The Ship Isn’t Going to Sink After All

I don’t expect this to be read by many people who need to hear this, but things are not as bad as you fear. Watch and wait. You’ll see. If you’re not ready to hear this yet, OK; maybe we’ll come back to it when you’re ready. I’ll just leave it here.

The ship will not sink after all.

I’m talking to those who aren’t celebrating after last week’s election—or maybe I’m talking to those who care about those who are not celebrating.

Here are a couple of examples. This first one, I like the person who posted. I think she’s a good mom and generally a good person. But I do not engage her on political issues. She reports having this uncomfortable conversation—which she believes should not be something she should have ever had to anticipate, let alone face—with her tween-age daughter. She assured her daughter that she and her husband would keep the children safe. They didn’t need to worry about the outcome of an election. The daughter then said, “Well, they don’t like childless cat ladies. I NEVER want to have kids, and I like cats. So, I guess they don’t want me here [in America]. And if they don’t want me here, fine—I will leave.”

This mom says they do not speak of politics around the house. The girl picked it up, essentially, from the milieu. The mom explains this burden “we” have put on her and her daughter, and ends with, “The coming generations will hold us accountable for what we do today, and if we are conveying that they don’t matter, that they cannot have a voice or live their lives in the abundantly free country many of us grew up in, they will abandon a country that their parents and grandparents forced them to suffocate in.”

By comparison to others, this was relatively mild. For example,

meme found on a Facebook here

I’m OK with history judging me on this vote, by the way, since I have neither those lacks nor those bad character traits.

And this one:

[Someone at] church told me my son would be deported, because he was born when I lived overseas, and that I’d be deported with him [4 laugh/crying emojis] all because [someone on TV] ran her mouth about nonsense. These oldhead liberals at church crack me up.

One more: This is from a HuffPost article called, “My Husband and His Family Voted for Trump, So I’m Canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas,” which then goes on to explain to the husband,

I am sorry about the holidays, but I cannot bite my tongue like I did with Hillary. I don’t want to disrespect your parents or your brother and his family in their home, or our home, so it’s best this way. No scenes. You can go see them. Seriously—I will not be in a room of 15 people who voted for Trump.

What a relief for the other 15 people!

We are not dealing with rational people right now. Just for clarity, J.D. Vance never said we should deport, or ignore, or “cancel” childless cat ladies; he said people with no children, and therefore no stake in the future of the country, should not be overrepresented in leadership positions. And he said it as an offhand remark in 2021 in an interview with Tucker Carlson. (Read more at your trusted NPR source here). It got dredged up by the Harris campaign, and taken out of context, to foment anger, which apparently worked on the demographic they aimed for—those who were already voting for her. The milieu in my home would not have caused such distress on a pre-teen girl, but then, our milieu is really very different—the sources for news, entertainment, conversation topics, etc. I think I wouldn’t have started the conversation with, “Don’t worry about the outcome of the election; we’ll protect you,” and then blamed the rest of us for the daughter’s distress.

As for the church person telling a US citizen that they’d be deported along with their child for allowing their child to be born while they were temporarily living outside US boundaries is so laughably ill-informed, I almost shouldn’t dignify it with the explanation, but children born to US citizens are considered US citizens, regardless of where they are born. Otherwise, you couldn’t get service members in their child-bearing years to live abroad with their families. Nor would ambassadors or even US workers in international companies. So, “oldhead liberals at church,” get a grip.

We—the majority of the country who are Trump voters—are, for the sake of love of country and our fellow Americans, being patient during this mourning process. We have been in that place of overwhelming loss, with a great deal more good reason.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, screenshot from here

Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying did a thoughtful podcast a few days after the election.  They come from a liberal background—up until “the science” was so obviously wrong, in 2020 and beyond concerning the pandemic, that they felt they had to speak up. And for that, even though she had been voted favorite professor at Evergreen College in the northwest, they were both fired for speaking the truth about actual data. So, yes, they were red pilled, and in this election strongly supported Trump. But they also remain close to a sizable number of people who cling to the left (bitter clingers?)

Bret Weinstein uses a metaphor of a ship that is being badly captained, in such a way that the ship is going to go down, along with everyone aboard. So there’s an honorable mutiny—the capable sailors come forward and restrain the captain and take over. There are also sailors who do not mutiny, who stay loyal to the captain no matter what. They’re angry with those who stepped in and changed the sails and set the ship aright. In fact, they insist the captain is saving them and these sailors stepping up to make the necessary changes are going to kill them all. Those angry ones are wrong, but they will nevertheless benefit from the lifesaving actions of those who took over.

Metaphors always have limits. The American voters are not mutineers nor insurrectionists; they abided by the law and used their vote for a peaceful transition of power. There is, nevertheless, weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth from those who insist these pro-American voters are killing democracy and inflicting us all with fascism. But they are wrong, fortunately.

Weinstein offers a main point, which maybe will help us move forward: we all want the ship to stay afloat.

I think the irony of the moment is you have something like half the population convinced that something terrible has just happened. And that half the population, I think, does not appreciate that, actually, the terrible thing was already well underway. We were living under what was at least a turnkey totalitarian state in which, actually, the key had begun to be turned, and we had all sorts of examples of political prisoners, of lawfare being wielded, people being disenfranchised, borders being open for cynical reasons that we can't know, the costs were accumulating for the insane captain's perspective on how the civilization—or the ship, in this case—was to be run.

