Other than being Black, what exactly is Sowell’s expertise in slavery or history?
Yeah, it’s kind of funny. But it’s also tremendously sad, because millions more young people absorb Hannah-Jones’ utterly mendacious work than will ever become familiar with Sowell’s brilliant oeuvre. And it’s not just young people, either.
Over the years, I’ve asked many friends to read some of Sowell’s books. To date, as far as I know, not one of them has done so. It’s not just their loss; it’s everybody’s loss.
Commeter “Banned Lizard” recently linked to this:
Dr. Ryan Cole’s Biopsy Results May Explain The Shocking Rise In “Mysterious” Cancers — He Explains There Is Spike Protein “Inside Every Single Cancer Cell”
“What’s inside of every cancer cell? Spike protein. Every malignant B-cell has spike protein in it.” pic.twitter.com/FDkq99ksqa
— ?? ???? ????? ??????? ?? (@Baklava_USA) February 11, 2023
So, what’s this “shocking rise”? Is no link necessary, since obviously we all are aware of the truth of the shocking rise and it’s timely connection with the COVID vaccine’s use?
Be very careful of confirmation bias. I’ve been saying that a lot lately, haven’t I? And yet I keep seeing confirmation bias and shoddy statistics or no statistics. What am I talking about here? Don’t we all know of people who have been diagnosed with cancer and die shortly afterwards? Or who have cancer return after lengthy remissions? Yes, we do. But I’ve always known of such cases, going back many many years. And isn’t cancer on the rise? Some cancers; but that goes back long before COVID and the vaccines, as well.
Anyway who ignores the history is fooling you or fooling himself or herself, or both.
This might be a good time for me to recap my position on COVID and vaccines: I believe COVID was probably bio-engineered and released in a lab leak. I believe the vaccine’s value is that it protects the most vulnerable to a certain degree from very serious cases of COVID rather than from COVID itself. I believe that vaccine mandates are wrong, and that vaccines are not valuable for the young. The evidence offered by the anti-vaccine crowd has been almost entirely garbage statistics, to be impolite about it, and I’ve refuted tons of it in the comments here and in other posts too tedious to find and list right now.
End of summary.
As for the rest of this post, I’m going to give a series of links about long-term trends in cancer occurrence. Anyone serious about analyzing what’s really going on needs to document any recent rises – not just anecdotally, even from doctors or nurses, because of course there are always local rises and other local falls and it’s only the bigger statistical picture that tells the tale – and then tie that rise into long-term trends, explaining both convincingly as well as comparing vaccinated to unvaccinated people in cancer incidence matched for age and pre-existing conditions. I have yet to see anyone even trying to do that.
And yes, some of you distrust all statistics. That’s your prerogative, and it’s understandable to a certain extent, given some of the lies and coverups that have gone on with government agencies and social media in particular. Nevertheless, what that does is allow you to choose your own facts or if necessary make them up or link to people who have made them up or use particularly poor statistical analyses. Unconvincing.
Here are links to pre-COVID but relatively recent articles about rises in cancer rates: this, this, and this. There are plenty of others.
Here’s one you might particularly want to take a look at, particularly the long-term trend angle:
A study by researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital reveals that the incidence of early onset cancers — including breast, colon, esophagus, kidney, liver, and pancreas — has dramatically increased around the world, with the rise beginning around 1990…
“From our data, we observed something called the birth cohort effect. This effect shows that each successive group of people born at a later time — e.g., a decade later — have a higher risk of developing cancer later in life, likely due to risk factors they were exposed to at a young age,” said Shuji Ogino, a professor at Harvard Chan School and Harvard Medical School and a physician-scientist in the Department of Pathology at the Brigham. “We found that this risk is increasing with each generation.”
It’s very disturbing. But COVID vaccines cannot explain a long-term tend like this.
