratory syncytial virus], human metapneumovirus or other respiratory viral co-detections influenced disease severity.”

Media parroted authors’ conclusions

U.S. media (for example here and here) picked up on the Zambrano paper and repeated its conclusion that most hospitalized COVID-19 pediatric patients were unvaccinated — ignoring that the study included more than 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects.

A deeper dive into the data reveals the extent of this error and the discrepancies between what Zambrano et al. reported and what they saw.

Tables 1 and 2 illustrate what the authors got wrong.

These calculations say nothing about the relative outcomes for vaccinated and unvaccinated children because Zambrano et al. either did not perform the relevant calculation — number of cases in each group divided by the number of subjects — or chose not to report the results it generated.

Instead of presenting the number of subjects experiencing the indicated outcome as a percentage of vaccinated or unvaccinated groups, they reported them as a percentage of all subjects experiencing that outcome. Since there were 7 times as many unvaccinated as vaccinated subjects, this approach all but guaranteed the numbers among the unvaxed would be higher.

Here’s an analogy: In a hypothetical study comparing 10 coffee drinkers to 100 abstainers, five drinkers and 10 abstainers reported feeling nervous. Using Zambrano’s logic, 67% of people feeling nervous were abstainers, and just 33% drank coffee. This “proves,” according to Zambrano’s logic, that not drinking coffee doubles (67% vs. 33%) the risk of getting the jitters.

The correct way to view this data is that 10 in 100 abstainers, or 10%, felt jittery but 5 in 10 (50%) of coffee drinkers felt jittery, and that drinking coffee raises the risk of nervousness fivefold (50% vs. 10%).

Table 2 uses the same raw data as Table 1. But instead of reporting vaccinated and unvaccinated data as a percentage of all data, it first calculates the occurrence of these conditions or outcomes in each group and compares the inter-group differences.

Hospital stays were also on average one day shorter for the unvaccinated. The only area where unvaccinated children faired slightly worse was in underlying cardiac issues, but the authors did not address this small difference in their discussion.

Previous study used same tactic

study preceding the Zambrano paper by three weeks used the same tactic to arrive at the same conclusion.

Tannis et al. compared many of the same outcomes as Zambrano in 6,337 unvaccinated and 281 vaccinated children ages 6 months to under 5 years.

All subjects had visited emergency departments for acute respiratory illness from July 2022 to September 2023.

By coincidence, Tannis also calculated vaccine effectiveness to be 40%.

Table 3 presents data from Tannis et al. with percentages reported by Tannis (Tannis %) and the actual values (Actual %).

Vaccinated children were also 68.3% more likely to harbor HCoV, an endemic coronavirus, than the unvaccinated. Similar to SARS-CoV-2 (the COVID-19 virus), HCoV can cause serious illness in immunocompromised individuals and the elderly.


Angelo DePalma, Ph.D., is a science reporter/editor for The Defender.

Karl Jablonowski, Ph.D., holds a master’s degree in computer science and a doctorate in biomedical and health informatics. He practices data science by asking questions of databases that can reveal population-based adverse outcomes of medical interventions.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 10, 2024 Posted by | Deception, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton Loses Medical License in New York for Writing Eight Vaccine Exemptions in California

By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | January 8, 2024

Dr. Mary Kelly Sutton (who goes by “Kelly”) on Oct. 30 lost her license to practice medicine in New York for writing eight vaccine exemptions in California between 2016 and 2018. New York was the third state to enforce this penalty, after Massachusetts and California. Sutton is now no longer able to practice medicine anywhere in the U.S.

Both the New York and Massachusetts medical boards adjudicated Sutton’s case on the basis of “reciprocal discipline,” rubber-stamping the Medical Board of California’s 2021 decision without allowing her to challenge the validity of the original findings.

Reciprocal discipline avoids the time and costs of relitigating. Therefore, like the Massachusetts Board of Medicine hearing last July, the October hearing in New York was just theater and the board never intended to allow Sutton to defend herself.

Instead, the New York board maintained that the purpose of the hearing was limited to determining what penalty should apply to Sutton’s state license in light of the findings already established in California.

Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law

Sutton, an integrative medicine physician practicing since the early 1970s, told The Defender that the Medical Board of California misinterpreted the law when it determined she violated “standards of care” when writing the vaccine exemptions.

Those exemption-specific standards — which came into effect in 2016 via Senate Bill (SB) 277, a California bill that stripped parents of the personal belief exemption for rejecting vaccines for their children — only stated it was up to the physician to decide on a medical exemption based on the needs of the child.

However, in 2019, California passed two more bills — SB 276 and SB 714 — designed to make vaccine exemptions even more difficult to acquire.

Specifically, when a doctor writes more than five medical exemptions per year (as of Jan. 1, 2020) or a school’s immunization rate falls below 95%, the California Department of Public Health (CPDH) has the right to review the medical exemptions.

Physicians since January 2021 are also required to use a standardized electronic exemption form submitted to a statewide database, and CPDH may revoke exemptions that do not conform to vaccination guidelines established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and by the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Sutton claimed the Medical Board of California applied its own definition of “standards of care,” in direct contravention to the standard established by SB 277.

“In California, any time a standard of care is written into statutory law, it is more preeminent than a community standard of care that is just held among the general opinion of doctors in practice,” she said.

Sutton believes the Medical Board of California was also applying laws derived from SB 276 and SB 714 that went into effect well after the date she wrote the exemptions.

The CDC’s and ACIP’s vaccine recommendations do not constitute mandates or requirements. According to Sutton, during the lobbying phase of SB 277, a doctor called ACIP and asked whether its recommendations should be considered mandates, and was told that they were only guidelines.

The ACIP guidelines do not mention the word “exemption,” according to Sutton, nor were the guidelines mentioned in SB 277.

“That’s the way guidelines have always been used in standards of care,” Sutton said, calling them “indicators, supports, references — but not mandates.”

Sutton said the mood of medicine is shifting away from a doctor exercising his or her own training and experienced judgment towards doing what the standards and guidelines say.

“This is decidedly against the quality of medicine because there’s no freedom to individualize for the patient,” she said.

Dissecting the California case

The California board revoked Sutton’s license for “gross negligence” and “repeated negligent acts” in issuing permanent vaccine exemptions for eight pediatric patients, saying the exemptions did not comply with standards of care and vaccine guidelines at the time.

The board’s sole expert witness, Dr. Deborah Lehman, infectious disease physician at the University of California, Los Angeles, dismissed Sutton’s claim that SB 277 clearly articulated standards of care regarding exemptions, saying those were not the “community standard of care,” Sutton recounted.

Sutton explained:

“SB 277 was brief and direct to the point. It said that if a child who is required to have vaccines receives a note from a physician stating that it is in the child’s best interests to not be vaccinated, then that suffices to fulfill the requirement and the child can go to school without having the required vaccines. The deciding factor is the physician’s discretion.”

The relevant clause from the bill states:

“If the parent or guardian files with the governing authority a written statement by a licensed physician to the effect that the physical condition of the child is such, or medical circumstances relating to the child are such, that immunization is not considered safe, indicating the specific nature and probable duration of the medical condition or circumstances, including, but not limited to, family medical history, for which the physician does not recommend immunization, that child shall be exempt from the requirements.”

Lehman said doctors must only grant an exemption when there is a contraindication to a vaccine and at no other time.

Lehman claimed the standard of care was determined by whether another physician would treat the medical issue the same or similarly. However, according to Sutton, she omitted the all-important phrase “in the same community.”

In the integrative medicine community in which Sutton practices, it is common for patients to receive more individualized treatments rather than one-size-fits-all approaches.

“It was kind of a force-of-personality situation that was successful in the setting of the courtroom hearing at the administrative level,” Sutton said. “And the board witness prevailed upon the judge to believe that the law had no meaning and that community opinion was higher.”

The California board also questioned Sutton’s decision not to request patients’ medical files or perform physicals in the cases for which she wrote exemptions.

“If I required a physical exam for every vaccine exemption, I could be accused of ‘padding the bill’ because the physical exam contributes nothing to the decision about the risk for a vaccine injury,” Sutton said.

Instead, Sutton’s process was primarily to review patient histories to understand if the child or a family member had suffered a negative reaction to vaccines.

She said:

“From my understanding and from the group of physicians that I worked with at the time — Physicians for Informed Consent — the risk factors for vaccine injury lie completely in the story of what’s happened to the child when they have had vaccines and what has happened to their blood relatives when those people had vaccines.”

After the passage of SB 277, Sutton said there was “a great deal of conversation” among doctors about how the law could be read and interpreted and how exemptions could be constructed rationally based on the scientific literature.

That literature showed several different areas of concern around vaccinations, including “The aluminum contained in vaccines can trigger neurologic issues and autoimmune disease,” Sutton said, adding, “There is the question of regression after vaccines and neurodevelopmental delays such as autism.”

“There’s also a higher risk of allergies, and then there’s the immediate reactions where a person collapses or has a seizure after a vaccine,” she said.

