Gestalt # 201

Dr. Morens Speaks

The following are a selection of quotes from emails written by Dr. Morens, senior advisor to Dr. Fauci. In the emails below, “Tony” refers to Dr. Fauci. “Peter” refers to Dr. Daszak. Most of these emails are in reference to EcoHealth Alliance, led by Dr. Daszak, and the grant money it received from the NIH and funneled to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. FOIA stands for Freedom of Information Act. This is the act which allows any US citizen to obtain unclassified information held by the federal government.

In his own words, Dr. Morens:

You are right, i need to be more careful. However, as i mentioned once before, i learned from our foia lady here how to make emails disappear after i am foia’d but before the search starts, so I think we are all safe. Plus i deleted most of those earlier emails after sending them to gmail.

The best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive.

PS, i forgot to say there is no worry about FOIAs. I can send stuff to Tony on his private gamil,or hand it to him at work or at his home. He is too smart to let colleagues send him stuff that could cause trouble.

I suggested Arthur try to interview Tony directly and connected him to our “secret” back channel. He emailed Tony a few hours ago.

email from Morens to Daszak and Keusch—with the subject line “NIH awards $7.5 million grant to EcoHealth Alliance, months after uproar over political interference”

Ahem … do I get a kickback???? Too much f*g money! DO you deserve it all?

Peter from Tony’s numerous recent comments to me, and from what Francis [Collins] has been vocal about over the past 5 days, they are trying to protect you, which also protects their own reputations.

You may be amused at the following aside that was a big surprise to me. He [Dr. Fauci] was asking my opinion about what is wrong with CDC and in the process said, out of the blue, that it was HE who got Rochelle Wolensky her job as CDC director by lobbying for her to Ron Klain.
Well, she does wear a skirt… I poured a little cold water on her
but he was undeterred in thinking she is the cat’s pajamas…

Waste, Fraud and Abuse in the US Military

A former U.S. Navy vice chief of naval operations has been arrested on charges that he accepted bribes to steer work to a company while he was commander of naval forces in Europe and Africa, Justice Department officials said in a Friday statement.

Robert Burke, 62, of Coconut Creek, Florida, along with two business executives, Yongchul “Charlie” Kim and Meghan Messenger of New York, were each charged with bribery and conspiracy to commit bribery, according to an indictment unsealed on Friday.

“Burke is also charged with performing acts affecting a personal financial interest and concealing material facts from the United States. If convicted, Burke faces a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison, and Kim and Messenger each face a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison,” the statement said.

Former vice chief of naval operations arrested on bribery, conspiracy charges. Bradley Peniston, Defense One. May 31, 2024.

Meghan Messenger and Yongchul “Charlie” Kim are senior executives at a company called “Next Jump“. After reading content at their web page, I found it difficult to determine what they actually do. Their website is filled with psychobabble about “leadership” and “decision-making”. They apparently offer “training” to improve decision making. Seems like patent BS, to me. In addition to the US Navy, they also list the US Air Force as a customer. Given the recent arrests, I think one can fairly ask whether anyone in the US Air Force was also involved in improper behavior.

Setting aside the bribery charges, why does the US Air Force and the US Navy need leadership lessons from such a BS company? Shouldn’t the US Air Force and US Navy be giving leadership lessons in their own training and by example? Do they not know how to do this anymore?

There is serious rot in the US military. We have “powerpoint” generals who need lessons in leadership from BS, psychobabble companies instead of people who lead by example. There are members of the US military who have led their troops into battle and prevailed in difficult circumstances. Shouldn’t generals and admirals ask proven combat veterans how to lead? Vast sums of money are being wasted on companies like “Next Jump” while enlisted personnel struggle to feed their families. Just so sickening.