And so, at some level, the fact that you believe that something terrible has happened in this mutiny doesn't mean your life wasn't just saved by the mutineers. You may not get that. But we should all be able to agree that we are bound together, and that what we need is for the ship to be well governed. And what we disagree over is which of these prospects was the terrifying one.

I may disagree with him slightly here; I think there are some, in power positions, who were rooting for the malaise and eventual demise of our beloved constitutional republic—for the ship to sink, as it were. But most of the people have been what Stalin (or was it Lenin?) called “useful idiots.” They believe what they’re told by the tyrannical state, without question, and they act accordingly.

I continue to puzzle over why they believe what they’re told, without questioning. They even seem to see a different reality from actual, provable reality. Some of it must be the sources they use for information. In fact, that must be a lot of it. But some of it must be choosing to believe what they believe, against the evidence.

As Mark Twain said, “How easy it is to make people believe a lie, and how hard it is to undo that work again!”

I am, of course, working under the assumption that reality as I see it is close to the actual reality. I aim for that, anyway.

A day or so before the election, Chris Martenson put out a short Peak Prosperity video. He began with a clip of Oprah saying, “We don't get to sit this one out. If we don't show up tomorrow, it is entirely possible that we will not have the opportunity to ever cast a ballot again.”

Chris Martenson, upper right, shows clip of Oprah,
screenshot from here

Martenson then said, “I agree. Just, we have— It's just amazing how fundamentally different we are.” We thought it was entirely possible that, had Harris won, the totalitarian state would have moved so far down, we might never have seen a way out of the tyranny. Seriously. Martenson pointed out that this administration oversaw shadow banning and actual banning, censorship—so much that it filtered down to regular people on Facebook. (My BIL had his post taken down when he told his own personal experience with COVID and the eventual treatment—which included hydroxychloroquine. Several Facebook friends had posts removed and were put on some sort of time out or probation they call Facebook jail. Many of us, including me, had those ubiquitous misinformation warnings placed under our posts.)

In the Weinstein video, they put out some of what we faced. A January 2022 report shows what people from the two parties believed should happen:

·        Find/identify the unvaxxed.

o   20% REP             55% DEM

·        Unvaccinated should be locked in homes.

o   20% REP             60% DEM

·        Unvaccinated should be sent to quarantine camps

o   20% REP (way too high)               40% DEM

·        Take children from unvaccinated parents.

o   Near 0% REP                    30% DEM

·        Imprison critics of the vaccine.

o   10% REP             50% DEM

This is not to say these things happened in the US; they didn’t. But Democrats wanted them to at much higher rates than Republicans. There were, however, actual CDC plans to carry them out. The day Weinstein and Heying recorded the video, they noticed a piece by Jeffrey Tucker, of the Brownstone Institute, saying that the CDC had plans built for quarantine camps, which plans remained on the CDC site until 2023. Tucker says this was called “interim operational considerations for implementing the shielding approach to prevent COVID-19 infections in humanitarian settings,” in case you didn’t get terrified enough by this year’s Halloween.

The Blaze put out a piece in their Lifestyle section called “Every Lie They Told You about Trump: A Brief Overview.”  It’s way too brief to touch on “every lie,” but I’ll let you explore that one on your own.

Tom Woods, in his email from Thursday (November 14), quoted Dave Smith, who reminds us of this story from eight years ago:

The US intelligence agencies framed the sitting US President for treason. They all knew that Donald Trump wasn’t involved in a conspiracy with the Russians, but they lied.

Well, that President is back AND the boss of the Intelligence agencies is now, not only someone completely outside of that conspiracy, but someone who was slandered with that same accusation, by the same nasty woman whose campaign came up with the whole Trump frame job to begin with.

It turns out there are people who should fear a Trump presidency—not because he’ll be a tyrannical dictator; clearly they weren’t afraid of tyranny (or "loss of our democracy," as they put it), as long as they were the tyrants. But they should fear that Trump will hold them legally and lawfully accountable for their actions. They will call any such legal actions the political retributions of an authoritarian dictator, but the myriad of Trump voters know what it really is.

Weinstein brought back the ship analogy an hour further into the podcast. It had taken some bravery to stand up publicly as they had, along with many others. He says,

If we had failed, we would have been made to walk the plank, and the ship would have gone down somewhat later. There was no escape. And this is why I think so many people took what they at least perceived to be such risks with their own personal well-being, was that we didn't have a choice, right? We really believed—and I still believe—that the other outcome was utterly intolerable, and that this was probably our last shot to gain control of the helm and steer the ship back on a reasonable course.

But I was imagining the ship, if the other outcome had happened, the ship would go down, and a lot of people would be scratching their heads at the last moments as to whether the mutineers might have been onto something, which is a—that's a terrible screenplay I don't want to live.

The Constitution had been hanging by a thread. The repair is going to feel kind of severe and crazy for a while. Coming to know the truth will help with the healing; it really will.

image from a Christian Homestead video

I put a new book on my reading list: Political Ponerology: The Science of Evi, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism. In a recommendation of this book, David Solway, for PJ Media says, 

In effect, you cannot change a mind that was never properly formed or classically educated or a mind devoid of any vestige of common sense or practical smarts. A coalition of conservative thinkers and ordinary working families constitutes a winning combination.

