We are in trouble because so many of us trusted the "experts." Refusing to consider that knowledge or expertise in medical science does not equal honesty, compassion, or a regard for human life as intrinsically valuable. Superior knowledge in the hands of a morally bankrupt individual only makes them that much more dangerous. They can use their reputation as an expert to deceive and their scientific know how to pull off horrible things an ordinary car repairman or janitor couldn't--if these individuals became moral reprobates.
I think it’s foolish and counterproductive to view the situation in terms of morality - unless you’re going to define “moral” as the way someone who feels his unity with the universe naturally acts, which those of us who do not feel that unity, due to our social conditioning (although I think we all feel it to one extent or another) cannot understand or reproduce, especially if we’re trying to be moral to pacify feelings of guilt, conscious or subconscious, inculcated by the social conditioning. I think it’s better to say someone like Dr. Fauci is dishonest, if you can prove it, or untrustworthy, if you can prove that, rather than morally bankrupt, which I think is basically childish name calling which tends to evoke the same in return.
A person who knows his policies kill people and continues to enact them is morally bankrupt. Read just the first chapter of Kennedy’s book and then tell me Fauci is not morally bankrupt.
I agree, I’m all for reasonable laws - hopefully democratically decided. But I don’t think the criminal justice system should be based on the idea of punishment - in hellish jails where people come out angrier than when they went in - for those who “know the difference between right and wrong,” and confinement in mental institutions - where people are deprived of all rights and sometimes have harmful “treatment” forced on them - for those who “don’t.” I think if we could see a place where we are all the same - with no choice but to be the way we are - we could deal with lawbreakers without making things worse all the time. I think it was Ghandi who said, “An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.”
One person can say you are morally bankrupt if you eat meat, another can say you are immoral if you save for the future while others live in great poverty, due to no fault of their own, now. Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged...”
They do it for prestige among their peers, too, especially in Academia.
Oh! How they pat each other’s backs! Quite a sight to see on Zoom during lockdown. They really believed in their own BS. I’m sure the Federal funding helped, too.
Thank you for this thought-provoking analysis of two philosophies that, when joined, spell disaster for both the individual and the human species.
I find John Stuart Mill a bit of a conundrum as I greatly appreciate his defense of freedom in “On Liberty” and his celebration of classical liberal principles such as heterodox thinking, arguing your opponent’s position, tolerance, and open-mindedness. But utilitarianism is such a vile philosophy, I carefully sort the wheat from the chaff when I’m reading his work.
I excoriated the concept of the “public good” and underscored the necessity of respecting individuality and human rights in my “Letter to the UK Government” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-uk-government). Two+ years of COVID tyranny has made abundantly clear how easily this concept can be used to manipulate the public into self-destructive actions—especially when combined with easily fabricated modeling such as what you’ve captured here, Dr. Malone.
For a litany of examples of medical hubris and the public health, see my latest letter, which calls on US legislators to reject S.3737, the Promoting Public Health Information Act introduced by Senators Ben Ray Luján and Chris Murphy:
This proposed bill would essentially establish the Ministry of Truth for public health. Are you aware of S.3737, Dr. Malone? The only person I’ve seen mention it so far is Dr. Meryl Nass, and it poses such a threat, I am surprised it is still so under the radar.
Perhaps you can help call attention to S.3737 and encourage people to contact their legislators about it per the instructions I include after my letter? I thank you for whatever you can do to help raise awareness about this grave danger to the physician-patient relationship and ethical doctors in the United States.
Of course this legislation authorizes a paltry $45M/yr for the creation and ongoing maintenance of the "advisory committee". A group "appointed" by the Secretary (not elected) whose job is to "ensure that official scientific and public health guidance is communicated effectively to the public with specific focus on populations that are especially susceptible to health misinformation and disinformation, in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner." Sure sounds like Ministry of Truth 2.0 to me. Just please God, don't put Nina Jankowicz in charge!
Ferguson, together with his loud-speaking buddies in the media, is one of the principal pushers responsible for the fear porn that created and made CV flourish. The now infamous maker of the PCRtest protocol, Cristian Drosden, completes the triad of the founding fathers.