“A doctor has to make an extra effort in order to understand the historical pattern of vaccine reactions that would indicate risk of vaccine injury, or how to diagnose mitochondrial dysfunction,” Sutton said.

During the California hearing, Sutton shared extensive scientific citations supporting her medical decision-making, including research by Dr. Chris Exley on the dangers of aluminum in vaccines.

She told the board that it was neither intelligent nor humane to force a family to continue to vaccinate after one of their children had already died or been injured by a vaccine, and shared her clinical observation that unvaccinated patients are healthier than those who are vaccinated.

The California board also claimed Sutton neglected to provide informed consent to her patients requesting vaccine exemptions.

Sutton was uncertain exactly what the board meant here but surmised it was saying she did not adequately highlight the diseases that could develop if the parents failed to vaccinate their children.

Deeming the real issue with informed consent to be advising patients about the potential harms of vaccination, Sutton said, “I don’t think I repeated the CDC bylines.” Instead, she believed the parents who came to her for exemptions were already “more than aware” of the risks of childhood diseases.

From her point of view, there was already enough vaccine promotion happening with mainstream media and schools “echoing over and over” how “vastly dangerous chickenpox” and the other childhood diseases were.

The California board’s concern about Sutton not requesting previous medical records is based on the notion of “Don’t trust a single word the patient says,” Sutton said, an attitude that necessitates getting “every documentation” about adverse vaccine reactions before making a decision.

“That’s not the way medicine works,” Sutton said. “But that’s what was expected in terms of a medical exemption interview. It’s like building a legal case instead of a medical case.”

Further wrongdoing was implied by the California board in pointing out that a number of the exemptions Sutton wrote were for patients for whom she was not the primary care provider.

“That is implying that the primary care doctor knows the patient best,” Sutton said. “And that is good in a lot of ways, but it can be a problem for the patient if it’s a large practice that has been forbidden to give vaccine exemptions.”

Sutton said that if a patient’s need cannot be addressed by that group, even if it’s their primary care group, then it is akin to patient abandonment.

SB 277, the law in effect during the period Sutton wrote the exemptions, never had a requirement that exemptions be written by the primary care physician, or even by a pediatrician or pediatric infectious disease expert, according to Sutton.

“So their [Medical Board of California’s] statements were beyond the law and that’s what they were enforcing against doctors,” she said.

Although the board improperly focused on laws that went into effect in 2019 and later, Sutton said, “That very argument could not be persuasively made by the attorneys at the time.”

Board expert: ‘Science has been decided’ on vaccine risks

The Medical Board of California conducted a three-day “trial” for Sutton in June 2021 in an administrative court with a single judge and no right to a jury.

Three experts spoke on behalf of Sutton, while Lehman, the board’s single expert, testified against her.

Lehman lacked basic knowledge of vaccine risks and stated that all doctors should follow the CDC’s vaccine schedule.

When asked to quantify the risk of vaccine injuries, Lehman said, “I don’t need to cite articles in my report, because the science has been decided … If you want answers to these questions, I would refer you to the CDC.”

After denying any knowledge of Dr. Peter Aaby’s more than 400 articles on PubMed analyzing vaccine dangers, Lehman characterized the journal as “low impact” and Aaby as “anti-vax.”

Sutton’s witnesses were Dr. Andrew Zimmerman, pediatric neurologist, Dr. James Neuenschwander, family physician with vaccine expertise and Dr. LeTrinh Hoang, integrative medicine pediatrician.

They skillfully articulated the heterodox perspectives on vaccine dangers and referenced a number of recent studies on vaccine adverse effects, while noting the lack of data on vaccine safety or government studies comparing health outcomes for vaccinated versus unvaccinated individuals.

“And on this very little evidence, people like the board expert are proclaiming to the high heavens these are safe and effective,” Sutton said. “All of these other concerns are irrelevant.”

Administrative court structure promotes ‘raw power’

In Sutton’s interactions with California, Massachusetts and New York, she observed a notable lack of due process when compared with civil and criminal courts.

In the proceedings with the Massachusetts board, one of the documents filed against her did not list any specific complaints, making it difficult for Sutton to defend herself. “I had to intuit what they were complaining about and then make up the answers,” she said.

When she brought this shortcoming to the magistrate’s attention, he confirmed that such detail is not required in administrative courts.

“The structure of the administrative-level courts promotes the raw power that’s exercised by the medical boards,” Sutton said, adding, “It’s not an exercise within the law and it doesn’t benefit the people, but only the administrative state itself.”

Sutton mentioned the Federation of State Medical Boards, which coordinates all of the medical boards in the U.S., sent out warnings to doctors about misinformation, masks, vaccines and exemptions related to COVID-19, she said.

“It’s a private, unelected group that’s been around for over 100 years,” she said. “It’s not visibly related to any government entity.”

Together with its partner agency, the International Association of Medical Regulatory Authorities, it forms an integral part of the administrative state that is undermining the doctor-patient relationship and helping to delicense doctors like Sutton.

Sutton said, “They are both in the same building at the same address in Euless, Texas. So there is a centralized organ to control medical boards around the world, which means controlling doctors around the world.”

“The coordination of COVID happened through organizations like that,” she added.

Doctors incentivized to ignore vaccine injuries

Sutton said the financial incentives to vaccinate everyone within a medical practice discourage doctors from connecting adverse health outcomes to the vaccines.

“The Blue Cross Blue Shield Provider Incentive Program manual of 2016 listed a $400 bonus to the doctor for every two-year-old who was on the CDC vaccine schedule on time,” she said, “as long as 63% of the practice was vaccinated.”

“That’s going to influence how you respond to a parent when they say, ‘Johnny had a seizure after the MMR [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccine,’” Sutton said, adding, “Do you put that in the chart as an MMR vaccine reaction? Or do you say, ‘Oh, it must be something else’?”

If a child has a febrile seizure, the doctor may well chalk it up to normal childhood fever rather than to a recent vaccination, Sutton said. “So we bias our own literature, our own notes, by the things that have been allowed in terms of financial incentives.”

Sutton said financial incentives must be removed from medicine to restore its integrity.

“It’s too much impact on physician judgment and motivations are not angelic,” she said. “We’re humans. So if somebody says ‘If you just get 10 kids vaccinated you’ll get $4000,’ I’m going to be looking for those 10 kids to vaccinate and I’ll be rationalizing to myself why that’s okay.”

Part of the problem, according to Sutton, is the state of the vaccine research literature that keeps doctors in the dark about the reality of adverse events.

“Vaccines have been very poorly studied,” she said. “Some of them were approved, like hepatitis B, after only four days in one case and five days in another brand’s case study — and it was approved for use in every newborn baby.”

Other vaccines have been studied for as long as 42 days, but none long-term, which is necessary to see the development of autoimmune diseases like asthma that don’t show up immediately after vaccination, she said.

“So the board expert could say there’s no evidence that an adverse event is related to vaccines, which is not accurate because the evidence is there — but it’s not in the evidence that the CDC accepts,” Sutton said.

According to Sutton, the CDC “very carefully curates” the articles and studies it puts on its website to support its own policies. If a CDC-sponsored study shows adverse vaccine reactions, it won’t appear on its website, she said.

Sutton shared the story of a former cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic who was training to do heart transplants when her 12-month-old daughter received an MMR vaccine and immediately regressed with severe autism. The woman had to leave the cardiology program and return to her home in Europe to care for her child.

Sutton said this woman claimed the CDC was researching a lot of topics, including that the rubella virus in the MMR vaccine persists in the body for a long time and results in granulomas in the case of immune-deficient children and sometimes immune-competent adults.

“This is not on the CDC website,” Sutton said. “So if we look at the nature of the research supporting our vaccine program, we would be astonished and staggered and ashamed because we’re injecting our children with very little evidence that these vaccines are safe or effective.”

Financial incentives in research and drug approvals are also highly problematic, according to Sutton.

“Medicine is no longer medicine,” she said. “It’s become co-opted as another business. Sickness is more profitable than health and mandates are more profitable than choice.”

“Otherwise, despite the efforts of individual doctors, the profession will be working against humanity and really becomes organized brutality instead of healthcare,” Sutton said.

‘The whole storm is not finished’

Sutton has exhausted or curtailed her administrative appeals with the states that have removed her license to practice medicine.

However, she and several doctors are planning to file a collective action in federal court in the spring. They are being supported by the nonprofit Physicians & Patients Reclaiming Medicine, where Sutton’s story is currently featured.

Meanwhile, Sutton keeps in touch with many of her colleagues who have suffered the same fate.

“They are recouping from the reputational and financial losses after being attacked,” she said. “So people don’t quit, but there is a lot of sadness about medicine.”

Sutton talked about the “diaspora” away from the state of California because of the discrimination that’s happened to families who had a health concern about a vaccine for their child.

“There’s been a lot of pain. So the whole storm is not finished,” she said.