Same here:
In 2023, 1,958,310 new cancer cases and 609,820 cancer deaths are projected to occur in the United States. Cancer incidence increased for prostate cancer by 3% annually from 2014 through 2019 after two decades of decline, translating to an additional 99,000 new cases; otherwise, however, incidence trends were more favorable in men compared to women. For example, lung cancer in women decreased at one half the pace of men (1.1% vs. 2.6% annually) from 2015 through 2019, and breast and uterine corpus cancers continued to increase, as did liver cancer and melanoma, both of which stabilized in men aged 50 years and older and declined in younger men. However, a 65% drop in cervical cancer incidence during 2012 through 2019 among women in their early 20s, the first cohort to receive the human papillomavirus vaccine, foreshadows steep reductions in the burden of human papillomavirus-associated cancers, the majority of which occur in women. Despite the pandemic, and in contrast with other leading causes of death, the cancer death rate continued to decline from 2019 to 2020 (by 1.5%), contributing to a 33% overall reduction since 1991 and an estimated 3.8 million deaths averted. This progress increasingly reflects advances in treatment, which are particularly evident in the rapid declines in mortality (approximately 2% annually during 2016 through 2020) for leukemia, melanoma, and kidney cancer, despite stable/increasing incidence, and accelerated declines for lung cancer.
To repeat: anyone who tries to explain this in terms of vaccines cannot ignore the fact that it’s a trend that began before COVID and before COVID vaccines.
File under “things we don’t understand”:
Astronomers have discovered an entirely new ring system within the solar system, and it’s located at such a great distance from its dwarf planet parent that it should be impossible.
The ring surrounds Quaoar, which is around half the size of Pluto and located beyond Neptune…
“The six [previously known] planets with ring systems all have rings which are quite close to the surface of the planet. So this really challenges our ring formation theories,” study co-author Vik Dhillon, a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Sheffield in England, told Live Science. “It was previously thought to be impossible to have rings that out, so in a nutshell, the ring of Quaoar is a real challenge to explain theoretically.”
The ring system is located at a distance of seven planetary radii away from Quaoar (that is, seven times Quaoar’s radius), which is twice as far out as the theoretical maximum limit for a ring system, known as the Roche limit.
Elastic collisions may be possible if the ring particles have an icy outer coating, Dhillon said — something that is plausible, given Quaoar’s location at the edge of the solar system. However, more data are needed to confirm this idea.
Not only are its rings news to me, but Quaoar is news to me. I’m so behind the times I can’t remember whether Pluto is still considered a planet or not; my recollection is that it seems to go back and forth, although I still cling to the nine planets of my youth.
And now for a little Bee Gees:
Amd speaking of rings – and we were speaking of rings, weren’t we? – there’s also this:
New images of Saturn from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope herald the start of the planet’s “spoke season” surrounding its equinox, when enigmatic features appear across its rings. The cause of the spokes, as well as their seasonal variability, has yet to be fully explained by planetary scientists.
Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons, though because of Saturn’s much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years. Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun. The spokes disappear when it is near summer or winter solstice on Saturn. (When the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest latitude in the northern or southern hemisphere of a planet.) As the autumnal equinox of Saturn’s northern hemisphere on May 6, 2025, draws near, the spokes are expected to become increasingly prominent and observable…
Like Earth, Saturn is tilted on its axis and therefore has four seasons, though because of Saturn’s much larger orbit, each season lasts approximately seven Earth years. Equinox occurs when the rings are tilted edge-on to the Sun. The spokes disappear when it is near summer or winter solstice on Saturn. (When the Sun appears to reach either its highest or lowest latitude in the northern or southern hemisphere of a planet.) As the autumnal equinox of Saturn’s northern hemisphere on May 6, 2025, draws near, the spokes are expected to become increasingly prominent and observable.
The suspected culprit for the spokes is the planet’s variable magnetic field. Planetary magnetic fields interact with the solar wind, creating an electrically charged environment (on Earth, when those charged particles hit the atmosphere this is visible in the northern hemisphere as the aurora borealis, or northern lights). Scientists think that the smallest, dust-sized icy ring particles can become charged as well, which temporarily levitates those particles above the rest of the larger icy particles and boulders in the rings.
And speaking of the Bee Gees – we were speaking of the Bee Gees, weren’t we? – there’s also this:
[NOTE: See my previous post on the subject. See also this post for some of my previously-expressed thoughts on Hersh, from 2015.]
Here’s a piece about Hersh’s pipeline article on the destruction of the Nord pipeline:
All the information in Hersh’s post reportedly comes from a single unnamed source, who appears to have had direct access to every step of the planning and execution of this highly secretive operation.
When first reading through Hersh’s account of the events, the level of detail he provides could add credence to his story. Unfortunately for Hersh’s story, the high level of detail is also where the entire story begins to unravel and fall apart…
Already in the accounts of the early top-secret planning meetings between high level US military, CIA and Biden Administration officials, some of the proposals seemed more akin to Tom Clancy fan fiction than plausible suggestions. The US Air Force officials reportedly proposed “dropping bombs with delayed fuses that could be set off remotely”. One could write an entire post on the reasons why sounds entirely made up by someone with no real grasp of what that suggestion would actually technically entail.