Strangely, Ferguson has managed to avoid a lot of public scrutiny, unlike his comrades. However I did see a video a few months ago where he was rightfully called out as fraud and murderer at some Q & A session at Oxbridge.
NONE OF THIS could have happened without fraudulent elections, a captive, one-voice press, and suppression of free speech. Until we fix those, we are just waiting for the next disaster that will come as surely as death and taxes.
You are CORRECT!! Stolen elections have consequences.
Trump won by 305 Biden lost with 233. SOURCE: 2000mules.
Yet Biden is the defacto President - exactly the corrupt suit they needed to kick off the Great Reset and implement their heinous One world order Plan.
However, truth be told, it all started with NOBama. Also Killary Kilton was supposed to win but there was a Trump interception. VoteTrump policy 2022/2024!
I totally agree.. and it is every so hard to get the truth out there because of the ongoing massive wave of MSM and the Gov't (dept of HHS) fill in the blanks list of both local, state and federal agencies blaring their propaganda day and night on TV, radio, bus bill boards and the like especially to the 'captive' audience who live in the DC bubble. I had a long and refreshing ride ,, (dental appt.. yeah) to Fauquier county which devoid of of the media onslaught. sadly I did buy the local paper which had gone fully woke including CHINA buying up farmland out there. Bidenrot called for the ONE WORLD ORDER in a speech and called for ULTRA maga and we are seeing the results. WHO IS BEHIND all this Malarky Propaganda? Hunter Biden gets to illegally buy a gun and there is the HUNTER BIDEN laptop. Obama opines about GEORGE FLOYD in Twitter in the face of the rampage by a mentally ill man in UVLADE.. What the hell is going on here? just saying? OH and then BIDENROT calls for massive gun legislation and has the unmitigated gall to quote scripture? the Bible exhorts us not to be joined with unbelievers and those who are evil in scope and nature. Wow. thanks for your post. Truth Defense.
Jun 2, 2022·edited Jun 2, 2022Liked by Robert W Malone MD, MS
Thank you! May I also suggest that people with the uber-hubris of a serious god-complex must be held accountable? The world must see them for what they are. God help us if we cannot wrench the levers of power out of their hands. They mean to starve us, Dr. Malone.
There has been a certain naivety in the way some philosophers have sought to revive the classical idea of virtue ethics as a counter-force to the callousness of utilitarianism. One of the most damaging phenomena of the last few years has been that virtue signalling; the practice of gaining social and political capital by conspicuously projecting an air of virtuousness, of uncritically jumping on the bandwagon of a supposedly worthy cause, of displaying supposedly responsible behaviour, which is often anything but.
The United States Government and the Resident Biden Administration is a SYSTEMICALLY CORRUPT, belligerent, harassing, machine that has caused unimaginable and undue stress to Americans and the world.
Countless mental and financial anguish and damage to American citizens through its constant day after day unbelievable, unwanted and radical agenda to flip a mostly harmonious country into a rioting, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend battle zone.
An unrelenting, constant unbearable unprovoked misery and pain put upon every man, woman and child and it must stop! They must be stopped!
It's looking like the monkeypox currently infecting may have come out of Wuhan too. They were working on this virus apparently and the current strain shows origins from Nigeria but has 50 SNPs inserted to make it a different variant of the original.
'Until you change how money works, you change nothing.' RIP Michael C. Ruppert.
Michael C. Ruppert, a fearless warrior for truth, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruppert) was a Los Angeles cop who became an investigative journalist who exposed the CIA for their involvement in drug trafficking. He recognized then that the entire culture was driven by oligarchs whose control of money and resources and their quest for ultimate power would essentially cause the entire global economic system to collapse. He explains how he arrived at that conclusion in his documentary 'Collapse' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(film). Ruppert correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis in the US three years before it happened.
I think Michael Ruppert would also have seen the current pharma-geopolitical tyranny well in advance. He wrote the book 'Crossing the Rubicon:The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Rubicon-Decline-American-Empire/dp/0865715408 - 1166 pages. It's a tour-de-force.