Lacking a medical license, Sutton has turned to offering health education for a small group of clients. They meet monthly over Zoom, and individuals can discuss their concerns privately with her. But she no longer diagnoses, treats or does physical exams.

Sutton is currently preparing a course about integrative medicine to present to a group of acupuncture students.


John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 9, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , | Leave a comment

The American Psychological Association Wants (More) Federal Funding To Curb Online “Misinformation”

By Didi Rankovic | Reclaim The Net | January 9, 2024

The American Psychological Association (APA) is among those organizations enlisted to join the “war on misinformation” back in 2021, when APA took a $2 million grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to help push the Covid narratives of the time.

APA’s particular task there was to come up with “a scientific consensus statement on the science of misinformation.”

Now, APA is clamoring for even more federal money as it declares psychology to be “leading the way on fighting misinformation” and advertises psychologists as the right people to research the problem (as it has been presented over the last years), and also be “part of the solution.”

An article on APA’s site doesn’t shy away from using terminology that spreads a sense of alarm, such as “the scourge of misinformation” and asserting that clinicians now have to treat patients “subsumed” by conspiracy theories, while institutions and communities are all allegedly suffering unspecified “harm.”

And APA also doesn’t shy away from mentioning the US presidential election, or from positioning that event as something that makes combating misinformation “messier and more important than ever.”

Messy it is, alright. To position itself properly among all those vying for funding/influence by exaggerating the threat posed by misinformation as a new phenomenon, APA actually states that, with the election in mind, fighting misinformation is “one of the top trends facing the field (physiology) in 2024.”

Really, APA? Maybe the author meant – a top trend faced by the organization itself, since it has had to show something in return for the $2 million 2021 CDC grant given to it to research “the science of stopping misinformation.”

(Spoiler: that “science” is already well-developed and applied; it’s called censorship.)

Beside the general alarmist tone, APA also came up with “recommendations.”

First, shut up – “don’t repeat misinformation.” Next, leverage “trusted sources to share accurate information.” At this point APA is pretty much parroting Big Tech’s various “guidelines” that have justified a lot of legitimate information getting obliterated over the past years as (never precisely and objectively defined) “misinformation.”

The “recommendations” address fellow physiologists, urging them to become “literate” in this newly crafted “science” – in order to be able to take active part in “the solution.”

According to APA’s current standards, helping people (as psychology professionals) should now include the total of eight recommendations (prominent and fairly ominous, free speech-wise, among which is – “collaborate with social media companies to understand and reduce the spread of harmful misinformation”).

And practitioners should do this everywhere – “(in) our labs, our communities, or our families.”

January 9, 2024 Posted by | Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

J’Accuse… !

The line is clear

NewZealandDoc’s Newsletter | January 7, 2024

We are now approximately four years removed from the unleashing of the covid so-called pandemic and the consequential measures adopted and enforced world-wide that created terror in the global populace, imposed unprecedented strictures, subverted foundational principles of medicine and foisted an unnecessary and dangerous inoculation upon a mostly unwitting public.

Some of us, at the very outset, upon hearing the mainstream messages of bat-inspired trans-species migration of a respiratory virus, suspected that things were amiss. The frenzied media, however, with their ‘case’ counts, death counts and fraudulent reporting about the actual lethality of the pathogen, were unstoppable and relentless, and I can forgive the many who began to shudder at this unexpected turn of events and who lined up for the dubious polymerase chain reaction ‘test’ and who, ultimately, placed every hope upon an emergency so-called vaccine, convinced as they were that our world was engulfed by an incomparable threat.

I have a harder time forgiving doctors who threw their senses and duties out the window, were unperturbed by the omission and suppression of attempts to treat and prevent the pathogen before hospitalization was required, abandoned informed consent, pushed the covid jab and regarded those who preferred to keep their minds and bodies and general health intact by not receiving the jab as a dangerous entity.

I frankly cannot forgive those physicians who, wielding considerable influence in establishment media, used this influence to sway their followers to accept something that has now been shown demonstrably and repetitively to be a health disaster

Perhaps, however, under the unnerving full-court press of a rabid and unchecked propaganda campaign waged by once highly-regarded journalistic authorities, everyone can be forgiven for having, essentially, lost their wits. Perhaps.

But now, four years hence, as the general picture has clarified itself, anyone with a sentient eye or ear not wedded to mainstream pulp can conclude that there never was a genuine pandemic, there never was a need to lock and shut down the entire world, and there never was or will be a need to inject billions with a gene-altering concoction that has hurt and killed too many to pass muster as a real and viable vaccine. We can further conclude that the preposterously tremendous control over people exhibited by the roll-out of the covid campaign, and the submission of people to the evisceration of their unalienable rights — these were not organically evolved developments, but consequences of a highly orchestrated deployment of power.

In short, all things covid was a strategically planned operation — a war-crime — the likes of which are unprecedented, and the consequence of which is to move the world towards some kind of autocratic fiefdom wherein we ‘little people’ surviving the first waves of the onslaught will be subjugated to the whims and directives of The Few.

I don’t care how many X followers one may have, or how many Sierpinski triangles one may conjure, how many high-profile interviews one has done, how many conferences one has attended, how many grants one has received, or how many plaudits one has obtained from our freedom-loving community: unless one can see the line and step across it, I regard you as an Enemy.

What line? The line that separates those who understand the concerted efforts of a Global Cabal to inflict the covid mess upon us for purposes of control, versus those who assert that this mess was essentially the result of unfortunate circumstances complicated by greed, incompetence, opportunism, corruption, human error and the like. To espouse the latter is untruthful and enervating: it takes the life out of our tenuously cobbled opposition and plays into our opposition’s hands.

Pick a side. To deny that the genocide visited upon us has been deliberately perpetrated, regardless of what you may invoke in the way of prudence, reason and thoughtful consideration, is to join the ranks of its perpetrators.

Pick a side, the line is clear, and time is short.

 

Emanuel E. Garcia, M.D.

January 2024

January 7, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Green Billionaires Fund Large Backbench Tory Net Zero Parliamentary Caucus

BY CHRIS MORRISON | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | JANUARY 3, 2024

Almost half the Conservative Party’s backbench MPs in the British Parliament belong to a Caucus promoting extreme Net Zero ideas that is funded by a small group of green billionaire foundations. The Conservative Environment Network (CEN), which acts mostly as a lobby group,  receives over 80% of its funding from the European Climate Foundation, Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisers, Oak Foundation, WWF-UK and Clean Air Fund. As regular readers will recall, these paymasters crop up regularly whenever anyone of influence, be they journalists, academics or politicians, requires help and guidance in promoting the insanity of removing hydrocarbon energy from industrial societies within less than 30 years.

The CEN relies on ‘peer reviewed’ research to lobby for Net Zero policies at both Parliamentary and local council levels. It counts over 150 MPs and Peers in its Parliamentary caucus, over 500 local councillors, along with “international declaration signatories” numbering 300 legislators from 45 countries. The billionaire-funded operation is said to support a network of ‘Net Zero champions’ inside Parliament “to make the positive case that Net Zero is an economic opportunity as well as moral responsibility”.

It is noted by CEN that when Russia invaded Ukraine “we helped promote the narrative that reducing dependency on fossil fuels through renewable energy and insulation would help defeat Putin”. Quite how fossil fuel dependency is reduced by intermittent renewables that rely on back-up hydrocarbons is not immediately clear. It’s unlikely that Putin quaked in his boots at the thought of the widespread mobilisation of loft insulators in the U.K.

The biggest CEN paymaster seems to be the European Climate Foundation, which is heavily supported by the Extinction Rebellion funder Sir Christopher Hohn. The CEN is run by Ben Goldsmith who is one of five trustees of Hohn’s fund, The Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. He is the brother of Lord Goldsmith, the former Conservative Environment Minister who served under Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Interestingly, Johnson’s father, Stanley, a long-time green activist, is listed as a member of the CEN steering committee.

The Clean Air Fund is also funded by Hohn along with Bloomberg Philanthropies, the green vehicle used to promote the political agenda of Michael Bloomberg, the former Mayor of New York. Bloomberg has a track record of funding the activities of politicians, again as regular readers will recall. He is one of the main backers of C40, a group of local civic leaders around the world, chaired by London Mayor and fireworks impresario Sadiq Khan. Removing cars from cites – and a form of rationing, whereby city dwellers are limited to a daily food quote of 2,500 calories with just 44g of meat – are just some of the proposals suggested in internal reports.

Of course targeting politicians is not a new game and lobbying legislators has long been a massive international enterprise. But the new breed of green promoters is particularly aggressive and the sums of money on offer are eye-watering. It has been reported that Hohn gave £46 million to C40. Jeremy Grantham, like Hohn a hedge fund billionaire, funds British academic institutions and journalists, but he also seems to have politicians in his sights. Speaking in 2019 to a group of business people in Copenhagen about the approaching apocalypse, he asked rhetorically, “What should I do, you say“? His suggestion: “You should lobby your Government officials – invest in an election and buy some politicians. I am happy to say we do quite a bit of that at the Grantham Foundation… any candidate as long as they are green.”