For those who eventually find your way here at a time when you have become open to it, I suggest adding a full list of conservative thinkers to your content providers. Check out Epoch Times, The Blaze, The Daily Wire, PJ Media, Tucker Carlson—just for starters. And check out free Hillsdale courses, particularly Constitution 101. And then have some open-minded discussions with those 15 people who voted for Trump who are at your holiday table (maybe you’ll be ready for this step next year). Maybe you will unlearn some of the untruths that have been making you so panicked/angry/over-emotional, miserable, and miserable to be around.

And, once you’re ready to add some levity back into your life, use the Babylon Bee as your news source; while they are a satire site, they do hit on the truth more accurately than the sources that led you astray before. And if you don’t understand the satire, well, that will put you on a journey toward truth too.

image from a Babylon Bee story on Facebook

One more Weinstein quote, about how the rest of us are feeling right now:

I just want to try to just capture the fact that something took place that I think all of the people, whose names you know, who took a risk on this were feeling, simultaneously, the day after, and it was not vitriolic; it was not angry; it was not any of the things that you might imagine; it was this feeling of “I can't believe that I feel hopeful. And I can't remember how long I've been living under this feeling of pressure, that we cannot afford to lose, because we are in the bullseye.”

I’m sorry there are people feeling lost and afraid the ship is sinking. But it’s not. And those of us who had witnessed the peril, we just feel so relieved. And we’re ready to help right the ship and sail forward.

Bonus: three lists (with some repetition) of progress in President-elect Trump's first week:

found on Facebook, here

 A facebook story, original credited to
@the_typical_liberal and dc_draino

found on Facebook here

Putting the Pieces Together

This post is something of a puzzle, with some assembly required. The pieces relate, but you might have to put them together before you can see the whole picture. Each video piece is relatively short, mostly in the 15-20-minute range.

image found here

The good news is the current variants of the COVID-19 virus are causing fewer and fewer deaths or hospitalizations. The bad news is the current variants are much more contagious, easier to spread.

The worse news is that the variants are adapting in a way that you can get it again, even though normal natural immunity would prevent that. The worst news is that this situation is caused by mass vaccination.

That’s right. The doctors who said it was a bad idea to mass vaccinate in the middle of a pandemic were right. One such doctor is Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a specialist in virology and vaccinology. He recently talked with Bret Weinstein, an evolutionary biologist, who has followed carefully all things COVID. Their conversation explains why the omicron variant, at its peak in January, didn’t result in herd immunity, as we thought it would.

The first puzzle piece, then, is Dr. Vanden Bossche’s conversation with Bret Weinstein:

·       “We have thrown a BOMBSHELL on this delicate balance (Geert Vanden Bossche & Bret Weinstein)” Dark Horse podcast, July 1, 2022.  

 

The second puzzle piece is Dr. Vanden Bossche again. On the Steve Deace show on The Blaze, Deace presents a 16-minute video in which the doctor essentially begs parents: DO NOT get your children vaccinated. He explains how the vaccine works in a way that undermines the natural immune system, which means, not only does it not work to prevent the variants of COVID-19, it can make cases worse. And—it can undermine the immune system’s ability to recognize other viruses. Vaccinating your child for this virus that has almost no chance of serious risk for your child can risk the child’s health—permanently.

Deace plays the whole thing, then talks it over with a couple of his teammates. You can’t talk openly about such things on YouTube, so it’s got to be on an alternative platform. This is worth it. Get a free trial, if you need to.

Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, during presentation shown by Steve Deace
screenshot from here

·       “Overtime: Virologist Provides Dire Warning about Covid Jabs,” Steve Deace, on The Blaze, July 6, 2022.    

·       If you can’t get that one, I think Dr. Vanden Bossche does a similar presentation here. 

 

Another piece has to do with the CDC’s failure to consider adverse events related to the vaccine. Bret Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying, also a biologist, discuss this:

·       “SHOCKING revelation from CDC FOIA request (from Livestream #132)” Dark Horse podcast July 7, 2022. 

Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses, I think, the same CDC failure a couple of weeks earlier:

·       “Makes Me Angry” Drbeen Medical Lectures, June 22, 2022. 

 

Dr. Mobeen Syed shows the promise to report adverse events, followed by 
an admission that they have not been doing the testing as promised.
screenshots from here

The next piece has to do with excess deaths—excluding COVID-related deaths. Why are they so high? Some things are related to COVID response, such as lockdowns and the various turbulence that caused in so many lives. Some of it, however, may be due to unexpected long-term effects of the spike protein in the body—from the illness itself and/or from the vaccine and boosters. Dr. John Campbell (as with Dr. Mobeen) is not against vaccination in general, nor against the COVID-19 vaccines. But he is about looking at the data and seeing if we can draw conclusions. Here’s his discussion:

·       “Non covid excess deaths,” Dr. John Campbell, July 6, 2022. 

 

Another look at this issue, from several months back, is presented by Dr. Kelly Victory, an emergency medicine and disaster specialist, going over observations noted by insurance companies, talking on KUSI News. She’s not saying the causes are known, only that 2021 has a statistically significant difference, and we ought to look at possible causes.