As a species, we would do well to understand that we live on a finite planet. While I don't necessarily believe the planet is overpopulated, I DO believe that the rate of the consumption of resources by the western countries is unsustainable. For example, solid science states that we only have 60 years worth of topsoil. Chris Martenson covers this exhaustively in his Crash Course, which I also highly recommend: https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/ There is a short overview version about an hour long, but the 4+ hour video series is well worth watching to truly understand the implications of our global energy/environmental/economic predicament. Chris does a stellar job of breaking it down scientifically chapter by chapter. As a scientist and pathologist, he's a man who walks the talk and teaches others how to downscale their consumption and live more resiliently. I had the chance to meet him at a conference. He's very approachable. I recommend his Peak Prosperity YouTube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/c/PeakProsperity
So, in summary, though human beings are intelligent and creative enough to solve many problems, we aren't collectively wise or disciplined enough to live within the constraints of a finite planet, no matter what religion we may affirm as our guide to morality. We will do as almost any other creature does when it has access to a (temporary) abundance of energy - consume beyond the point of sustainability and face collapse. This is how many 'civilizations' have come and gone. They've reached the point of peak complexity, then, when there is not enough energy/resources to maintain the social hierarchy and maintain order, chaos ensues. Tragic, but consistently true throughout history. Science and technology will not save us from ourselves. It will only enslave us further and create utter dependence among the masses. It already has. All we can do is mitigate the suffering by voluntarily reducing our personal consumption and fight to retain what little human dignity that we have remaining.
Thanks for reminding me about Ruppert, who certainly is a man for our times. I did watch Martenson's Crash Course and also found him approachable at a conference. Very smart guy. And Derrick Jensen changed the course of my life. Soon after 911, when I didn't know how everyone seemed to be buying "they hate us because we love freedom," I saw The Culture of Make-Believe on a shelf. Understanding the invisible, passive violence that sustains our lives was something that, once I saw it, I could never unsee.
That was the start, 20 yrs ago, of the research that eventually led to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which is about taking back local economies. My principle is to give up first the things that don't give you joy--long commutes to pointless jobs, foreign wars of aggression, factory farms and agribusiness. Adopt things that feed your body and soul like regenerative agriculture, that reverses climate change just as a perk. And then see whether it solves the problem. I know modeling is getting a (deservedly) bad rap here but there are ways to test if we can sacrifice what we don't want and keep what we do, and still meet the objective.
Another good resource is the book "Overshoot" by William Catton. It carefully and in plain language lays out the concepts of carrying capacity and overshoot. It also shows that this has been known for years, as the book was written in 1980 (but remains a relevant as ever today).
We need to get back to the basic language and intent of our United States Constitution which explicitly enumerates limited authority and power of the federal government. The federal government has no authority on the issues of health, education and many other issues. The 10th Amendment makes it clear powers not enumerated to the federal government remain with the respective states and the people. A simple way to get back to this fundamental doctrine is for Congress to defund all unconstitutional federal agencies. The federal budget would immediately drastically reduce and the resultant surplus consequently employed to reduce and eliminate the federal debt.
Unfortunately, Congress no longer represents the wishes of the electorate. Our elected officials represent the interests of the donor class. Which is to say, what you suggest is not going to happen until an "after-rebellion" time period.
Modeling, utilitarianism, greater good are all just tools of mass deception to hide the reality that the most important value captured agencies and governments have is maximizing financial returns for those who are pulling the strings. Hippocrates and now Tess Lawrie's World Council for Health have iterations of values that should be applied to health activities. Invoking the Judeo-Christian ethics is certainly not inconsistent with these value systems, but the main issue is getting the moneyed interests out of government, out of public health and putting people who really care about people, not feeding those who enrich them. People like Gates, Fauci, and Tedros, Walensky, Birx and others are amongst the best examples of these people who need to be excluded. The greater problem is one of systemic reform: How do we prevent the palms of those who hold power from being greased by those who own most of the world's grease?
In my opinion, all of our traditional institutions of democratic change have been captured by the big-money people. We now have manipulated elections, a paid-off congress, biased judiciary (most notably the Supreme Court), and corporate owned and controlled mass media. The only power "we the people" have left is the power of superior numbers, gathered in the streets in massive numbers demanding removal of power from the sociopathic oligarchs who have us all by the throat. I don't think any meaningful change will occur until we see truly massive sustained demonstrations of civil disobedience, preferably nonviolent. THAT is Job #1. (By "sustained" I mean until the job gets done. The traditional "march and go home" demonstrations are completely ignored by the ruling elites.)