All of this, it might be argued, has led to the British Parliament donkey-nodding through some of the most restrictive and potentially most disastrous Net Zero legislation in the world. The actual target of 2050 Net Zero was rushed through in 2019 via secondary legislation by a Prime Minister without any considered debate. A green activist legal unit within Government called the Climate Change Committee keeps feet to the fire with demands for industry-destroying cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. Over £12 billion a year is lifted from the pockets of electricity users to pay for hopelessly inefficient power from the breezes and sunbeams that accounts for barely 5% of total energy use. In the cities, the cars of the less well off are penalised, while empty cycle lanes, road closures, 20 mph speed limits and sky-rocketing parking charges proliferate. Meanwhile, there are not enough children in the Congo to mine all the cobalt needed for spontaneously combusting electric cars, while heat pumps spell catastrophe for the life chances of old and frail people in the depths of a cold British winter.

“We’re very grateful to all those who have supported CEN financially and made our work possible,” says the Conservative Environment Network.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

January 6, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science | | Leave a comment

‘Autism tsunami’: Society’s cost to care for expanding, aging autism population will hit $5.54 trillion by 2060

By Brenda Baletti, Ph.D. | The Defender | January 5, 2024

The societal costs of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in the U.S. are projected to reach $589 billion per year by 2030, $1.36 trillion per year by 2040 and $5.54 trillion per year by 2060 if steps are not taken to prevent the disorder, according to a study published last month.

The paper, “Autism Tsunami: The Impact of Rising Prevalence on the Societal Cost of Autism in the United States,” was first published in 2021, in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders (JADD). It was retracted almost two years later by the publisher and editor, citing “concerns” with methodology and the authors’ “non-financial interests.”

Last month, Science, Public Health Policy and the Law peer-reviewed and republished the study — the first to project present and future costs of ASD that links rising costs to the increasing prevalence of the disorder.

The authors found that previous studies, which didn’t account for increasing prevalence, tended to overestimate current costs — because they assumed prevalence rates among adults are the same as rates among children — and underestimate future costs associated with a growing autistic population with shifting care needs.

Researchers Mark Blaxill, Cynthia Nevison, Ph.D., and Toby Rogers, Ph.D., projected future ASD costs in three scenarios: a base case scenario assuming the continuation of existing trends; a low scenario providing a conservative estimate of future costs; and a prevention scenario exploring possibility of future mitigation of environmental causes.

But these two premises of the paper — that prevalence is increasing and that environmental intervention is possible — made a straightforward modeling paper controversial and were the basis of the “concerns” raised that led to its retraction.

Those premises ran counter to the deeply held assumptions of the autism research and treatment industry, which continues to sidestep the issue of increasing prevalence and holds that autism is primarily a genetic and not an environmental disease.

U.S. could surpass 6% rates of ASD in children in 2024, 7% in 2032

To build their model, the researchers estimated four key parameters: the historic and future prevalence of ASD, the future size of the ASD population, the cost per individual over the course of a lifetime, and inflation projections.

Prevalence projections were based on the California Department of Developmental Services caseload data from 1931 to 2016. The researchers used U.S. Census Bureau population predictions to translate prevalence into actual numbers of people with autism. They multiplied those by different cost categories partitioned by age group and severity of ASD and applied an inflation index to their projections.

Nevison told The Defender this approach to calculating future costs was built on previous models that similarly identified cost categories and multiplied them by autism populations in each age group.

“But we used a more sophisticated prevalence model, and that provided an advance over previous work,” she said.

Their ASD prevalence model showed that based on current trends, the U.S. could surpass 6% rates of ASD in children in 2024 and 7% in 2032, and then would likely rise more slowly after that. This differed from previous models, which predicted continuous exponential growth.

Costs associated with ASD included “non-medical services” like community care and day programs, individual and parent productivity losses, estimated special education costs, early and behavioral intervention and medical costs.

Rising prevalence itself makes costs go up, the study showed, but so does the fact that the mix of costs changes over time as the autism population ages and has different care needs.

As people age, their needs change, Blaxill told The Defender, “You’re dealing with education and parental loss productivity in the early years, and you’re dealing with residential services and medical care and lost adult productivity of disabled people. So it’s a whole different profile.”

As the first generation of parents of children of the autism epidemic, who shouldered much of the burden of care-taking, begin to die around 2040, according to the study, costs of care that had been borne by them will shift onto state and federal governments.

The cost increase, Blaxill said, “is radical, it will cost $5 trillion a year.”

Nevison told The Defender that for their “prevention” scenario they looked to an existing example with good data where ASD rates had gone down.

She and a colleague published that research in JADD in 2020, showing that while ASD rates, which had increased for all U.S. children across birth years 1993-2000, either plateaued or declined among white families living in wealthy counties, suggesting those families made changes that lowered their children’s risk of ASD.

“The Prevention scenario assumes that these parental strategies and opportunities already used by wealthy parents to lower their children’s risk of ASD can be identified and made available rapidly to lower-income children and ethnic minorities, who are currently experiencing the most rapid growth in ASD prevalence,” the “Autism Tsunami” authors wrote.

The paper does not indicate what those changes may have been, but Blaxill told The Defender they hypothesized the changes happened among families who followed alternative vaccination schedules and other lifestyle changes.

Even in the prevention scenario, the paper found, the cost of ASD will skyrocket to $3.7 ± 0.8 trillion annually by 2060 because it still needs to account for the demographic momentum of the large ASD population born over the last three decades.

The authors concluded that rising autism rates must be taken seriously as a public health and economic policy issue.

“Paradoxically, the future costs of autism loom so large that, rather than responding with a sense of urgency as one might expect, policymakers thus far have generally failed to engage with the policy implications at all,” the authors wrote.

“We hope this paper will serve as a wake-up call for the public health emergency that the societal cost of autism represents to the economic future of the U.S.”

A ‘digital scarlet letter for eternity’

After the paper “sailed through peer review” at JADD, and became one of the journal’s most downloaded papers, there was immediate pushback, particularly in articles posted on the Spectrum News website (now The Transmitter ). Former JADD Editor-in-Chief Fred Volkmar launched an investigation into the study based on concerns raised.

One article on Spectrum even included a Twitter post that implied the authors’ idea of prevention was “eugenics,” an accusation the authors told The Defender was extremely shocking and hurtful and clearly an attempt to “cancel” them.

Rogers told The Defender, and detailed in a Substack post, that they had expected some negative response from gatekeepers, “because we broke new ground and the autism debate is always fraught in this country.”

But, he said, he and his co-authors were surprised when they were informed that Volkmar solicited new critical reviews and gave them one week to respond.

Rogers said in retrospect they realized “the die was cast at that point” and a decision had been made to undermine the article. However, the researchers “naively believed” they could provide rigorous responses to the reviews, which offered “nothing substantive” and the publication would stand.

The retraction statement indicated there were methodological concerns along with concerns that the authors, Blaxill, editor-at-large for Age of Autism and chief financial officer of the Holland CenterNevison, a former board member of SafeMinds, and Rogers, who writes the uTobian Substack and according to Spectrum had “written for the Children’s Health Defense Fund,” had not revealed their “non-financial” conflicts of interest.

According to Spectrum News these “undeclared conflicts” were the authors’ “anti-vaccine” views. Blaxill and Nevison had both previously published papers in JADD, with no similar concerns raised.

The authors noted in their response to reviewers, that the concerns enumerated by Volkmar mirrored those in Spectrum’s “hostile blog post.”

Spectrum News is fully funded by the Simons Foundation Autism Research Initiative (SFARI), from which Volkmar has received millions in research funding.

SFARI has a budget of over $100 million per year and since 2003 has dedicated almost $1 billion to autism research. That funding is largely dedicated to research focusing on the genetic basis for autism.

Rogers wrote, “The Simons Foundation has largely captured the field of autism research and they have hundreds of academics who are dependent on their largesse.”

“Rather than change direction based on new information the Simons Foundation doubled down on their wrongheaded strategy and they put the word out that ‘this article needs to get got,’” he added.

The authors also noted that no researcher in the history of JADD had listed a personal belief as an “undisclosed non-financial conflict of interest,” and that their premise that the rise in autism numbers is real and is primarily driven by environmental factors is a legitimate scientific viewpoint shared by others.

The authors also responded in detail to what they deemed to be minor comments by three reviewers.

Yet, the journal decided to retract the article, attaching what Rogers described as “a digital scarlet letter for eternity, ‘RETRACTED!’”

The authors attempted to sue but did not prevail.

“The whole process has been weaponized to serve power and money and nobody’s standing up for, or very few people are standing up for good science and proper methods and scientific norms and all that stuff that we would expect to be foundational to all this sort of thing,” Rogers told The Defender.

“We are being censored because of a word that does not even appear in the article — vaccines,” Rogers wrote.

“The unstated implication about the California study was that those parents were likely operating on different vaccine schedules or skipping vaccines. The public health agencies never investigated this trend,” Rogers said, “because they are scared that they might find an association between vaccines and autism.”