·       “There was an unexpected 40% increase in 'all cause deaths' in 2021,” KUSI News, February 2, 2022. 

Another recent report on the insurance data comes from Roman Balmakov for The Epoch Times.

·        “Life Insurance CEO Reveals Deaths Are Up 40%Among Working People: ‘Just unheard of,’” Facts Matter, with Roman Balmakov, June 29, 2022.

 

We’re dealing with a “vaccine” that doesn’t prevent illness, as we’ve come to expect from vaccines—such that they had to change the definition of vaccine to even apply the term to this injected medical intervention. It has proven to be neither safe nor effective. Now we’re looking at serious damage to individuals and society as a whole. Yet the push to vaccinate—and even mandate vaccination of an emergency use authorized drug—continues.

Roman Balmakov, for The Epoch Times, discusses the effect of mandating these vaccines in the military, with Lt. John Bowes. They discuss a report that some 40,000 National Guard troops will be expelled from the military for refusal to get the COVID-19 vaccines. This is going to affect military readiness. The states with the highest percentage of unvaccinated troops include Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas, Missouri, and Mississippi, with 30-40% refusing the shots. By the way, 98% of all religious exemptions have been denied.

chart showing vaccination percentages in Army National Guard
screenshot from here

·      “Exclusive: Vaccine Mandate Will Force Over 700 Pilots, 40,000 National Guard Troops to Be Discharged,” Facts Matter, with Roman Balmakov, July 4, 2022. 

·       Full interview at EpochTV here. 

Lt. John Bowes, full interview
screenshot from here

 

Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson reports on the COVID-19 pandemic as “the greatest crime in history.” He goes over the lab origin, the coverup, and more.

·       “This may have been the greatest crime in history,” Tucker Carlson on Fox News, July 8, 2022. 

 

The picture isn’t fully put together yet. But what we’re seeing is perhaps the greatest death toll and misery ever perpetrated on the people of the world, without a war or natural disaster. It’s not over. It might never be over, because of the ongoing push to force vaccination on the population, rather than allow herd immunity, and rather than allow early treatment, which we have known to be effective since the earliest weeks of the pandemic.

In short: prepare yourself with treatment on hand, because you’re likely to get it again. Getting the jab won’t prevent you from getting it or from getting a worse case. It is likely making things worse, for individuals and society as a whole. If you’ve gotten the injection before, don’t risk your body any further. And absolutely under NO circumstances should you allow your children to be injected with it.

 

Not Like the Others

 

 

This meme is perhaps a tad unfair. Three of these quotes were given during speeches designed to inspire, such as in an inaugural address. And the odd one is given simply in a Christmas greeting to the people, on December 20, 2021. Plus the photo (found here) is less than inspiring. Rather, it is intended to inspire fear.

Viva Frei, observing from Canada, heard of Biden’s statement and thought it must be a parody, so he looked it up, and wasn’t convinced until he found it on the White House’s official site:

This shouldn’t be another dark winter, however. There’s plenty of good news surrounding this virus the president wants us to remain panicked over.

We’ve already gone over some of the data relating to the Omicron variant. As more data comes in daily, here’s what we think we know:

·        It is definitely less severe than Delta and other previous variants. This appears to be true not just for younger people, but for all demographics.

·        It is quickly overtaking Delta and becoming the dominant variant as it spreads around the globe.

·        It doesn’t much care whether a person has been vaccinated or not, although people with a recent third shot (booster) may be better at preventing serious infection.

·        Death is very rare from this variant; it is unclear whether any cases died of this disease or only died with it (meaning they died of some other cause while also testing positive for the infection).

·        A much smaller percentage have an infection that progresses to need hospitalization. Those that do, by some reports, have a similar later progression of the illness as other variants; however, anecdotal evidence shows a much shorter hospitalization stay, down to 2-3 days, rather than weeks.

·        South Africa has already passed through its spike of Omicron cases; new cases are now down. Their spike began around November 23, so it lasted a month. Places experiencing a current spike are likely, then, to be through it by a month from now. (By my reasoning, if you were to get vaccinated now, or get a booster, the Omicron surge will have passed before you get any positive effect.)

·        This illness, while mild, is also very amenable to treatments.

·        Loss of smell and taste is not a common symptom for this variant, which may mean less neurological damage. Also, it seems to affect only the upper respiratory areas, rather than causing COVID-pneumonia as previous variants.

·        In Great Britain, a person with cold symptoms has about a 50% chance of actually having the Omicron variant of COVID-19. While no one recommends risking the illness to get immunity, getting this weaker variant is likely to give immunity.   

One of the good things we’re learning is how to treat. These things probably also work on previous variants as well, but it turns out practically anything kills this virus. Doctors are recommending a sinus wash. You can use a neti pot or a spray bottle. The solution is 2 teaspoons of betadine in 6 ounces of water. As one experienced with a neti pot, I recommend using distilled water; regular filtered water will sting. Even distilled water stings; I use a teaspoon of salt and baking soda in a cup of water to get a saline solution (I buy little packets for the purpose, for convenience, but making your own is fine). Add the betadine to that. Alternatively, you can use hydrogen peroxide (get the kind meant for human use rather than just for stain cleaning). 