During the supposed initial planning of this operation, from the way it is described by Hersh and his source, it appears that the CIA and entire interagency group were unaware of the fact that the Nord Stream pipelines were in fact pipelines.
I am unsure as to why all the intelligence officials in the initial planning meetings for the mission felt that the only possible way to sabotage the pipeline would be at the short section directly bordering Russia, instead of the large section in more favorable waters.
As the operation commences, Hersh states that Norway was chosen as the obvious partner. This entails bringing the Norwegian Navy and Secret Service in on the details of the mission, as they will play a key part in carrying out the operation. This is the same mission where Biden still holds secrecy as the top priority and does not want the “Gang of Eight” or members of Congress to catch wind of the plan for fear of leaks.
During his introduction of Norway, Hersh makes a very strange remark about NATO General Secretary Jens Stoltenberg implying that he has worked directly with the US intelligence community since the Vietnam War. Jens Stoltenberg was born March 16th 1959. The US involvement in the Vietnam War ended April 30th 1975, meaning Jens had just turned 16 when Saigon fell to the PAVN troops. I doubt Jens Stoltenberg was a US intelligence asset in his early teens.
As Hersh’s article begins to move into the detailed account of the supposed operation, this is where the factually incorrect statements that can be crosschecked begin to appear.
Much much much more at the link. It’s full of very detailed criticisms of Hersh’s story. Read it for yourself and make your own decision.
Of interest to me is why so many on the right accepted Hersh’s story at the outset so quickly and even avidly. The answer is rather simple, I think: people tend to believe what they already want to believe. The idea that the Biden administration did this is useful to many on the right who have been Putin-sympathetic and Ukraine-hostile, and of course it also fits in with the idea of Biden as villain (which he often is). The reasons to distrust Hersh and his anonymous sources are washed away in the rush towards confirmation bias.
Also, few people – and I including myself among the ignorant – have much understanding of the logistics of pipelines and what it would take to destroy one. Without that knowledge, articles like Hersh’s are difficult to critique in the practical sense and are more easily accepted.
The other day I thought I’d lost my favorite earrings. That is, one of the pair of my favorite earrings, which are these.
I’ve had those earrings for at least twenty years, maybe thirty or forty years. Hard to say exactly, but a really long time. I had lost them (or one of them) twice before and purchased another pair many many years ago, which meant that for several years I had three of the earrings – a pair and a spare.
Then I lost another singleton, and I still had a pair to wear. You may ask why I didn’t wear earring protectors on the tips of the hooks, to prevent that from happening? I could say that it’s because I find those things really hard to put on because they require inordinate manual dexterity in an area you can’t see. And that would be true. But it’s also because I just don’t think to do it and I’m usually in a hurry, so I guess you’d call that laziness.
A couple of days ago I was out for a while, and when I returned and started to take my earrings off, there was only one to remove. I searched and searched and searched, and concluded that the other had fallen out on the street. I resigned myself to buying another pair – after all, they’re still available. But right before bedtime I saw something odd and shiny dangling from the bottom of my down jacket, near where the zipper pull is. It looked like my earring, and it was hanging by the proverbial thread.
Literally.
It appeared to be floating in air about three quarters of an inch below the bottom on the jacket. But when I got up close, I saw that a looping thread had come loose and was acting as picture hanging wire for the earring. How had the earring survived in that precarious position, hanging on for dear life? I don’t know, but there it was, reunited with its fellow.
An encouraging sign, if you’re looking for signs. And I am; I am.
At 94. That’s a pretty good run.
My favorite Bachrach songs were the rhythmically-interesting ones he made for Dionne Warwick, who tossed them off with her characteristic light touch:
Well you might ask.
He experienced a bout of what’s being called “lightheadedness” on Wednesday, was hospitalized, and is still undergoing tests. A new stroke has been ruled out, and now they’re wondering about a seizure.
It may end up being nothing much. But if it is something, and if ultimately Fetterman has to be replaced, it’s interesting to note that the mechanism in Pennsylvania is a special election, not an appointment by the governor.
[CORRECTION: That link apparently is for state and local elections. For US senator, the governor makes an appointment till the next regular general election, which at the moment would be in November of 2024.]
Father and son:
[NOTE: Here’s a repeat of one of my earliest posts, written in my very first year of blogging: May, 2005. Back then I didn’t have all that many readers, so I thought I’d bring it out for another go-round.]
I know it’s not a real cheerer-upper, but I recently read Tolstoi’s The Death of Ivan Illych. Actually, you could say that I re-read it, since my first encounter with the novella was in a Russian literature course I took as a senior in college.
You may remember from Part 4A of “A mind is a difficult thing to change” that this was the year my boyfriend was fighting in Vietnam. Consequently, it was very hard for me to concentrate on anything. But that Russian lit course, and a history course I also took that year entitled ‘Russian Intellectual History,” grabbed me and caught my attention with tremendous force.
Both courses focused on works from the 19th century, which at the time I considered to be more or less ancient history. That’s why I was so amazed at the immediacy and relevance of both courses. Clearly, the Russians didn’t mess around when they wrote; they went for the jugular, the Big Issues, and they didn’t let go. The meaning of life, good vs. evil, that sort of thing. Perfect for a college student, and especially perfect for me at the time because I had no patience whatsoever with anything that didn’t deal with those Big Issues, since I was dealing with quite a few of them myself.
The history course was sobering. It turns out that those old Russians (Bakunin, Herzen, the Slavophiles are the names that now come to mind, although the details have become very fuzzy) had been wrestling mightily with questions such as what sort of society would be best for humankind, and how best to create it. Hmmm. In the 60s, that’s what we were doing, too.
So it seemed that we college students of the 60s were not nearly as unique as we thought we were, after all. Even I could see that, from reading these Russians. Their voices sounded suspiciously like those of the young firebrands who spoke at the local SDS meetings. Since I already knew the endpoint of the path those long-ago Russians had taken, often with great idealism and hope, this made me a lot more skeptical of the modern variety. This was actually the sort of thing that kept me a liberal rather than a leftist in those days.
But back to Ivan Ilych, which I also read that same year. Unlike the others, it’s not about politics, although Tolstoi can’t resist putting in a noble peasant (the only idealized character in the book), and mocking the bourgeousie. The story achieves greatness as a feat of psychological imagination, a relentless study of an “unexamined life.”
Tolstoi himself was an incredibly complex and contradictory man, a titanic figure, and one of the first literary superstars. He could be supremely idealistic and maddeningly cruel all at the same time (read about his treatment of his long-suffering wife, if you want to get an idea of the latter). But boy, could that guy write! Much of his writing in Ivan Illych has an immediacy and an almost brutal honesty, as well as a dry humor, that seems startlingly original and quite modern.
Here’s one of my favorite passages from the work; I recall it from college, and I noted it with a flash of appreciative recognition on my recent re-reading. Just as we students of the 60s had some trouble accepting that we resembled countless others who had come this way before us; so, also, does Ivan Illych have great difficulty giving up his belief in his own exceptionalism:
In the depth of his heart he knew he was dying, but not only was he not accustomed to the thought, he simply did not and could not grasp it. The syllogism he had learnt from Kiesewetter’s Logic: “Caius is a man, men are mortal, therefore Caius is mortal,” had always seemed to him correct as applied to Caius, but certainly not as applied to himself. That Caius — man in the abstract — was mortal, was perfectly correct, but he was not Caius, not an abstract man, but a creature quite, quite separate from all others. He had been little Vanya, with a mamma and a papa, with Mitya and Volodya, with the toys, a coachman and a nurse, afterwards with Katenka and with all the joys, griefs, and delights of childhood, boyhood, and youth. What did Caius know of the smell of that striped leather ball Vanya had been so fond of? Had Caius kissed his mother’s hand like that, and did the silk of her dress rustle so for Caius? Had he rioted like that at school when the pastry was bad? Had Caius been in love like that? Could Caius preside at a session as he did? “Caius really was mortal, and it was right for him to die; but for me, little Vanya, Ivan Ilych, with all my thoughts and emotions, it’s altogether a different matter. It cannot be that I ought to die. That would be too terrible.”
Such was his feeling.
But so many people are talking about this piece of his that I’m putting up the link.
As far as Hersh goes, I’m with what Mary McCarthy said about Lillian Hellman: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'”
The point is not that “and” and “the” are lies; they’re not, of course. And perhaps Hersh is telling the truth here. But he’s earned our distrust.