He added:

“This cowardly act of censorship by JADD and Springer [its publisher] is a stunning admission of guilt by the mainstream gatekeepers. They simply cannot have a conversation about the facts because they know that they will lose. Censorship is all that they have left.”

Study predictions proving true

Since “Autism Tsunami” was first published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network, which conducts biannual surveillance of ASD prevalence, has issued two reports confirming a continued rise in ASD rates.

When the CDC first began collecting data in 2000, rates were 1 in 150 children diagnosed with ASD. In the 2021 report, the ADDM found that 1 in 44 or 2.27% of American 8-year-olds had ASD and in the 2023 report, it found that 1 in 36 (2.8%) 8-year-old children — 4% of boys and 1% of girls have ASD.

ADDM also reported that autism prevalence was higher among Black, Hispanic and Asian/Pacific Islander children than among white and biracial children.

Yet the CDC continues to suggest that the numbers “might reflect improved screening, awareness and access to services” rather than actual growing rates.

Nevison told The Defender that given these growing rates, she is very concerned about the future of those living with ASD, especially given that it is already apparent that public services are unable to keep up with the needs of children on the autistic spectrum.

In her own school district, there is a critical shortage of educators who could serve children with Individualized Education Plans (IEPs), many of whom have ASD.

Data from the U.S. Department of Education indicate this is a national problem — 42 states and Washington, D.C., have fewer special education teachers than schools need. Many children in special education are diagnosed with ASD.

Shortage of adult facilities already a reality in Massachusetts

“Autism Tsunami” pointed to the fact that the growing numbers of children diagnosed with ASD over the last few decades are or will be soon entering adulthood and will need different, and expensive, services from those provided by the already stretched Department of Education, such as residential care.

A new investigation on residential care for people with ASD published last week by the Boston Globe reported that the numbers predicted by “Autism Tsunami” are already materializing in Massachusetts.

“A record number of children with intellectual disabilities or autism turn 22 years old this year and qualify for adult services with the Department of Developmental Services,” the Globe wrote.

That number has doubled in the past 10 years to more than 1,430 people “driven by the tremendous increase in children with autism. Autistic children now account for more than half of these new adults.”

“There has been very little planning to prepare for this,” Michael Borr, the parent of an adult son with autism and former chairman of Advocates for Autism of Massachusetts, told The Globe.

In the past, Borr said, “I would talk about the tsunami that is coming. It’s not coming any more; it’s here.”

The Massachusetts Department of Developmental Services, which licenses and runs group homes, last year informed the legislature that it has an “extremely limited” capacity to provide housing to autistic adults who have different needs than their typical clients.

The Globe investigation also found that many hundreds of children and adults with autism in residential schools have been physically assaulted or neglected at residences with low-paid and poorly trained caregivers.

The newspaper provided several examples of serious assaults on non-verbal residents by caregivers.

Massachusetts group homes for adults have more than 4,000 vacancies for direct care staff, which is more than one-quarter of the necessary workforce.

And “while federal law guarantees special education services for disabled children, adult services are largely dependent on eligibility criteria and funding,” according to The Globe, leading to a lot of uncertainty for the aging parents of autistic young adults.

Blaxill told The Defender that without interventions to slow ASD prevalence rates, “It’s going to grow so fast, it’ll break the system. If we go from maybe 1 or 2 million people — most of them children with autism — to 10, 15, or 20 million people with autism — most of them adults — that’s a dramatically different service population and cost problem and cost profile.”

Blaxill, who also is the parent of an autistic child, said the problem isn’t only the cost, but for people with ASD, “The parents are their advocate. We take care of them. But we’re all getting old.”

He said he’s constantly worried for his daughter’s future. “When we’re gone, who’s going to watch over her? Who’s going to advocate for her with the state? Who’s going to protect her from abuse or violence?”

“It’s a crisis,” he said.

The major barrier to confronting this crisis, Rogers told The Defender, isn’t just Big Pharma. There is an entire autism industry that has sprung up that includes pharma, but also researchers, nonprofits, academic journals and more, he said.

“That industry is worth upwards of a trillion dollars and they don’t want to have a conversation about root causes or prevention. They want to make money from the disease industry.”


Brenda Baletti Ph.D. is a reporter for The Defender. She wrote and taught about capitalism and politics for 10 years in the writing program at Duke University. She holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a master’s from the University of Texas at Austin.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

January 6, 2024 Posted by | Economics, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

An Open Letter to the APA Regarding the Publication of Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care

By Peter A. McCullough, MD, MPH | Courageous Discourse | January 2, 2024

Dr. Miriam Grossman, one of the world’s most renown pediatric psychiatrists is leading this effort to force the American Psychiatric Association to withdraw this publication because of its lack of scientific integrity and its reckless approach to the safety data emerging on hormonal and surgical transgender interventions. From Dr. Grossman: “On November 8, 2023, Gender-Affirming Psychiatric Care was released by the American Psychiatric Association’s official publishing house. We the undersigned strongly support the following Open Letter to the APA. Our letter calls on the APA to explain why it glaringly ignored many scientific developments in gender-related care and to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety, mental and physical health.

On Dec 28, 2023, this Open Letter was sent to the leadership of the APA, asking for a substantive response. We invite you to sign to support our continued efforts to demand medical and mental health excellence from the APA.”

We are a group of clinicians, educators, and researchers committed to treating every patient with respect and compassion while upholding excellence in medical and mental health care. We seek an unbiased scientific investigation and discussion of the harms and benefits of all types of care offered to those with gender related distress. We have grave concerns about the American Psychiatric Association’s GAPC textbook. Until those concerns are addressed and the textbook’s errors corrected, we call on the APA for its withdrawal.

GAPC, released on November 8, 2023 by the American Psychiatric Association’s official publishing house, is touted as “the first textbook dedicated to providing affirming, intersectional, and evidence-informed psychiatric care for transgender, non-binary, and/or gender-expansive (TNG) people.” APA Publishing claims to use a system that “is unique in the extent to which it uses peer review in both the selection and final approval of publishing projects.” Considering the serious concerns about “affirming care” of minors raised by multiple international systematic reviews, we do not understand how such a review process could grant the imprimatur of the APA. We ask that APA Publishing disclose details of the peer review process for this book and explain why it glaringly ignored scientific developments in gender-related care.

The book’s claims of being evidence-informed are untenable. GAPC omits any in-depth analysis of the evidence to date, dismisses “scientific neutrality” as “a fallacy” (p. xix), and chooses authors with the correct “lived experiences” and “community impact of prior work over academic titles” (p. xx).

At the time of publishing, the gender affirmation model promoted in GAPC is under scrutiny from clinicians and scientists worldwide. After conducting careful systematic reviews of the evidence, FinlandSweden, and the United Kingdom are drastically retrenching from their earlier affirmation model for treating gender dysphoria in minors. In Norway, the NetherlandsDenmarkFranceAustralia and New Zealand we see either critical reviews by public health agencies, or pushback by professional societies and in mainstream medical journals. Having omitted these international developments and heated debates, GAPC was out of date before its publication.

Not only do the authors ignore the most current systematic reviews, which count as the most reliable source of scientific information in evidence-based medicine, they also repeatedly undermine well-established standards of care in multiple mental and medical practices. We highlight just two examples of many.

First, GAPC neglects to address the many known risks of puberty blockers (see Cass Review 2020Jorgensen et al. 2022FDA 2022), and cross-sex hormones while presenting fundamentally flawed research to support their gender-affirmative approach. The authors falsely state that “Use of GnRHas in pubertal suppression is a fully reversible intervention that allows young patients time to mature, explore their gender identity, and understand better the risks and benefits of GAHT” (p. 52). It is astonishing to see such an outdated fallacy appear in this book, especially referring to a case presentation of a 10-year-old child. According to Jorgensen et al. 2022, “Over 95% of youth treated with GnRH-analogs go on to receive cross-sex hormones. By contrast, 61-98% of those managed with psychological support alone reconcile their gender identity with their biological sex during puberty.” This contradicts both the reversibility and exploratory nature of puberty suppression claimed by GAPC.

The authors continue, “This often leads to improvement in psychiatric symptoms, behavioral problems (de Vries et al. 2011), and suicidal ideation (Turban et al. 2020)” (p. 52). The studies cited by the authors have been extensively critiqued by the aforementioned reviews and other investigators (see Biggs 2022SEGM 2023, Abbruzzese et al. 2023). The European systematic reviews found the de Vries study to be at high risk of bias. The Turban et al. study is cross-sectional, and by the authors’ own admission “does not allow for determination of causation. Longitudinal clinical trials are needed to better understand the efficacy of pubertal suppression.” Additional, equally profound critiques include a) downplaying serious known side effects b) profound methodological flaws that exaggerate and misrepresent reported efficacy and benefits c) inclusion of only the most successful cases in outcome-reporting d) lack of applicability to the currently predominant cohort of minors experiencing gender dysphoria (adolescent-onset natal female patients with severe psychiatric comorbidities) and e) absence of randomized, controlled trials and long-term studies (Ludvigsson 2023).