Excellent piece, though your conclusion means jettisoning all, or very nearly so, of the schools of public health and most of their faculty (and, as an MD, MPH, I'd be in favor of that).
As I thought about these issues in 2020, I concluded that the only unit of decision-making that could do the job is the individual. No one but the individual can make the judgments about personal values, needs, and willingness to accept or reject various risks.
Once again you have distilled it all to the essence of the problem. I liked your parable about the healthy patient who must sacrifice his organs. I have lived this experience in my medical practice as it has become more important to think about the societal consequences of using too many antibiotics than it has been to treat the patient in front of me.
As far as the utilitarians, they are no different from the other utopian philosophies that have seen millions of people sacrificed, as,for example in all the communist revolutions. The idea always seems like a good one, until it's tried out. There is never an apology.
Much better to start with first principles, as you say. The Ten Commmandments are a nice start. I think that the "experts" could be the "false gods" referenced there.
Yes, Re: "first principles" the O.T. is a nice start. Then, if someone believes the N.T. really did bring good news, the Sermon On The Mount (Matthew 5 - 7) could be considered as the final word on the Values for Life.
Thank you Doc. Will make a point to share everywhere I can. People I know wait for all the articles you put out.
Thousands are starting to come around to the reality and the state the world is in.
We must never stop.
Me too
We are in trouble because so many of us trusted the "experts." Refusing to consider that knowledge or expertise in medical science does not equal honesty, compassion, or a regard for human life as intrinsically valuable. Superior knowledge in the hands of a morally bankrupt individual only makes them that much more dangerous. They can use their reputation as an expert to deceive and their scientific know how to pull off horrible things an ordinary car repairman or janitor couldn't--if these individuals became moral reprobates.
ARCHAIC meaning of Reprobate
(in Calvinism) predestined to damnation.
Not the definition I intended.
I think it’s foolish and counterproductive to view the situation in terms of morality - unless you’re going to define “moral” as the way someone who feels his unity with the universe naturally acts, which those of us who do not feel that unity, due to our social conditioning (although I think we all feel it to one extent or another) cannot understand or reproduce, especially if we’re trying to be moral to pacify feelings of guilt, conscious or subconscious, inculcated by the social conditioning. I think it’s better to say someone like Dr. Fauci is dishonest, if you can prove it, or untrustworthy, if you can prove that, rather than morally bankrupt, which I think is basically childish name calling which tends to evoke the same in return.
A person who knows his policies kill people and continues to enact them is morally bankrupt. Read just the first chapter of Kennedy’s book and then tell me Fauci is not morally bankrupt.
Jesus did not
Mean that murders and
Killers should not
Have their actions stopped.
I agree, I’m all for reasonable laws - hopefully democratically decided. But I don’t think the criminal justice system should be based on the idea of punishment - in hellish jails where people come out angrier than when they went in - for those who “know the difference between right and wrong,” and confinement in mental institutions - where people are deprived of all rights and sometimes have harmful “treatment” forced on them - for those who “don’t.” I think if we could see a place where we are all the same - with no choice but to be the way we are - we could deal with lawbreakers without making things worse all the time. I think it was Ghandi who said, “An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.”
One person can say you are morally bankrupt if you eat meat, another can say you are immoral if you save for the future while others live in great poverty, due to no fault of their own, now. Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged...”
Garbage modelers are everywhere.
They do it for prestige among their peers, too, especially in Academia.
Oh! How they pat each other’s backs! Quite a sight to see on Zoom during lockdown. They really believed in their own BS. I’m sure the Federal funding helped, too.
Better to shovel dirt and gain their soul than conform to the world and lose it. Sad.
Thank you for this thought-provoking analysis of two philosophies that, when joined, spell disaster for both the individual and the human species.
I find John Stuart Mill a bit of a conundrum as I greatly appreciate his defense of freedom in “On Liberty” and his celebration of classical liberal principles such as heterodox thinking, arguing your opponent’s position, tolerance, and open-mindedness. But utilitarianism is such a vile philosophy, I carefully sort the wheat from the chaff when I’m reading his work.