Gestalt #196

Nuclear War – A review

I read the book “Nuclear War” by Annie Jacobsen in one day. This fictional scenario was better written than most thrillers. Plot spoilers ahead. The book does not have a happy ending. The great strength of the book is its meticulous description of the procedures that would govern our response should the United States come under nuclear attack. These are quite frightening as they appear to be antiquated and not suitable for the 21st Century. The author suggests, and I agree, that even if a nuclear war begins “small”, it will likely expand to large scale launch of many nuclear weapons. There are just too many potential failure points and too little time to make decisions to stop at a limited war. Where I disagree with the author is her assumption of a nuclear winter that lasts five years. Maybe this will happen, but I don’t think this is the consensus. The truth is, we really don’t know what will happen. Certainly, some level of cooling will occur for at least a few months, which, in itself, will be devastating to countries that must import food to survive. However, the dire prediction that she makes is not well-supported by the available evidence. There are lots of activists pushing the same scenario. I get that she wants people to be scared enough to try avoid nuclear war. But frankly, there isn’t much her readers can do about stopping it from happening. Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un are the men who will decide whether or not to start a nuclear war, not us. They are not smart or especially rational men. They are all megalomaniacs who live in echo chambers surrounded by eunuchs who tell them exactly what they want to hear. We can’t control what they do. However, we can decide to survive what they do. The truth is that deaths due to famine from nuclear winter will be unequal. Countries dependent on external inputs will do the worst. Countries that are well-prepared and self-sufficient in food production will do the best.

Where is Cesar Chavez when you need him?

For those who don’t know, Cesar Chavez was a labor activist who advocated on behalf of Mexican farm workers. He sought better working conditions for people who had been exploited by agribusinesses. Right now, farm workers in the dairy industry are being exposed to H5N1 without adequate protection. Farm equipment is thought to be aerosolizing contaminated milk. This is thought to be how the one documented human case occurred. How many undocumented cases have there been? We don’t know because no one is bothering to check on the farm workers many of whom are themselves, undocumented. Do the “liberals” in the media care? Don’t make me laugh. They could not care less. Evidence: how many stories do you see of uber wealthy elites like Anderson Cooper going down to the farms and exposing the lousy working conditions for workers. Do the “liberals” in Congress or the White House care? Please, stop. I need to breathe. Evidence: the White House controlled-CDC has done absolutely nothing to help get PPE or H5N1 tests to the farm workers. “Liberals” don’t really care about the poor or working class.

Where is Ronald Reagan when you need him?

President Reagan, regardless of what you think of his policies on other issues, was a strong foe of the Soviet Union and the threat it represented to the free world. He must be turning in his grave to see Members of Congress who call themselves “conservatives” kissing up to Vladimir Putin, a man who seeks to re-establish the Soviet Union that Reagan helped dismantle. Win one for the Gipper? Not these clowns. They’re Red alright. Commie Red. Make careful note of who votes against helping Ukraine prevent the rebirth of the Soviet Union and you will know who the Communist Sympathizers are. Or worse. People who have betrayed the US – for what?

Gestalt #102: The Family as an Economic Unit in the New World

Prolog

Today is Father’s Day, so perhaps an appropriate day for this blog. This blog will touch on sensitive and what might be considered controversial subjects, for some. So please be assured I do not look down on people who have made different choices than I have. Nor do I assume that I have any right to judge or criticize individuals for the choices they have made. I also do not claim to be a model of perfect behavior.

Like many of us, I underestimated the impact of the pandemic on our economic situation. For many of us, the 1918 flu pandemic was our model. It came, killed a lot of people, and then went. The effect on the economy was temporary. Not so SARS-CoV-2. The pandemic caused by this virus is unlikely to go away on its own. There is little evidence that it is becoming milder. The effects of long Covid are only now being realized. Some, more advanced countries, are already calculating the economic costs of large numbers of people in the prime of their lives who won’t be able to work at their full potential and are likely to need extensive health care for the rest of their lives. This cost is almost certain to be large.

As many preppers expected, government services failed the general public in many ways. Unfortunately, monkeypox is teaching us that the US and other governments learned nothing from SARS-CoV-2 or I may say, HIV, and will continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. Economically, this will mean that we will be whipsawed between recession and inflation and may perhaps experience both at the same time. Outright shortages are already here and are likely to get worse. Our economy is in crisis. We cannot rely on the government to save us. So, who ya gonna call?

Your family, that’s who.

We have hear a lot about the effect of isolation on mental health. This has not been exaggerated. Humans are social animals. Isolation from other humans has bad effects not only on mental health, but physical health as well. Imagine someone who is living alone in an apartment. If they are prevented from leaving it or interacting with others in person, this could be considered a form of cruel and unusual punishment; a type of solitary confinement. However, when this cost to isolation is discussed, rarely are the different circumstances of people with families considered. Some young people who were in small apartments went back to live with their parents when the pandemic hit. I haven’t seen any studies, but I would be willing to guess that their mental health was a lot better than the ones who continued to live alone.

In the early days of the pandemic, many people lost their jobs. I will assert that those who had families to rely on as a backstop experienced less anxiety than those who did not. With government mismanagement of multiple pandemics, it would be foolish to count on the government to save us from economic disaster in the future. Do you really want to have to choose between isolating from potentially deadly viruses or starving because you don’t have enough money for food and shelter? This leaves us with our families to buffer us from solitary confinement and possible economic disaster.

If you accept the premise that the crisis we are currently experiencing is not temporary but represents a long term change in our state of civilization, then how should we organize our families? Fortunately we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. For most of human history, people have lived under worse conditions than we are experiencing or are likely to experience. They dealt with the problems that arose with a family structure that did not vary much across thousands of years or across different cultures on different continents: a husband, a wife, their parents and siblings, a lot of children and a small patch of land to grow food on. This works.

Yeomen, Kulaks, and the judicious use of Technology

The United States and the Soviet Union both had tremendous natural resources and large populations. Why did the United States win the Cold War? Some say the reason is that capitalism is superior to communism. Maybe. But why is capitalism better? And was it really capitalism that won the Cold War? The Founders of the United States were descendants of Yeomen in Great Britain. Yeomen were a small group who were not aristocrats and not peasants. They could be rich or poor. What distinguished yeomen was that they did not have the hereditary titles or the large estates of the aristocrats but neither were they dependent on the aristocrats like the peasants were. Yeomen owned their own small patch of land and could manage it however they wished. Their fate was determined by what they did. If they worked hard, they prospered. If they didn’t, they suffered. This led to a certain set of values that included a reliance on a large family that worked hard. Immorality was not tolerated because that would weaken the family and result in economic disaster. The Founders imagined the US as a collection of yeomen, small landowners who would chart their own destiny free of interference from a government controlled by hereditary aristocrats. For much of the history of the United States, large families on small farms were the rule. Russia had a similar class of people to the yeomen called the Kulaks. Lenin hated this class. He had many of them murdered. When the peasants asked for their own land, first Lenin and then Stalin repressed them violently. Ukrainians will never forget the Holodomor, a genocide of starvation instituted by Stalin to destroy famers who wanted to control their own farms. Why did the US succeed and the Soviet Union fail? I believe one factor is that we celebrated and encouraged our yeomen while the Soviet dictators exterminated theirs.

In the past, farmers were often uneducated in a formal sense. They passed on practical knowledge verbally from parents to children. The US founders were able to enjoy enough leisure to become highly educated, but at the cost of enslaving other human beings, the original sin of this country. How can we live on traditional farms, avoid slavery or serfdom and achieve a high level of education and culture? Fortunately, technology exists today that, if carefully used, can allow us to have the best of both worlds. The reason I am interested in solar and wind power is not so I can be “greener” than my neighbor; it’s because it represents energy that I can control and use to power a variety of labor saving devices. Battery operated tools of many types are much better than they were in past. I can attest to this from personal experience. I’ll write more about self-sufficient agriculture in a future blog.

Children, expense or asset?

Some of the most ancient artifacts we have are of fertility symbols. Why is this? The reason is that the more children you had, the richer you were. Children were free field hands when you were young and the only social security there was when you were old. Modern families are small or, for an increasing number of people, nonexistent, because children today are considered a cost. You have to pay for expensive daycare, buy them expensive clothes, expensive electronics, expensive take-out food, send them to expensive sports camps, etc, etc, etc. Except, you don’t have to do any of those things, if you don’t want to. You can easily afford a large family as long as you buy durable clothes that you hand down from kid to kid and give the kids chores like: growing food, cooking food, cleaning the house, etc. etc. No smart phones. No iPads. To teach them how to program, you can buy them Raspberry Pis for $35.00 each. If you homeschool your kids, you can make sure that they learn essential skills to be successful in life and skip the PC indoctrination.

One thing this pandemic has made very clear to me is that, if you are sick or old, you need family to look out for you. No one else will. There is no way Social Security and Medicare will take care of most Americans alive today. Expecting strangers to care about you when you are old is a fool’s bet. A large family is the best social security there is.

What is a traditional family?

When I grew up, the common perception of a traditional family was portrayed on the TV show: “Leave it to Beaver”, a dad who went away to work every weekday, a mom who stayed home and cooked and cleaned, and kids who went away to school every day. You know what? This is not a traditional family. It was invented on Madison Avenue to maximize corporate profits.

Here is a story I heard some time ago. A woman who knew some German overheard some Amish people talking. They were expressing concern about what would happen to a family now that a parent would be working away from the home. They thought the poor kids would now go straight to Hell in terms of their behavior. The woman initially assumed that the Amish people were talking about the mother of a family getting a job outside the home. But they weren’t. They were talking about the father leaving the farm and getting a factory job. You see, in a traditional family, both parents stay home with the kids. There is a division of labor, mostly based on upper body strength, but fathers are considered just as important child-rearers as mothers.

Laura Ingalls Wilder is famous for her “Little House on the Prairie” books. But she also wrote a book called “Farmer Boy” that was based on her husband’s experience growing up on a farm. If you read that book, you will come away with a strong sense of a farm father’s responsibility to take care of and educate his children. In a traditional family, taking care of children isn’t “women’s work”, it is parents’ work. Both of them. Equally.

There’s lots more to discuss about family farms and educational and economic opportunity, but this blog is already too long. I’ll come back to some of these themes in future blogs.

Gestalt # 70 – Hypersonic Missiles and Nuclear War

When I was growing up, the threat of nuclear war was never far from the minds of Americans. We were constantly reminded of the possibility of nuclear war by the news, movies and the radioactive symbol on fallout shelters scattered throughout our cities. There was a fallout shelter in my High School. After Cold War I was over, we all relaxed and thought “Whew, glad that didn’t happen!” We did not know at the time how close we came to nuclear war. It wasn’t just the Cuban Missile Crisis. Watch “The Man Who Saved the World” if you want to know about one of several very close calls. It is unfortunate that many do not know how close we came to nuclear war. Those who prepped by building fallout shelters for their families were laughed at. “See”, many scoffed, “Nuclear war never happened. You panicked for nothing.” Actually, nuclear war preppers were right to prepare. We just got lucky.

Cold War II has begun. One of the major differences is that the US Government hasn’t informed the American people that it is occurring. Although some military leaders have expressed concern about the build up of nuclear forces in China, these warning are undercut by assurances that we have more nuclear warheads than they do. This is misleading. The only thing that stopped the Soviets from attacking the US with nuclear weapons was the fear that we would retaliate with our nuclear weapons – so-called mutually assured destruction. In the movie “War Games”, various nuclear war scenarios are simulated. You can see curved lines representing Soviet missiles launched towards the US. While these are en route, you see our missiles launched towards the Soviet Union. Given the technology at the time, a first strike launched by one side would result in a counter-strike by the other side resulting in annihilation of the aggressor – mutually assured destruction. Does this same logic prevent a nuclear war with today’s technology? Not necessarily. The US military has drastically reduced its nuclear counter attack capability. At the same time, the Chinese military has dramatically increased their nuclear first strike capability.

Does Xi Jinping have the resources to destroy US nuclear counter strike capability thus removing any fear of retaliation? In a few years, he may. Forget the warhead counts that the soothers use to assuage such a fear. Warheads don’t matter if they are not married to delivery systems. The number of delivery systems is what counts. If you look at these numbers, the US does not fair well. According to the Arms Control Association, the US had about 659 deployed nuclear weapons in 2018. China is now estimated to have 700 deliverable nuclear weapons by 2027. Still, you may say, if they launch their 700 we can launch our 659. That should be enough to scare them. Not if they can destroy our 659 before we can launch. How could they do this? With hypersonic missiles. These are destabilizing weapons. Since they can arrive at their targets within a few minutes of Xi Jinping’s orders, it is possible that almost all of our nuclear counter-strike capability could be destroyed on the ground, before we have a chance to launch. The Chinese and Russian militaries are getting better at finding our nuclear submarines. A coordinated attack on missile silos, nuclear bombers and submarines may leave us without a means of retaliation. Also, consider the possibility that the Chinese and Russian militaries might launch a joint-attack with hypersonic missiles. What do our wargames show happens to the US nuclear counter-strike capability if this occurs?

Prepping for nuclear war in the 1950s through the 1980s was not foolish. And it is not foolish now. Obviously, it is unwise to live in a location likely to be attacked with nuclear weapons. The many people who survive the immediate physical destruction of nuclear weapons will need to protect themselves from radiation sickness. I will have more to say about fallout shelters later.