Second, the authors are disturbingly nonchalant about the high rate of co-occurring mental and behavioral health challenges seen in the context of gender dysphoria. Autism, ADHD, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, suicidality, substance use disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder are all dramatically over-represented in gender dysphoric youth. The Minority Stress Model is used to dismiss such phenomena, unscientifically, as the result of “the psychosocial stressors associated with having to exist within a cisheteronormative society” (p. 50). Minority stress is not sufficient to explain away all psychological distress in the gender nonconforming population, as research has shown no significant change in suicide rates over time in this cohort despite increasing societal acceptance. Rather than comprehensively exploring and addressing these co-occurring conditions, GAPC charges ahead with medicalized gender transition in children and young adults with autism and ADHD (chapter 8), substance use disorders (chapters 1, 13 & 16), eating disorders (chapter 15), and severe mental illness (chapter 18).

GAPC overlooks the risk that rapid affirmation concretizes patients’ dysphoria or contributes to patients’ regret post-treatment, with some even attempting to return to their natal sex. Such detransitioned individuals are now suing surgeons, endocrinologists, and psychiatrists for damages, claiming their doctors encouraged them to follow measures that are not backed by rigorous science and did not address their co-morbid conditions. They are suing health systems employing such doctors and the professional organizations (the American Academy of Pediatrics in the Isabelle Ayala lawsuit) that uncritically endorse unproven and irreversible treatments. It appears that the APA is either unaware of or has chosen to ignore such risks and outcomes for patients and for those that promote, teach and provide these treatments.

GAPC condemns any attempt to prevent such iatrogenic harm through careful evaluation, wrongly dismissing widely-accepted, less invasive psychotherapeutic treatments as “conversion therapy” (p. 291). Instead, GAPC proposes that patients struggling with gender-related distress be taken at their word that “gender” is the source of the problems and rushed to treatments that may lead to irreversible sterility, anorgasmia, surgical complications, and life-long dependence on exogenous hormones and medical interventions. This aggressive approach discounts the possibility that many of these children, if not initiated on blockers and hormones, would eventually conclude that their early gender dysphoria was the developmental prelude to a healthy, non-heterosexual adult orientation.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has similarly advocated for gender-affirming care by publishing a policy statement in 2018, a stance it recently reaffirmed. The AAP now finds itself named in the Ayala case, cited above, on claims that it improperly endorsed harmful care that is not backed by evidence. Its publishing house was accepting pre-orders for a book promoting gender-affirming care until December 6, 2023 when the book was removed, with refunds offered, pending further review. We hope the APA heeds the AAP’s example and retracts GAPC.

Encouraging any physician, trainee, program or provider to view this book as “cutting-edge” “best practices” is unacceptable, unethical and unsafe. We urge APA Publishing to consider its responsibility to promote and protect patients’ safety and their mental and physical health, and to uphold its own claim to be “the world’s premier publisher of books, journals, and multimedia on psychiatry, mental health, and behavioral science”. To avoid discrediting itself as a professional organization and a reliable source of gender related psychiatric care, and to minimize the risk of legal liability to itself, we call on the APA to withdraw this book.

January 4, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science | Leave a comment

CONFESSIONS OF A BIG-FOOD/BIG-PHARMA INSIDER WITH CALLEY MEANS

KenDBerryMD | February 16, 2024

Calley is the co-founder of TrueMed.com , a company that enables Americans to buy exercise and healthy food with FSA/HSA dollars, and the co-author (with his sister, Dr. Casey Means) of an upcoming book on food-as-medicine. Earlier in his career, he was a consultant for food and pharma companies and is now exposing practices they use to weaponize our institutions of trust. He is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School.
twitter.com/calleymeans

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BILL GATES FUNDED “EDIBLE FOOD COATING” APE HITS THE ORGANIC FOOD MARKET

January 4, 2024 Posted by | Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | | Leave a comment

Why are so Many Californians Dying?

By Thomas Buckley | Brownstone Institute | January 3, 2024

Covid has claimed about 105,000* lives in the state since 2020.

In that same time period, 82,000 more Californians died from everything else than is typical.

Adjusted for the decline in population, that non-Covid “excess death” figure becomes even more concerning as the state has seen its population drop to about the same it was in 2015.

In 2015 – obviously there was no Covid – 260,000 of the then 39 million Californians died. In 2023, not including November and December, 240,000 people died not from Covid (6,000 additional people died of Covid.).

Extrapolating the year-to-date figures for 2023 creates a final year-end figure of 280,000 – 20,000 more people than died in 2015. That’s a non-Covid, population-neutral jump of 8%.

In other words, despite the protestations of certain officials, the state’s death rate has NOT returned to “pre-Covid” levels – in 2019 the year before the pandemic, 270,000 people died with a population at least 400,000 greater than today.

Why?

Dr. Bob Wachter, medical chair at UC-SF and ardent supporter of tight pandemic restrictions, did not respond to an email from the Globe (away for work the auto-response said) but he did recently tell the San Jose Mercury News that in “(T)he last three years, not only were there a lot of deaths from Covid, there were a lot of additional deaths from non-Covid causes, which are probably attributable to people not receiving the medical care that they normally would have received’ when ERs were overflowing with Covid patients (note – the truth of that ER assertion has not been verified), Wachter noted.”

In other words, the pandemicist Wachter admitted the pandemic response itself at least contributed to a significant number of excess deaths, a fact that was aggressively and roundly denied and – if mentioned – led to censoring and societal ostracization (and in many cases job losses) by the powers that be during the pandemic.

A second admission along these lines was recently made by former National Institutes of Health Director Dr. Francis Collins – Tony Fauci’s boss.

In this video clip, Collins – who once called for a “devastating takedown” (see above) of those who questioned the hard pandemic response – said his DC and public health blinders, well, blinded him to the problems his pandemic response caused and is still causing:

If you’re a public health person, and you’re trying to make a decision, you have this very narrow view of what the right decision is, and that is something that will save a life. Doesn’t matter what else happens, so you attach infinite value to stopping the disease and saving a life. You attach zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from. Collateral damage. This is a public health mindset. And I think a lot of us involved in trying to make those recommendations had that mindset — and that was really unfortunate, it’s another mistake we made. 

(You can see Collins for yourself here.)

Needless to say there is not even a half-hearted apology involved. And Collins is/was wrong in the approach to public health he apparently subscribes to, as throughout modern history it has involved a cost/benefit analysis and a weighing of the impact on society.

Public health, practiced properly, does not – and never before has – attached “zero value to whether this actually totally disrupts people’s lives, ruins the economy, and has many kids kept out of school in a way that they never might quite recover from.”

“We had the exact wrong people in charge at the exact wrong time,” said Stanford professor of medicine (and one of the people Collins tried to “take down”) Dr. Jay Bhattacharya. “Their decisions were myopically deadly.”

To remind Collins of the ramifications of his decision beyond the excess deaths: 

Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal overreaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street.

The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends.

The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration, co-authored by Bhattacharya) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches; approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable –  that had been tested and succeeded before.

Nationally, pandemic “all-cause” deaths spiked, for obvious reasons, but they remain stubbornly higher than normal to this day.

There could be mitigating factors to California’s numbers, specifically the issue of drug overdoses. Since 2018, the overdose death rate has doubled. The last overall figures available are from 2021 which showed 10,901 people dying of an overdose. While not specifically broken out for which drug, the vast majority are from opioid overdoses and the vast majority of those involve fentanyl. In 2022, there were 7,385 opioid-related deaths with 6,473 of those involving fentanyl.

But the overdose death increase would account for only about 25% of the total increase in “excess deaths,” meaning it has an impact but cannot explain the whole story.

There is also the issue of homeless deaths. Homeless people die at a far higher rate than the rest of the population and California has had a burgeoning homeless population for the last few years, despite the money being spent on the issue. However, at least a portion of that increase can – as with overdoses – be attributed to fentanyl and is therefore difficult to separate out as discrete numbers.

Those two increases, however, may explain the fact that the “all-cause” excess death rate for those in the 25-to-44 year age bracket (it has comparatively higher overdose death and homelessness figures) have remained – except for two very recent weeks – above the typical historical range.

The increase in overdose (and alcohol-related deaths) has been directly tied to the pandemic response previously. In California, there were about 3,500 more alcohol-related deaths during the pandemic response than before: 5,600 in 2019 (pre-pandemic,) 6,100 in 2020, 7,100 in 2021, 6,600 in 2022, and 2023 is on pace to see about 6,000.

That still leaves roughly half of the excess deaths unaccounted for, raising questions about the safety of the Covid shot (a shot, not a vaccine) itself. The CDC lists 640 deaths in California directly from the shot and an increase in “adverse effects” from the shot compared to many other actual vaccines. The Covid shot “ adverse” rate was one in a thousand, while, for comparison, it’s about one in a million for the polio vaccine.