I excoriated the concept of the “public good” and underscored the necessity of respecting individuality and human rights in my “Letter to the UK Government” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-the-uk-government). Two+ years of COVID tyranny has made abundantly clear how easily this concept can be used to manipulate the public into self-destructive actions—especially when combined with easily fabricated modeling such as what you’ve captured here, Dr. Malone.
For a litany of examples of medical hubris and the public health, see my latest letter, which calls on US legislators to reject S.3737, the Promoting Public Health Information Act introduced by Senators Ben Ray Luján and Chris Murphy:
• “Letter to US Legislators: #DefundTheThoughtPolice” (https://margaretannaalice.substack.com/p/letter-to-us-legislators-defundthethoughtpolice)
This proposed bill would essentially establish the Ministry of Truth for public health. Are you aware of S.3737, Dr. Malone? The only person I’ve seen mention it so far is Dr. Meryl Nass, and it poses such a threat, I am surprised it is still so under the radar.
Perhaps you can help call attention to S.3737 and encourage people to contact their legislators about it per the instructions I include after my letter? I thank you for whatever you can do to help raise awareness about this grave danger to the physician-patient relationship and ethical doctors in the United States.
Of course this legislation authorizes a paltry $45M/yr for the creation and ongoing maintenance of the "advisory committee". A group "appointed" by the Secretary (not elected) whose job is to "ensure that official scientific and public health guidance is communicated effectively to the public with specific focus on populations that are especially susceptible to health misinformation and disinformation, in a culturally and linguistically appropriate manner." Sure sounds like Ministry of Truth 2.0 to me. Just please God, don't put Nina Jankowicz in charge!
💯
Ferguson, together with his loud-speaking buddies in the media, is one of the principal pushers responsible for the fear porn that created and made CV flourish. The now infamous maker of the PCRtest protocol, Cristian Drosden, completes the triad of the founding fathers.
Strangely, Ferguson has managed to avoid a lot of public scrutiny, unlike his comrades. However I did see a video a few months ago where he was rightfully called out as fraud and murderer at some Q & A session at Oxbridge.
NONE OF THIS could have happened without fraudulent elections, a captive, one-voice press, and suppression of free speech. Until we fix those, we are just waiting for the next disaster that will come as surely as death and taxes.
You are CORRECT!! Stolen elections have consequences.
Trump won by 305 Biden lost with 233. SOURCE: 2000mules.
Yet Biden is the defacto President - exactly the corrupt suit they needed to kick off the Great Reset and implement their heinous One world order Plan.
However, truth be told, it all started with NOBama. Also Killary Kilton was supposed to win but there was a Trump interception. VoteTrump policy 2022/2024!
I totally agree.. and it is every so hard to get the truth out there because of the ongoing massive wave of MSM and the Gov't (dept of HHS) fill in the blanks list of both local, state and federal agencies blaring their propaganda day and night on TV, radio, bus bill boards and the like especially to the 'captive' audience who live in the DC bubble. I had a long and refreshing ride ,, (dental appt.. yeah) to Fauquier county which devoid of of the media onslaught. sadly I did buy the local paper which had gone fully woke including CHINA buying up farmland out there. Bidenrot called for the ONE WORLD ORDER in a speech and called for ULTRA maga and we are seeing the results. WHO IS BEHIND all this Malarky Propaganda? Hunter Biden gets to illegally buy a gun and there is the HUNTER BIDEN laptop. Obama opines about GEORGE FLOYD in Twitter in the face of the rampage by a mentally ill man in UVLADE.. What the hell is going on here? just saying? OH and then BIDENROT calls for massive gun legislation and has the unmitigated gall to quote scripture? the Bible exhorts us not to be joined with unbelievers and those who are evil in scope and nature. Wow. thanks for your post. Truth Defense.
Thank you! May I also suggest that people with the uber-hubris of a serious god-complex must be held accountable? The world must see them for what they are. God help us if we cannot wrench the levers of power out of their hands. They mean to starve us, Dr. Malone.