A sinus wash and/or a mouthwash can help
kill the virus in the mouth and sinuses.

For your throat, use some of the solution and swish it around and gargle with it. Or use a typical mouthwash. The most data is coming in about Listerine Cool Mint but just about any mouthwash will do. Even a saline mouthwash helps, although not as completely.

So, if you clear out your sinuses and mouth/throat 2-3 times a day, or particularly when you’ve been out among a crowd, you can prevent the replication of any virus particles you may have picked up during the day.

This is long-known information for fighting respiratory infections. There’s just now data showing that, of course, it works for COVID-19 as well, which is a respiratory infection. Dr. Peter McCullough last week referenced nine studies showing these nose and mouth virucidal washes work. This simple thing could either help you avoid the illness altogether or make it much milder than it would have been.

This practice should be on top of taking zinc, Vitamin D 3, and anything else you may need to boost your immune system. And have a plan for early treatment in case you get the illness. With the Omicron variant, unless you’re in a high-risk group (elderly or with multiple co-morbidities), you’re unlikely to need even the typical medical interventions like hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, or monoclonal antibodies.

The point here is, you’re in control. You don’t have to live in fear of an illness that is now about as high risk as getting a cold.

If you’ve had COVID-19 before, can you get this new variant? There are mixed messages on this. Dr. McCullough, just before Christmas, still believes there is virtually zero reinfection. He tells this about what the CDC finally admitted:

You know, our CDC was pressured on this by a Freedom of Information Act request that basically said, listen, if someone really can get it twice, show us the case. The CDC must have a case of someone who’s really gotten it twice, and they’ve spread it, and this is all verified with basically confirmatory testing. We’d have to see a patient who’s PCR-positive, who’s sick with COVID-19, has signs and symptoms, chest x-ray, laboratories everything fits COVID-19. And they have a PCR at a low-cycle threshold, and a confirmatory antigen, and confirmatory sequencing. And the same person gets the same serious illness, let’s say six months later. And the CDC doesn’t have a case, thankfully. And they’ve certainly never had a case where someone has gone on to spread it on a second occurrence.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mobeen Syed reports—simply passing along reports he’s reading—that this new variant has a reinfection rate about 5 times that of Delta. Are they screening the way Dr. McCullough says must be done? Doubtful. And the supposed reinfection rate before was very low, about one in a thousand, so five times that would be only five in a thousand. In other words, if you’ve had COVID-19 previously, you don’t need to worry about getting it again even as this mild strain.

And if you’re one of the surging cases getting this Omicron variant—whether you were vaccinated or not—afterward you’ll have lifetime immunity.

This will hold true until the variations are no longer COVID-19, but have varied enough to become an unrecognized new virus.

By the way, there is no mechanism for this Omicron variant to mutate into a more dangerous strain. Dr. Mobeen Syed goes over that discussion here. 

We are coming out the other side of this pandemic. Give it a month or two.

But the real plague hasn’t been this highly treatable illness; it has been authoritarian control. And there is no guarantee that will let up. Biden’s Christmas warning hints at that.

Here’s an anecdote for the day. This just happened last night. A friend here has relatives elsewhere who go on a bi-annual trip to Hawaii with all the kids and grandkids. They were flying out of Los Angeles and had done all they were required to do—and there were a lot of hoops to jump through. All the adults were vaccinated. In fact, if I understood correctly, all were vaccinated but one seven-year-old boy. Oddly, when they all had their pre-flight PCR tests done, this boy's result didn’t show up with the rest of them. It was obvious he wasn’t sick. It was obvious he’d been tested—because he was with the whole family who was tested. But a glitch in the system prevented his result from showing up. At the airport, they went through all of this, and the officials there thought this shouldn’t be a problem and let them fly to Hawaii. But in Hawaii they were not allowed to leave the airport. None of them. They were not allowed to get the boy an additional test. They were not allowed to do anything but fly back to LA in the middle of the night.

This was a family where they had been perfectly willing to go along with whatever was required of them. Only the grandmother had been skeptical, but even she had been willing to get vaccinated. Now there’s a whole extended family that has been red-pilled. The boy wasn’t sick; he couldn’t spread anything. He had been tested, and results are somewhere, just not where they belong—because of some bureaucrat somewhere making an error, or maybe a machine making the error. That error cost this family thousands of dollars and the loss of a much-anticipated holiday vacation. This is not OK.

Add to that, the family doesn’t like the idea of vaccinating a seven-year-old for an illness that will not harm him, while the vaccine risk is unknown for children. But California is requiring school children to be vaccinated in order to return to school in January. The family had been considering homeschooling for that reason; this experience may settle it. As if there weren’t already hundreds of reasons to homeschool in California to prevent anti-family and anti-American indoctrination there.

The summary today is, a month from now the pandemic may be over. In the meantime, while we may not be able to do much to prevent exposure, we can take actions that may prevent any infection at all, and will at least make serious infection much less likely. That’s great news for us, but it’s bad news for authoritarians. They're likely to double down on the fearmongering. Their plague on us may not let up for some time.

Dr. Alfred Johnson (left) talks with Dr. Peter McCullough
screenshot from here

Some Resources

·       “Covid-19 and the Holidays” on Real News Communication Network, Dr. Alfred Johnson interviews Dr. Peter McCullough, December 22, 2021. 

·       “Omicron—70 Times More Infectious than Delta and Significantly Less Severe (Study from HKUMed)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 16, 2021. 

·       “COVID and Vaccine Policy Dangerous” Bret Weinstein talks with Dr Peter McCullough on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 18, 2021. 

·       “Cancel Culture Tactics Being Used against Unvaccinated (from Livestream #109)” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 26, 2021. 

·       “Documentary Maker Reveals His Experience of COVID in Australia” Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying on DarkHorse Podcast Clips, December 27, 2021. 

·       “Simultaneous Reinfection and Breakthrough Case Report” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 20, 2021. 

·       “Omicron—Good News Continues (60% Less Risk of Hospitalization by Omicron)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 23, 2021. 

·       “UK Common Cold Maybe Omicron, South Africa—Peak Is Over” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 24, 2021. 

·       “Omicron, Half of Common Colds” Dr. John Campbell, December 24, 2021. 

·       “Mouth Washes that Inactivate Coronaviruses” Dr. Mobeen Syed, October 21, 2020. 

·       “Mouth Wash, Colchicine and Vitamin D” Dr. John Campbell, February 2, 2021.

·       “STUNNING—No Reinfection in Previously Infected (Harvard Preprint Study)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, November 22, 2021. 

·         “Dr. Peter McCullough on NFL Protocols, Pregnancy, Omicron and More” Teryn Gregson talks with Dr. Peter McCullough, December 17, 2021. 

·       “(Dec 15, 2021) Omicron—Prof. Dr. Terrence Kommal Shares South Africa Cases and Hospitalizations” Dr. Mobeen Syed talks with Dr. Terrence Kommal, December 15, 2021. 

·       “Omicron Spike Protein is Less Efficient—Random COVID Questions with Dr. Been (#162)” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 17, 2021. 

·       “Will Omicron Mutate Back to a More Lethal Variant?” Dr. Mobeen Syed, December 11, 2021.  

Coming to a Fortunate End

It’s only slightly premature to say the pandemic is ending. From the data we have so far, much of it from South Africa, the Omicron variant is more contagious than the Delta variant, or other variants, and is therefore likely to overtake the others and become the dominant strain. That is likely to happen in the UK in the next couple of weeks, and in the US shortly after that, and definitely within the next couple of months.

The good news is that it is very mild. There are very few hospitalized cases. About 90% of those hospitalized were incidental, meaning the patient was in the hospital for some other reason when a standard test for COVID-19 showed up positive. Of patients on ventilators, all were on ventilators for some other reason; the Omicron variant of SARS-COV-2 did not cause the need for oxygen. There have, as of this writing, been zero deaths attributable to the Omicron variant.

The Omicron variant seems to be less transmissible than the Delta variant—around R-2.5, rather than R-5. Yet it does seem to be overtaking Delta in populations. The reason seems to be that it has a greater affinity for binding with the ACE-2 receptor. If Omicron and Delta were in the same body, but Omicron gets into a particular cell before the Delta, the Delta has to look elsewhere—like a game of musical chairs—or it gets killed off by the body’s immune system. Omicron seems to be winning the game.

If Omicron continues to evidence less virulence, that is a good thing.

Dr. Mobeen Syed illustrates Omicron's doing damage to Big Pharma
screenshot from here

Doctors are starting to speculate that this could mean the end of the pandemic. In a similar way to how the Spanish Influenza pandemic of a century ago went, there was a bad first year followed by an even worse second year, followed by much milder forms, eventually moving into the endemic background illness that it continues to be. That could be the trajectory for SARS-COV-2.

Here are some sources:

·       “WHO: No Deaths Reported as a Result of Omicron Variant to Date” Nathan Worcester for The Epoch Times, December 10 (updated December 12), 2021. 

·       “Omicron Could Be Natural Vaccine for Unvaccinated—Prof. Eleanor Riley (University of Edinburgh)” Dr. Mobeen Syed discusses a UK study on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast December 11, 2021.  He shows why using a model for Delta looks alarming, but if Omicron is truly less virulent, that fear is unwarranted.

·       “Omicron Helping Wind-down the Pandemic—Netcare Report from South Africa” Dr. Mobeen Syed on his DrBeen Medical Lectures podcast, December 11, 2021.  He states his opinion that the pandemic is winding down, thanks to the Omicron variant.

·       “Good Fortune with Omicron” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 11, 2021.  He talks about current data on the virus in South Africa and the UK. He also goes over the Eleanor Riley piece that Dr. Mobeen covered.

Dr. Campbell says, in that last one,

It’s not because humans have been particularly clever. It’s not because the vaccines have been so successful that it’s eradicated the infection. It’s not because the lockdowns have worked. It’s not because we’ve been so clever. We are just fortunate that this massively communicable variant that is going to bring about huge amounts of herd immunity is doing so at the cost of absolutely minimal disease. Humanity has been indeed fortunate.”

And then he adds, “It’s almost as if there’s corrective systems looking after us. I don’t know how much philosophy or emotion to put into this, but this could have been bad….” And “Palpable relief here.” He stops just short of calling it a miraculous turn of events.

As with many other things about this virus, however, there are unanswered puzzling questions.

Evolutionary biologists Bret Weinstein and wife Heather Heying discuss a great many things on their podcasts. And they typically think of themselves as liberal. But this past couple of years of pandemic, they have commented frequently on the biology of the disease as well as the authoritarian response—in a way that has been getting them labeled as conservative. This past week Weinstein was commenting on the evolution of the Omicron variant. They are asked by a follower this question:

Q: Can you steel man the arguments for the various ways Omicron might have evolved from 2020 without being noticed by the medical community that has been sequencing as many variants as they find? To the naïve, “engineered” seems like a possibility. But I would like to hear other natural evolutionary solutions to the problem.

The answer, in short, is that there are too many strange things about this variant, from an evolutionary biological perspective, specifically from a phylogentic systematics perspective, which they explain. Briefly that has to do with the genetic inheritance tree of a thing, in this case a virus. They show a time-lapse animation of the phylogeny of the different strains, from someone else’s work. Here’s the discussion from that point; I’ve highlighted some key sentences:

Bret Weinstein: So, these are all the variants that are being tracked. And the line—

Heather Heying: What’s the X? I mean the X axis is presumably time, so when does it start? What’s the left most—?

BW: Zach will have to read it. I think it’s like mid-2020, or maybe it’s early 2020. (responds to technician off screen). 2019. Yeah. OK, OK. So it starts right at the beginning of the sort of named pandemic. And what you have are all of the variants and their relationships as deduced by their sequence differences. And what you saw is that Omicron pops up without any history of connection to the rest of the swarm, as if it came about somewhere March through September of 2020.

HH: 2020?

BW: Yes. So it—

HH: Not 2021? Omicron? 2020?

BW: No. It shows up in 2021; but the point is, its relationship is as if it has been frozen in time at a much earlier state and then shows up.

I looked up the chart used in the DarkHorse podcast and found it here.
I added arrows to show the beginning and current day points of the Omicron variant.

Now, the thing is, this has people over in lab leak world fascinated, because this is not the first time in history that this has happened. In fact there’s a very famous example that you may have just barely heard mentioned in the lab leak discussion about the flu of 1977. And the flu of 1977, it has been concluded—this of course could be revised if some better model emerged that was more predictive or assumed less—but, it has been concluded, for now, and with substantial evidence, is actually a lab escapee. And the way we know that is that its closest relative dates back to 1949. So it vanished from the world, and then the clock started again on its evolution in 1977. So that indicated this surely was in a fridge somewhere or isolated from the world. Whatever was happening with it, effectively time was stopped, and that effectively requires a refrigerator.

HH: In an organism or a virus that does not have extraordinarily variable mutation rates, you would not, you could not possibly expect a—whatever that would have been—a 28-year hiatus with no changes.

BW: Right. And so, the other example which we have of this, which isn’t as good, because we don’t really have a good ancestor, right, is SARS-COV-2 itself, where we suddenly have a virus that’s very very good at doing the things a virus needs to do in order to become a human pandemic, with no history of circulating in another animal where it learned those tricks, no history of circulating in some population of humans, as far as we can tell, somewhere. It just— It’s a genius right off— It’s like a child that was born speaking three languages or something, you know.

And so, anyway, this has people who are paying attention to this thinking very carefully about what could even explain this other than its having been somewhere in someone’s lab during the period of time that we would have expected it to emerge and then suddenly popping back up.

And there are other anomalies too, like things like the non-synonymous to synonymous mutation rate is way off of normal. It’s like 25 to 1. So, this is about how many alterations that have no consequence for actual protein sequence you would expect for every one that has an actual consequence, and the number appears impossible through a normal process.

Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
screenshot from here

Now, what the discord server [person who posed the question] has asked us to answer is the question of, well—

HH: Could it be, you know, what might explain this variant with this many changes appearing so suddenly, given a supposed background rate of so many people checking all the time for variants?

BW: Right. And so, what I think we should do, rather than search the world for crazy explanations, is just identify one— So, you’ve heard things like “immunocompromised person” in which much more evolution took place than normal, because their immunocompromised state effectively created a gain-of-function environment, a serial passage environment between tissues that was extremely favorable to variants. Now this doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, because— And, in fact I think the idea— So, it was originally reported that it had been isolated from somebody with HIV and diagnosed HIV; I believe that that has been debunked—although who even knows what debunked means in 2021.

But, nonetheless, these kinds of explanations have been offered before. In fact, there was one quite good paper—I thought it was dead wrong, but quite good paper—that argued that it could be that SARS-COV-2 experienced extreme evolutionary change in one of the miners who got sick in Yunnan Province, because lungs have such a large surface area.

HH: Back in 2013.

BW: Yeah. It was a very clever argument. Again, I think it’s dead wrong. But, anyway, it’s at least the kind of thought you would want to have. How could you get more evolution than you expect, right? Maybe surface area is the answer.

HH: Well, at least in that case, it— You can track the story evolutionarily. Like, the logic—each logical step is plausible, even if one or more of them may be so unlikely as for it not to have happened. So many of these stories that are charted, these explanations that are thrown out at the masses, and then the guy in effectively the white lab coat steps out to say, “I know you can’t follow this, so let me just tell you, the conclusion is...” actually just don’t even logically hold together. And we’ve sort of stopped, you and I have stopped largely on here even saying, “Oh, this thing, except it doesn’t make sense. And this thing, except it doesn’t make sense,” because it’s just coming so fast and furious. Like this— I don’t, on the face of it, the idea that immunocompromised creates gain-of-function in a body—I don’t know why that would be true. I have yet to hear the explanation for how you get from a to b. That’s just a simple a to b. Spell it out.

BW: Well, the idea, to the extent it is an idea rather than excuse, is, in the immunocompromised body, the defenses that would ordinarily silence lots of evolutionary experiments in the body tolerates them. Right? Something like that. And so you have— It’s like a big population in which processes that wouldn’t make any headway, in a small population gets a chance.

HH: So if that is true, you would expect that immunocompromised people would tend to be incubators of lots of variations in colds, other coronaviruses, or flus, or, you know any of the other things—

BW: It makes other predictions. And frankly, I don’t know whether any of those predictions are manifest.

HH: Right. That’s how you would actually follow this up with a scientific approach.

BW: The other thing would be—OK, so let’s say that this is true in the immunocompromised person and you get lots of evolution of little—you know, there are lots of foothills in the immunocompromised person that don’t exist in people with a fully competent immune system. But then, when the variant gets out into people who do have a fully competent immune system, you wouldn’t expect those variations to function very well, unless—

HH: If they only got a foothold because of immune suppression—

BW: Right. So then you would need another step to the process. And the point is, this is where you start running afoul of Occam’s razor. You’re not just hypothesizing an immunocompromised person, which provides a unique environment; you’ve got another black box that you need to fill. And at some point, it’s too many epicycles to be sustained.

So, I just want to point out, the other thing that we talked about last week that fits this category is, why did COVID-19 collapse in Japan, oh yes, after they allowed doctors to prescribe Ivermectin? And the answer was, “Oh, it became mutationally aggressive and lost its coherence.”

HH: It just did so well that it failed.

BW: Right. Something. And so the answer is, No, you need at least one more factor. You know what one factor could do it? Ivermectin could drive a virus to make some sort of a deal that it couldn’t sustain. But you can’t do it with just spontaneous mutational idiocy.

Bret Weinstein Twitter Thread
December 12, 2021

The summary of this is,

·       The Omicron variant’s history traces back to mid-2020, but it didn’t appear until November 2021. It’s as though it was kept in a lab refrigerator for a year and some months.

·       Also, it has a mutation rate that is impossible under normal processes.

·       The explanation about it being naturally developed in an immunocompromised person doesn’t hold up.

So, if you ask these evolutionary biologists, who have looked at the data and charted the history of the disease, this variant didn’t just happen naturally.

I’ve wondered about deus ex machina. Are we at a point where God has intervened and purposely altered the genetics of a worldwide plague? I’m not ruling that out; I tend to see His hand, whatever is happening.

But I am asking this additional question: If someone had a variant in mid-2020 that would be both mild and highly communicable—so that it would quickly end the pandemic through herd immunity and giTwitve people natural immunity for the future—why would such a person hold back, allowing another year’s worth of deaths to occur, before bringing it out?

And another question: Why, if the data shows this variant is likely to end the pandemic, is there so much panic and continued push to take a vaccine not designed to help against this variant, even pushing the vaccine onto children, who have always been at extremely low risk of serious illness from any variant of SARS-COV-2?

All versions of this illness have been highly treatable when dealt with early, using typically low-cost medicines and supplements. It looks like ease of treatment—or lowered need for any treatment—is nigh. As those who claim to be science keep saying while not showing any evidence of science, “Follow the science.” When you actually do that, you’ll notice that there was never any need for the vaccines, or mandates of any kind, or lockdowns. This has been a plague of authoritarians. Let us hope someone who has the power to hold off solutions for well over a year does not also have the power to spring an even more lethal virus upon the oh-too-trusting world.

Here are a few more interesting references: 

• “Live Q&A: WHO Says No Deaths from Omicron; Was Jussie Smollett ‘a Hate Crime in Reverse’?” Joshua Philipp on Crossroads, December 12, 2021.  After mentioning that there are no deaths or other worrisome data associated with the Omicron variant, he asks, then why are countries taking even harsher measures? 

• “Covid: The Path not Taken—DarkHorse Podcast with Dr. Peter McCullough” Bret Weinstein The DarkHorse podcast, December 6, 2021.  This is mostly talking about SARS-COV-2 in general, including treatments and possible vaccine dangers, rather than about Omicron. 

• “Omicron on the Move” Dr. Peter McCullough on The McCullough Report podcast of December 6, 2021. 

• “Ivermectin in Japan” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, November 23, 2021. He shows the data that seems to show cases plummeting in Japan 12 days after Ivermectin was allowed openly as a treatment. News outlets seem to be assuming this is mere coincidence. 

• “UK, 50% Omicron Now” Dr. John Campbell on his podcast, December 13, 2021. https://youtu.be/XzrG3Odgf28 While noting the sharp rise in cases in the UK (and where the UK is today, the US is likely to be in January), he offers update from South Africa, where they have passed three weeks, showing only mild cases, recovery in 3-5 days, regardless of age or vaccine status; there isn’t a later cytokine storm, as some feared might come.