That means a person was more than 9 times as likely to die from the Covid shot as any other vaccine and 6.5 times to be injured by it in some fashion.

Still that is – according to state figures – not enough to explain the increase.

There are three other issues to note: first, many of the counting questions around dying “from” Covid versus “with” Covid remain, meaning the Covid death numbers could be elevated if the “withs” are lumped in with the “froms.”

Second, there is the simmering matter of “iatrogenic” deaths – i.e. deaths caused by the treatment. Early on in the pandemic response, a push was made to “ventilate” patients mechanically. From the above article (no caps in the original):

here’s an unsettling comparison: in NYC area, mortality rate for all COV ICU patients was 78%. in stockholm, the SURVIVAL rate was over 80%. this is a staggering variance. the key difference: ventilators. NYC used them on 85% of patients, sweden used them sparingly

Combined with the placing of Covid patients in nursing homes, the number of actual “only” or “natural” (for lack of a better term) Covid deaths, again, may be elevated.

The state Department of Public Health declined to comment on the matter.

Which brings us back to the Wachter and Collins oblique, nearly accidental admissions that the response itself may have caused significant and ongoing damage across numerous personal and public sectors.

Comparing California to other states also shows a concerning trend, specifically when considering the aftermath of the pandemic response. While increasing in population, for example, Florida’s excess death rate increase was/is lower than California’s as was its Covid death rate, a fact Gov. Gavin Newsom has been lying about for years.

During the pandemic itself, the nation saw an “all-cause” – including Covid – death rate increase of about 16% above normal. Using that metric, as it is clear the response itself had knock-on effects – California’s was 19.4% and Florida’s was 16.7%, despite the wildly different pandemic responses.

Imagine, if you will, you own a baseball team and you have two shortstops, one that earns $10 million a year and one that earns $1 million. And it turns out that both are equally talented – errors, batting stats, etc. – and that maybe the cheaper one is actually even a bit more talented it turns out. Which shortstop was the better deal for the team? The less expensive one, of course.

That is an apt analogy for states choosing how to respond to the pandemic – Florida cut the $10 million player while California kept him. In other words, the two states got the same-ish performance but at wildly different societal costs.

This pattern seems to be borne out by many of the figures. Obviously, various states that ended up lower than the national average took very different approaches: North Dakota and New Jersey saw roughly the same all-cause mortality numbers, as did Washington (state) and South Dakota.

This is true on the “high side” as well: California and Montana, Oregon and Arkansas are two pairs that had similar numbers with different approaches.

All of this raises a deeper question in that there appears to be little if any direct causative resultant difference between a draconian pandemic response and a softer touch.

And that should not at all be the case: the lockdowns, the masks, the shots, the social distancing, the closing of schools and stores and churches and parks, and everything else should have produced a clear and distinct difference – if the pandemicists were right.

If they were right, the difference in results should be stark and obvious to the naked eye. Miami should look like Genoa after the plague ships arrived while Los Angeles should seem like a New Eden. If the much-maligned Swedish “soft” model was as dangerous as the pandemicists said, Stockholm should be a ghost town.

But that’s not at all true and that’s why the pandemicists are/were so evidently wrong: the harshest methods had little impact on the end results.

While there were differences between states, they cannot necessarily be directly tied to a specific policy construct (save Hawaii, which can be discounted considering their isolated geography). Hard or soft pandemic response, in the long run it didn’t seem to matter much in the Covid death tolls.

Where it did – and still does – matter is the immediate and long-lasting damage the more tyrannical responses had on society as a whole.

And – if California’s excess death numbers are an indicator – the pandemic response itself is still killing people.

And that, too, definitely shouldn’t be happening – if the pandemicists were right.

It is even more problematic – and even more ethically abhorrent – if the Covid death figures are inflated; the number of Covid deaths of 105,000 is only about 20% higher than the other non-Covid excess death figure of 82,000.

In other words, the net “from Covid” deaths may not be terribly different from the “from the Covid response” death count.

And that possibility is the most terrifying of all.

*  All numbers used are rounded for simplicity and come from state and federal sources.

Thomas Buckley is the former mayor of Lake Elsinore, Cal. and a former newspaper reporter. He is currently the operator of a small communications and planning consultancy.

January 3, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science | , , , , | Leave a comment

THE INFORMED CONSENT IMPERATIVE: AARON SIRI TESTIFIES

The Highwire with Del Bigtree | December 28, 2023

ICAN Lead Counsel, Aaron Siri, Esq., gives presentation ‘What is Informed Consent’ before members of the Novel Coronavirus Southwestern Intergovernmental Committee in Arizona. He explains the imperative of Informed Consent, and pillars that make it an essential tenet of freedom and liberty.

January 2, 2024 Posted by | Civil Liberties, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

Benevolence Betrayed: How Good People Cause Harm

Psychiatric drugs, sociopathy, and the ethical frontiers of transhumanism

By Dr. Roger McFillin | Radically Genuine | December 21, 2023

My initial encounter with the mental health system has had a lasting impact on my life. At the age of 22, my first post-undergraduate job took me to a children’s psychiatric hospital, where I worked with children between the ages of 5 and 10.

These children, many of whom were victims of abuse and neglect, were placed on a cocktail of mind & mood-altering drugs to manage their behavior. Despite clear signs of acute stress, they were assigned pseudoscientific labels such as Oppositional Defiant Disorder, ADHD, and Bipolar Disorder, and subsequently treated with the latest psychiatric medications.

It became clear to me that the main goal was to numb and sedate the children, with the intention of reducing behavioral issues and making them more manageable. Lethargy, excessive sleep, and emotional numbness were considered secondary; the absence of aggression was viewed as a successful treatment outcome.

Unfortunately, the path to sedation often led to worsening mood, increased aggression, ticks, akathisia, and other disturbing side effects. Shockingly, many of these adverse drug reactions were misinterpreted as symptoms of their supposed “mental illness.”

The prevailing belief was that they needed their “medicine” to balance their brain chemicals. Disregarding their behavior as a result of their living conditions or natural post-trauma responses was overshadowed by the declaration of a mental illness.

Recalling that period in my life, nights were restless for me, haunted by distressing images of young children suffering with horrific side effects from their prescribed “medicine.”It weighed heavily on my conscience, knowing that I was part of a system that would inevitably return these same children to environments marked by abuse, often worse off than when they arrived.

What would happen to these kids? What is the implication of labeling them as mentally ill when it was clearly their environment that was the problem?

The duration of their stay in the psychiatric hospital was relatively brief, typically spanning 7-10 days for “stabilization” before being sent back home. For many of these kids, it became a disheartening pattern – a revolving door in and out of the hospital until they were eventually discharged to a residential facility.

What troubled me even more was the emotional detachment exhibited by the staff. I often found myself wondering if others shared my concerns.

Were there others struggling with sleepless nights as I did?

How could a psychiatrist rationalize such treatment as humane?

I questioned the bystanders—the nurses, social workers, and counselors on staff—did anyone else share my reservations and question the ethics of this approach?

What about the human condition can allow seemingly good people to accept this as safe and ethical care?

What I uncovered was a diffusion of responsibility among the staff—an acceptance that they had no authority and the doctor must possess greater knowledge. There was an uncanny ability to deny reality. Many staff members seemed to assume that there must be a valid medical reason necessitating these drugs for the children.

Some held onto the belief that a complex medical treatment was at play, where the doctor, armed with advanced knowledge of biochemistry, was meticulously fine-tuning the dosage of a medication to enhance a child’s life. I recall saying “like a mad chemist?”

The concept of mental illness as a brain disorder was widely accepted.

I began to question the evidence supporting these practices. It struck me that many staff members knew little beyond what they were told, yet they were entirely comfortable accepting it as unquestionable truth.

There appeared to be little motivation to challenge the authority or a seeming lack of concern about the veracity of the information. This lack of critical inquiry and complacency deeply troubled me and became an enduring source of concern.

After moving on from the hospital and continuing my education with the ultimate aim of becoming a clinical psychologist, I realized that the psychiatric treatment I had observed with children in the hospital was unfortunately the norm in most community settings.

Children, teens, and adults alike were often assigned pseudoscientific labels and placed on multiple drugs, with little evidence of substantial help. This was mental health care. The predominant approach seemed to revolve around offering various methods of numbing or sedation.

The typical “treatment” involved assigning a diagnose, adjustments to dosages, the addition of new drugs, or discontinuation of existing ones, all within the framework of managing, rather than believing in, any form of recovery. The prevailing attitude was that, being deemed mentally ill, genuine recovery was not a realistic expectation—only ongoing management. Working in some of these settings proved to be a soul-crushing experience.

Many readers may be all too familiar with mental health treatment in the United States, but the focus here isn’t on the system itself. Instead, the question at the heart of this article is about human nature: How can seemingly rational and compassionate professionals reconcile endorsing such a treatment as ethically sound?

What does this reveal about human nature?