There has been a certain naivety in the way some philosophers have sought to revive the classical idea of virtue ethics as a counter-force to the callousness of utilitarianism. One of the most damaging phenomena of the last few years has been that virtue signalling; the practice of gaining social and political capital by conspicuously projecting an air of virtuousness, of uncritically jumping on the bandwagon of a supposedly worthy cause, of displaying supposedly responsible behaviour, which is often anything but.
Thank you Dr. Malone! Your continued invaluable insight is inspiring and very necessary! You are a hero! 💯‼️
The United States Government and the Resident Biden Administration is a SYSTEMICALLY CORRUPT, belligerent, harassing, machine that has caused unimaginable and undue stress to Americans and the world.
Countless mental and financial anguish and damage to American citizens through its constant day after day unbelievable, unwanted and radical agenda to flip a mostly harmonious country into a rioting, neighbor against neighbor, friend against friend battle zone.
An unrelenting, constant unbearable unprovoked misery and pain put upon every man, woman and child and it must stop! They must be stopped!
It's looking like the monkeypox currently infecting may have come out of Wuhan too. They were working on this virus apparently and the current strain shows origins from Nigeria but has 50 SNPs inserted to make it a different variant of the original.
'Until you change how money works, you change nothing.' RIP Michael C. Ruppert.
Michael C. Ruppert, a fearless warrior for truth, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ruppert) was a Los Angeles cop who became an investigative journalist who exposed the CIA for their involvement in drug trafficking. He recognized then that the entire culture was driven by oligarchs whose control of money and resources and their quest for ultimate power would essentially cause the entire global economic system to collapse. He explains how he arrived at that conclusion in his documentary 'Collapse' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse_(film). Ruppert correctly predicted the 2008 financial crisis in the US three years before it happened.
I think Michael Ruppert would also have seen the current pharma-geopolitical tyranny well in advance. He wrote the book 'Crossing the Rubicon:The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil https://www.amazon.com/Crossing-Rubicon-Decline-American-Empire/dp/0865715408 - 1166 pages. It's a tour-de-force.
As a species, we would do well to understand that we live on a finite planet. While I don't necessarily believe the planet is overpopulated, I DO believe that the rate of the consumption of resources by the western countries is unsustainable. For example, solid science states that we only have 60 years worth of topsoil. Chris Martenson covers this exhaustively in his Crash Course, which I also highly recommend: https://peakprosperity.com/courses/crashcourse/ There is a short overview version about an hour long, but the 4+ hour video series is well worth watching to truly understand the implications of our global energy/environmental/economic predicament. Chris does a stellar job of breaking it down scientifically chapter by chapter. As a scientist and pathologist, he's a man who walks the talk and teaches others how to downscale their consumption and live more resiliently. I had the chance to meet him at a conference. He's very approachable. I recommend his Peak Prosperity YouTube channel as well: https://www.youtube.com/c/PeakProsperity
I also highly recommend Derrick Jensen's book 'Endgame: The Problem of Civilization'. Here's his YouTube talk that covers the concepts in his book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtuxHVD4Srw. Here's an excellent synopsis of his book called the Premises (of civilization) https://derrickjensen.org/endgame/premises/.
So, in summary, though human beings are intelligent and creative enough to solve many problems, we aren't collectively wise or disciplined enough to live within the constraints of a finite planet, no matter what religion we may affirm as our guide to morality. We will do as almost any other creature does when it has access to a (temporary) abundance of energy - consume beyond the point of sustainability and face collapse. This is how many 'civilizations' have come and gone. They've reached the point of peak complexity, then, when there is not enough energy/resources to maintain the social hierarchy and maintain order, chaos ensues. Tragic, but consistently true throughout history. Science and technology will not save us from ourselves. It will only enslave us further and create utter dependence among the masses. It already has. All we can do is mitigate the suffering by voluntarily reducing our personal consumption and fight to retain what little human dignity that we have remaining.
Thanks for reminding me about Ruppert, who certainly is a man for our times. I did watch Martenson's Crash Course and also found him approachable at a conference. Very smart guy. And Derrick Jensen changed the course of my life. Soon after 911, when I didn't know how everyone seemed to be buying "they hate us because we love freedom," I saw The Culture of Make-Believe on a shelf. Understanding the invisible, passive violence that sustains our lives was something that, once I saw it, I could never unsee.
That was the start, 20 yrs ago, of the research that eventually led to my book, How to Dismantle an Empire, which is about taking back local economies. My principle is to give up first the things that don't give you joy--long commutes to pointless jobs, foreign wars of aggression, factory farms and agribusiness. Adopt things that feed your body and soul like regenerative agriculture, that reverses climate change just as a perk. And then see whether it solves the problem. I know modeling is getting a (deservedly) bad rap here but there are ways to test if we can sacrifice what we don't want and keep what we do, and still meet the objective.
Another good resource is the book "Overshoot" by William Catton. It carefully and in plain language lays out the concepts of carrying capacity and overshoot. It also shows that this has been known for years, as the book was written in 1980 (but remains a relevant as ever today).
Dismantle Public Health, period. End of.
We need to get back to the basic language and intent of our United States Constitution which explicitly enumerates limited authority and power of the federal government. The federal government has no authority on the issues of health, education and many other issues. The 10th Amendment makes it clear powers not enumerated to the federal government remain with the respective states and the people. A simple way to get back to this fundamental doctrine is for Congress to defund all unconstitutional federal agencies. The federal budget would immediately drastically reduce and the resultant surplus consequently employed to reduce and eliminate the federal debt.
I wonder what would happen if my car wore the bumper sticker, “DEFUND THE CDC!”
How'd you wind up with 4 flats?
😂
Unfortunately, Congress no longer represents the wishes of the electorate. Our elected officials represent the interests of the donor class. Which is to say, what you suggest is not going to happen until an "after-rebellion" time period.
Modeling, utilitarianism, greater good are all just tools of mass deception to hide the reality that the most important value captured agencies and governments have is maximizing financial returns for those who are pulling the strings. Hippocrates and now Tess Lawrie's World Council for Health have iterations of values that should be applied to health activities. Invoking the Judeo-Christian ethics is certainly not inconsistent with these value systems, but the main issue is getting the moneyed interests out of government, out of public health and putting people who really care about people, not feeding those who enrich them. People like Gates, Fauci, and Tedros, Walensky, Birx and others are amongst the best examples of these people who need to be excluded. The greater problem is one of systemic reform: How do we prevent the palms of those who hold power from being greased by those who own most of the world's grease?
In my opinion, all of our traditional institutions of democratic change have been captured by the big-money people. We now have manipulated elections, a paid-off congress, biased judiciary (most notably the Supreme Court), and corporate owned and controlled mass media. The only power "we the people" have left is the power of superior numbers, gathered in the streets in massive numbers demanding removal of power from the sociopathic oligarchs who have us all by the throat. I don't think any meaningful change will occur until we see truly massive sustained demonstrations of civil disobedience, preferably nonviolent. THAT is Job #1. (By "sustained" I mean until the job gets done. The traditional "march and go home" demonstrations are completely ignored by the ruling elites.)
Few of us tonight, came to this same conclusion. (oh and add churches to your list of paid off traitors of humanity)
Excellent piece, though your conclusion means jettisoning all, or very nearly so, of the schools of public health and most of their faculty (and, as an MD, MPH, I'd be in favor of that).
As I thought about these issues in 2020, I concluded that the only unit of decision-making that could do the job is the individual. No one but the individual can make the judgments about personal values, needs, and willingness to accept or reject various risks.
Excellent. This is why individual rights are so Important
Exactly! A top-down approach, especially to one’s very being is to be rejected. No one cares about your life like you do.
Once again you have distilled it all to the essence of the problem. I liked your parable about the healthy patient who must sacrifice his organs. I have lived this experience in my medical practice as it has become more important to think about the societal consequences of using too many antibiotics than it has been to treat the patient in front of me.
As far as the utilitarians, they are no different from the other utopian philosophies that have seen millions of people sacrificed, as,for example in all the communist revolutions. The idea always seems like a good one, until it's tried out. There is never an apology.
Much better to start with first principles, as you say. The Ten Commmandments are a nice start. I think that the "experts" could be the "false gods" referenced there.
Yes, Re: "first principles" the O.T. is a nice start. Then, if someone believes the N.T. really did bring good news, the Sermon On The Mount (Matthew 5 - 7) could be considered as the final word on the Values for Life.