Monthly Fusion - July 2022

Civil war, climate derangement, collapse of legitimate leadership, kid's vaxx mania and revenge of the Scarf Lady

US CITIZENS READY TO TAKE UP ARMS AGAINST THEIR GOVERNMENT

In 2016, Associated Press launched a pre-Covid project called “Divided America” with the following proclamation.

It’s no longer just Republican vs. Democrat, or liberal vs. conservative. It’s the 1 percent vs. the 99 percent, rural vs. urban, white men against the world. Climate doubters clash with believers. Bathrooms have become battlefields, borders are battle lines. Sex and race, faith and ethnicity ... the melting pot seems to be boiling over.

Photo courtesy of Mario Gogh

Today, 28 months into the new social, political and economic regime ushered in under the banner of Covid and Climate, the AP project seems quaint. The 43rd annual Battleground Poll by Georgetown University’s Institute of Politics and Public Service in July 2022 asked voters to rate political division on a scale of 0 to 100, “…with 0 being no division at all and 100 being the edge of civil war.” Respondents gave a mean score of 71.74.

Similarly, a July 23, 2022, University of Chicago survey found that a majority of voters believe the government is irredeemably corrupt and nearly one third agree with the statement that “it may be necessary at some point soon for citizens to take up arms against the government.” Half of survey respondents believed that their disagreements with other people spring from the fact that the others are consuming “misinformation.”

One can argue that the US has always been divided, often bitterly. Democracy is the most difficult form of government because it is predicated on the need for ceaseless argument. It isn’t a passive walk through a mall.

But there is a qualitative difference in Covid-Climate division. The often vitriolic, even violent debates that animated the nation from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement happened against a backdrop of an always tenuous, but nonetheless palpable, social consensus, a set of shared beliefs in the value of the individual, freedom of conscience, and the inalienable right of others to express themselves freely.

Although it was often marred by violence, there was nonetheless a general underlying sense that most political speech was overblown, and that even the most odious people who were judged to be dangerously wrong should be accorded the right to unabridged free speech.

Today, such sentiments are nearly non-existent, a casualty of what sociologists are calling pandemic driven “affective polarization” rather than political differences. It is tribal in the worst sense, a primal reduction to biology.

“In contrast to ideological polarization, which mostly considers differences in political views, affective polarization is more of an identity-based comparison between in- and out-groups. As such, it is defined as emotional attachment to in-group partisans and hostility towards out-group partisans. Importantly, such animosity is based on strong in-group identification and negative partisanship with out-groups and not necessarily strong policy disagreement.”

This apolitical tribalism is propelled in part by the fact that a majority of Americans (50%) now believe that when they have political differences, they are not caused by “honest disagreement” but by the fact that that those who disagree are “misinformed because of where they get their information.” (ibid)

In this milieu, a long list of illustrious heretics who defined much of modern science, such as Galileo, Newton, Pasteur, Lavoisier and dozens of others, might have been burned at the stake.

Czech philosopher Erazim Kohák observed long ago that “we are becoming a race of amoral, technologically advanced savages,” masking our descent into barbarism with “a [technical] sophistication that is little more than distraction.”

A citizenry thus divided and degraded is easy prey.

A COLLAPSE OF LEGITIMACY AT THE TOP

During the two year plus rise of pandemic authoritarianism in the advanced economies of the West, there has been a steady decline, now approaching a collapse, of legitimacy among globalist Western elites. Here are a few examples of approval ratings from Morning Consult’s Global Leader tracking page.

Biden 39%
Boris Johnson 27%
Macron 33%
Scholz 34%
Trudeau 38%
Sanchez 34%

The two most popular leaders in the world today are Modi of India at 75% approval and Lopez Obrador (AMLO) of México at 63%. Both are unabashed nationalists, one a right leaning populist (Modi), the other a left leaning populist (AMLO).

After initial wavering, both have resisted the worst excesses of the coercive Covid lockdown regime and salvaged their presidencies in the process. And both are now under assault by the new order pushing extreme coerced social, political and economic reorganization to fight climate and Covid.

AL GORE AND THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE DERANGEMENT

On July 13, 2022, Al Gore appeared on Meet the Press, which host network NBC says has been the “most watched Sunday show in the Nation’s Capital for 86 months” reaching 1.8 million viewers across digital platforms.

Mr. Gore, a well known climate activist and former US Vice President, said this:

"You know the climate deniers are really in some ways similar to all of those almost 400 law enforcement officers in Uvalde, Texas, who were waiting outside an unlocked door while the children were being massacred. They heard the screams, they heard the gunshots and nobody stepped forward.”

After the televised exchange, which was characterized as “ghoulish,” Gore was attacked as a "climate shock jock" who, 22 years removed from office, is still selling “climate hysteria” for "money and attention” while generating an enormous “carbon footprint” by flying worldwide in private jets year round.

Gore’s comments are revelatory because he voiced publicly what so many elite climate activists believe privately. Anyone convinced that they possess absolute scientific certainty and moral carte blanche is by definition a dangerous extremist. For good measure, Gore, like so many other elite climate alarmists, owns an $8.9 million ocean view villa in Montecito, California, an investment that belies his professed deep concern over rising ocean tides due to warming.

Mr. Gore is not alone in his climate hypocrisy. Bill Gates owns a $43 million beach mansion in San Diego, California. Barack and Michelle Obama own an $11.75 million oceanfront estate in Martha’s Vineyard. Joe Biden owns a $2.74 million Delaware vacation beach house, while Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry owns an $11.75 million, 18.5 acre estate overlooking Vineyard Sound in Martha’s Vineyard.

There is a long list of elite climate alarmists who own lavish oceanfront properties, travel via private jets and luxury autos as they descry the world’s melting ice caps and rising tides.

During the first two years of the pandemic, these are the people who fared best while recommending austerity for others. In the midst of enormous pandemic hardship and suffering for the majority of humanity, the world’s ten richest men more than doubled their fortunes from $700 billion to $1.5 trillion —at a rate of $15,000 per second or $1.3 billion a day. This happened as the incomes of 99% of humanity fell and over 160 million more people were forced into poverty. 

OTHER CLIMATE PERSPECTIVES

We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations. – Judith Curry, Emeritus Professor, School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Georgia Institute of Technology

For the sake of balance, here are a few links to top climate experts and organizations that dispute the simplistic doomsday scenarios promoted so profitably by elites such as Al Gore & Co.

• Climate Forecast Applications Network, Judith Curry
• Watts Up With That, Anthony Watts
• The Breakthrough Institute, Michael Shellenberger

My favorite climate “denier” of all time was Freeman Dyson, the world famous Princeton physicist. By refusing to abandon his belief that science should be “fun,” Dyson accidentally became the bane of grievously serious climate scientists, and handled the resultant vitriolic attacks with good humor and equanimity that managed to put climate into a more balanced perspective. Here is a link to a 2009 interview.

With her impeccable credentials as one of the world’s preeminent climate scientists, Judith Curry functions as the adult in the noisy climate debate room when she eloquently summarizes the central problems with climate alarmism.

Climate change is increasingly being referred to as a crisis, emergency, existential threat and most recently as ‘code red.’ Climate change has become a grand narrative in which manmade global warming is regarded as the dominant cause of societal problems.

So, exactly what is wrong with this grand narrative of climate change? In a nutshell, we’ve vastly oversimplified both the problem of climate change and its solutions. The complexity, uncertainty, and ambiguity of the existing knowledge about climate change is being kept away from the policy and public debates. The dangers of manmade climate change have been confounded with natural weather and climate variability. The solutions that have been proposed for rapidly eliminating fossil fuels are technologically and politically infeasible on a global scale.

Note that the IPCC itself does not use the words ‘crisis’, ‘catastrophe’, or even ‘dangerous’; rather it uses the term ‘reasons for concern.’

MONKEY BUSINESS AT THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO)

In a stunning development July 23, 2022, the WHO declared the Monkeypox virus a “Global Health Emergency,” the organizaton’s second highest alert level.

On June 30, 2022, the European Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (ECDC), characterized the recent Monkeypox outbreak.

The disease is more likely to spread through close contacts, for example during sexual activities, and in this group the risk can be considered high. The likelihood of MPX spreading in people who have multiple sexual partners, including some groups of men who have sex with men (MSM), is considered high in the EU/EEA. However, it should be noted that the likelihood of spread to the broader population is low and that most cases in the current outbreaks have presented with mild symptoms. Public health authorities should currently prioritise the identification, management and contact tracing of monkeypox cases.

Yet in a historic first one month later, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO’s director general, “took the unprecedented step of overruling a panel of advisers” to make an emergency designation.  The UK Telegraph reported:

Dr Tedros ignored his own expert committee after nine voted against the designation and only six in favour. It was the first time a UN health agency chief has unilaterally made such a decision without an expert recommendation.

The US has already ordered $300 million in Monkeypox vaccines, with nearly 800,000 doses in the pipeline. The only other diseases for which WHO currently has emergency declarations are Covid and polio.

VACCINE MADNESS

The ever increasing reliance on vaccines to deal with easily managed disease outbreaks is its own kind of pandemic, especially among children. For more than a century after the first vaccine requirement for school children was implemented in Massachusetts in 1853, the Smallpox vaccine was the only one required.

By the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, the Salk polio vaccine began to be added to the list of recommended childhood vaccinations. By 1995, the list of recommended vaccinations for school kids had expanded to include diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, polio (oral), Haemophilus influenzae type b, and Hepatitis B vaccines.

In 2022, the CDC’s “Recommended Child and Adolescent Immunization Schedule for ages 18 years or younger,” is 10 pages long and includes at least 24 vaccinations.

One is not an “anti-vaxxer” to question the long term health and public policy wisdom of extreme reliance on a vaccine-only approach to public health in the nation’s children.

REVENGE OF THE SCARF LADY

Many of you will remember Dr. Deborah Birx, the infamous “scarf lady” who, along with Dr. Anthony Fauci, was the co-architect of America’s disastrous mask and lockdown policies at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

Birx has a new self-dramatizing book out titled “Silent Invasion: The Untold Story of the Trump Administration, Covid-19, and Preventing the Next Pandemic Before It's Too Late.”

Although I have not yet read the book, Jeffrey Tucker of the Brownstone Institute offers an excellent summary of the lessons to be learned from Birx.

The story of the lockdowns is a tale of Biblical proportions, at once evil and desperately sad and tragic, a story of power, scientific failure, intellectual insularity and insanity, outrageous arrogance, feudalistic impulses, mass delusion, plus political treachery and conspiracy. It is real-life horror for the ages, a tale of how the land of the free became a despotic hellscape so quickly and unexpectedly. Birx was at the center of it, confirming all of your worst fears right here in a book anyone can buy. She is so proud of her role that she dares to take all credit, fully convinced that the Trump-hating media will love and protect her perfidies from exposure and condemnation.

MY VISIT FROM MISS RONA

I published a brief dispatch about my bout with Covid a few days ago. It can be read here. My case lasted one week, and the last two days of that week were nearly symptom free.

I used the Frontline Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC) “Early Treatment” protocol to self-treat, and it has been remarkably effective.

The FLCCC protocols are on their website, can be downloaded as PDF files and are available in multiple languages.