This has been a persistent question for me over decades. How can fellow human beings become so disconnected from the suffering of others? How can intelligent doctors endorse the notion of a “chemical imbalance,” witness the decline of their patients, and continue justifying the treatment?

Why do bystanders choose not to act?

Indeed, let’s confront the reality: the entire psychiatric drug movement can be characterized as a form of mass experimentation on the human brain. The profound implications and consequences of this approach warrant serious reflection and examination.

Not on the experiment itself… but what it demonstrates about humanity.

What is Sociopathy?

A sociopath, clinically referred to as someone with Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD), is an individual characterized by a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others, coupled with a lack of empathy and remorse.

Sociopathy is marked by deceitfulness, impulsivity, irritability, aggressiveness, and a consistent failure to conform to societal norms. These people can exhibit a charming and manipulative demeanor, enabling them to navigate social situations adeptly while lacking genuine emotional connections. They may engage in deceitful or criminal behavior without experiencing guilt or remorse, displaying a persistent pattern of exploiting others for personal gain.

The term sociopath is used interchangeably with psychopathy and antisocial personality disorder.

What distinguishes a sociopath from the general population is the striking inability to experience fundamental human emotions, most notably empathy, guilt, and remorse. There exists a profound detachment from the typical spectrum of human feelings, and, notably, some sociopaths may derive pleasure from the suffering or exertion of control over others.

This absence of moral and emotional anchors can lead to a disturbing capacity for manipulation and exploitation, as sociopaths navigate social interactions with a calculated and often self-serving perspective, void of the emotional connections that guide typical human behavior.

An early Radically Genuine Podcast episode explored this topic: Episode 25 titled “The Sociopath Next Door”: Listen here

The central theme of the episode was to educate the listener on the prevalence of sociopathy in society and its implications, revealing how 4% of the general population meets the criteria for this condition. This translates to approximately 1 out of every 25 people, a far more common occurrence than many realize.

Importantly, not every sociopath fits the stereotype of a mass murderer or repeat offender. Instead, sociopaths can be found in various roles of power and authority within our society. Some may choose careers in politics, medicine, or leadership positions in Fortune 500 companies, while others could be working at your local grocery store. The recognition of this broader spectrum highlights the need for a nuanced understanding of sociopathy and its potential impact across diverse facets of daily life.

I am not suggesting that every medical professional involved in psychiatric practices is a sociopath, but rather recognizing that a percentage of individuals in all fields exhibit sociopathic traits, while others may display characteristics such as deference to authority, adherence to established rules, and a fear of acting outside the norms defined by their profession.

When individuals in positions of power, wielding both financial and political influence, have the ability to shape the narrative, it becomes clear how detrimental medical practices could persist and thrive.

This realization has shaped my understanding of the perpetuation of harmful practices. I’ve dispelled the illusion that all human beings invariably act in each other’s best interests. History has consistently demonstrated that people often prioritize their own self interest when confronted with moral dilemmas. Embracing this recognition has been instrumental in fostering a more realistic perspective on human behavior and motivations, especially within the context of challenging ethical considerations.

In fact, we are compelled to confront the reality that a contemporary movement exists, expressing a strong aversion for human beings and propagating the belief that the majority of us are mere parasites to them, consuming resources without providing any inherent value.

Transhumanism

Transhumanism is the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance human cognition and bodily function, expanding abilities and capacities beyond current biological constraints.Ultimately, by merging man and machine, science will produce humans who have vastly increased intelligence, strength, and lifespans; a near embodiment of gods.

Transhumanist perspectives include the notion that human life is expendable in the pursuit of scientific advancements and innovation. This philosophical stance raises ethical considerations about the balance between technological progress and the preservation of human dignity, prompting a broader societal conversation about the potential consequences and moral implications of prioritizing scientific pursuits over the inherent value of human life.

The conflict between spiritual or religious beliefs and transhumanist ideologies encapsulates a profound clash of worldviews. On one side, individuals rooted in spirituality or religious traditions prioritize the sanctity of life, viewing it as divinely ordained and deserving of respect and preservation.

In contrast, transhumanists advocate for the enhancement and transcendence of human limitations through technological means, sometimes challenging traditional notions of mortality and the human experience. This dichotomy raises complex questions about the ethical boundaries of scientific intervention, the nature of existence, and the role of spirituality in shaping our understanding of humanity.

When Virtue Becomes a Blindspot

I genuinely believe that most individuals who support psychiatric medications perceive it as an inherently virtuous and compassionate act. The primary care doctors, nurse practitioners, and countless frontline psychiatrists prescribing medications daily are not inherently malevolent. Similarly, the parents who trust medical advice and diligently administer prescribed pills to alleviate their children’s suffering do so with the best intentions.

This belief is grounded in the recognition that, when someone is facing considerable distress, seeking solutions to ease their pain is inherently humane. Take persistent anxiety as an example, a condition that can be profoundly debilitating. Attempting to decrease anxiety to improve quality of life, on the surface, is reasonable.

Yet, beneath the surface lies a trust that these drugs, influencing the brain in ways that nobody could fully comprehend, will yield only positive outcomes. It’s a belief that suggests essential aspects of human nature and our inherent design are flawed. It suggests that a medical doctor can modify this experience by utilizing synthetic chemical compounds produced in a factory, with the expectation that this pharmaceutical will enhance the human experience.

These convictions are deeply ingrained in our culture, to the extent that people often reject contrary evidence when confronted with it. The reality, however, is that these chemical compounds seldom, if ever, result in a positive transformation of the human experience.

In some cases, these compounds lead to worsening conditions, while others find themselves in a state of numbness and sedation. Despite facing debilitating side effects, individuals endure them, driven by the idea that they themselves are fundamentally flawed—a supposed design error necessitating the intervention of these chemical compounds.

In the face of persistent suffering and worsening conditions brought on by the use of psychiatric drugs, I’ve observed mental health professionals attributing the decline to a “mental illness” rather than recognizing the consequences of the ongoing experiment on the patient’s brain.

This constitutes a form of brainwashing, a mass conditioning that persists for various complex reasons. Sociopaths, driven by a lack of empathy and fueled by a desire for profit and control, vehemently strive to maintain their position of authority and exploit the vulnerable for financial gain. Concurrently, the underlying transhumanism movement persistently conducts perverse experiments on human beings in an attempt to advance the human condition. Throughout history, there are also the bystanders who, for various reasons, allow these unethical practices to persist.

Lessons in Conformity

It runs deep. Our education system, spanning from grade school to medical school, often places a heavy emphasis on rote learning at the expense of fostering critical analysis and ethical considerations. The prevailing culture of standardized testing and rigid curricula tends to prioritize memorization of facts and figures rather than nurturing a deeper understanding of concepts and encouraging thoughtful inquiry.

Unfortunately, the result is a learning environment produces students who excel at regurgitating information but may lack the skills for independent thinking or ethical decision-making. Particularly in fields like medicine, where ethical considerations are paramount, the absence of dedicated education on ethics can have profound consequences.

In the realm of healthcare within a free society, an unquestioning deference to authority can prove particularly perilous. When individuals blindly trust medical professionals or institutional directives without engaging in critical scrutiny, it opens the door to harmful medical practices and compromises patient well-being.

The ethos of a free society demands an active and informed citizenry, especially in matters as personal and crucial as healthcare. Excessive deference in the medical realm can result in a lack of accountability and transparency, permitting harmful practices to persist. To safeguard the principles of individual health and autonomy, it is imperative for individuals to question medical authority, advocate for informed decision-making, and actively participate in shaping the ethical standards of healthcare delivery.

Indeed, it is a slippery slope. Without fostering critical analysis and ethical decision-making, we run the risk of relinquishing our medical freedom and blindly surrendering to medical authority.

Forced medical interventions without consent represent a blatant violation of free will and personal freedom, striking at the very core of individual autonomy. In a society that values personal agency and the right to make decisions about one’s own body, coercive medical practices undermine the fundamental principles of freedom. Such interventions strip individuals of their right to give informed consent, turning medical care into a tool of control rather than a service that respects individual choices.

The imposition of medical procedures without consent not only disregards the principle of bodily autonomy but also erodes the trust between individuals and the healthcare system. In a free society, respecting the sovereignty of personal decisions in matters of healthcare is paramount, and any breach of this principle threatens the foundation of individual freedom and self-determination.

If we relinquish the right to make informed medical decisions, we risk placing authority in the hands of individuals who may not prioritize our well-being. Sociopaths, lacking empathy and driven by personal gain, could exploit such a vacuum of autonomy for their own agendas.

Furthermore, a transhumanistic agenda, seeking to merge human biology with technology, might capitalize on the absence of individual decision-making, potentially leading to the imposition of radical medical interventions without regard for personal values or consent. Safeguarding the right to make our own medical choices becomes a crucial defense against potential abuses of power, ensuring that decisions about our health remain aligned with our individual beliefs and values rather than dictated by those who may not have our best interests at heart.

No More Bystanders!

January 2, 2024 Posted by | Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment