Volume 80, no. 2
Having a precise definition of terms is essential in mathematics, science, and law. There are undefined terms, but these are few and must be obvious and agreed upon by everyone: in geometry, point, line, plane, and set. They serve as the foundation for everything else. Lack of agreement on definitions means chaos.
Precursors to George Orwell’s novel 1984 and his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” were novels by mathematics lecturer Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking Glass (1871), in which logic is reversed.
As Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.’’
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.” (See AAPS News, October 2016.)
Recall how the decision to uphold ObamaCare was based on the tortured definition of “tax.” (See AAPS News, August 2012.)
As Orwell wrote, political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Examples of today’s distorted language: racism is called “anti-racism”; authority-dictated is called “evidence-based”; abortion is called “reproductive health care”; forced quotas (only if favoring women or “people of color”) are “fairness”; truthful but counter-narrative information is “disinformation”; 25% of Americans declining a shot is “widespread vaccine refusal”; censorship is “online safety”; got shot outside hospital is “unvaccinated.”
Some words (such as “man” and “woman”) are undefinable in some circumstances but evidently not in others (as we need more women in high office, and it is not clear whether a “trans-woman” would fulfill the quota).
What Is Extreme?
An “extreme” view (these days generally applied only to the Right) is viewed as evil or dangerous. But what does it mean? On a Gaussian (normal) distribution, extreme might be two or more standard deviations on either side of the mean—or 2.5% of the population above and 2.5% of the population below. So how can a politician call a view (such as favoring Donald Trump) “extreme” if it is held by nearly half of the population?
But as population views shift, what used to be mainstream is held by a much smaller proportion of the population. The “Overton window” is said to have shifted. For example, 60% of Americans opposed same-sex marriage 15 years ago; now 60% are in favor (http://tinyurl.com/mr2ynkfp). All Victorians would probably be considered extreme today.
What Is “Right” and “Left”?
Equating these terms to “conservative” vs. “progressive” is a handy short-hand—but what exactly is being conserved? When the Soviet Union fell, were Communists the conservatives?
“Conservative, Inc.” avoids “social” (cultural, ethical) issues and focuses on policies favoring corporate profits and foreign interventionism. Establishment Republicans and much of the upper middle class support it. This does not fit the definition of “Right” in Gerry Smedinghoff’s scholarly delineation (AAPS News, January 2022, and https://aapsonline.org/leftvsright.pdf). (Smedinghoff relies extensively on the book Leftism by Erik Ritter von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1909-1999), an Austrian monarchist, who admired the American system and despised democracy and egalitarianism.)
As acknowledged by Saul Alinsky, the first Leftist—the first rebel against established authority—was Lucifer. As it is impossible to create something that defies natural laws, attempts to do so will fall apart; one can defy God only through destruction. The rebels’ ambition? James Kirk in the original Star Trek quoted Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”
Amazon Prime is heavily promoting an animated video series, #HazbinHotel, portraying angels of heaven as bad guys and insurrectionists Satan and his minions as good guys.
What Is an Insurrection?
The Merriam-Webster definition is “an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.” Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, being invoked to try to deny Donald Trump the right to run for office, was clearly meant to bar officials of the Confederacy. But does it apply to a demonstration meant to delay certification of an allegedly fraudulent election? Does assuring election integrity overturn—or sustain—an established government? And what about “color revolutions” (e.g. in Ukraine) instigated by the U.S. to bring about “regime change” (http://tinyurl.com/yvba829t)?
What Is Truth?
This question was asked by the most famous judge in history, Pontius Pilate, of the man who claimed that He was Truth. Pilate had the man executed, despite believing him innocent, in order to avert an insurrection. The prevailing Roman authority was not truth, nor did it endure forever.
Is truth perhaps fiction? World Economic Forum advisor Yuval Noah Harari said in a TED talk that human rights are a fiction—like heaven and God, they are a fictional story that we invented (http://tinyurl.com/3xw7mncy).
Liberal or Conservative?
Now known as the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke in his day was considered a proponent of liberalism—that is, carefully defining and limiting the power of the state. In his 1790 book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, he argued that it is impossible to wipe the slate of society clean without destroying society. “With astonishing prescience, Burke predicted the Terror and he predicted that order would ultimately be restored by a military commander,” writes John Leake (tinyurl.com/b6ks9866).
A Spiritual Experience
In 1931, while in Hungary, Kuehnelt-Leddihn stated that he had a supernatural experience. While conversing with a friend, the two men saw Satan appear before them: “Slowly, in that moment, to both of us, Satan appeared as Satan appears in primitive books. Naked, reddish, horns, long tongue, trident, and we both exploded laughing…. As I later found out, in apparitions of the Devil, this is a natural reaction, that you laugh hysterically.”
St. Thomas More wrote: “The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.”
In debates with ideologues, who have no sense of humor and no sense of humility but rather a mood of unremitting, serious self-righteousness, Dwight Longenecker writes: “In the end the only weapon was a joke” (http://tinyurl.com/2vxs59fb).
Deep State Censorship
The Interim Staff Report by the House Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government (http://tinyurl.com/3hhbf4ka) was released on Nov 6, 2023. Titled “The weaponization of ‘disinformation’ pseudo-experts and bureaucrats: how the federal government partnered with universities to censor Americans’ political speech,” the bombshell report laid out the role of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) and other astroturf organizations contracted (that means paid for) by the Department of Homeland Security to censor Americans.
Dr. Robert Malone explains how the U.S. government might not directly interfere with your First Amendment rights, or meddle in an election or with your medical freedoms, but it will contract the job out to private firms (tinyurl.com/fk8ashth).
The House committee also released a document (Jira Tickets) that lists some of those censored in chronological order and what their alleged “crimes” were. On Jun 11, 2021, the list abruptly changed its focus from “election misinformation” to “vaccine misinformation” and renamed these efforts the Virality project.
Dr. Malone’s sin was to claim in a Fox interview that the risks of the COVID vaccine outweigh the benefits in teenagers and young adults. He is now tagged as “general anti-vaccination” and “right-wing” (ibid.).
X X X
“Mutual distrust (as Aristotle said) is the key to all the forms of tyrannical rule. The greater the distrust, the more total the tyranny. The totalitarian movement-state strives to break up every sort of loyalty among individuals, from class solidarity to friendship and family love, and then to focus undifferentiated loyalty on the Party or the leader of the Party.”
Michael Walzer, 1984 Revisited (1983)
COVID Vaccine Updates
· ‘Goldmine to Landfill.’ EU countries have dumped more than 200 million COVID jabs (€4 billion). Poland and Hungary are refusing deliveries, and Pfizer is suing them for nonpayment (http://tinyurl.com/kpadw2d8).
· Japanese Professors Unveil Side Effects. In a Jan 11 press conference, the Vaccine Study Group stated: “Thousands of papers have reported side effects after vaccination, affecting every possible aspect of human pathology—from ophthalmology to psychiatry…. This kind of reporting on drug side effects or the like is unprecedented” (http://tinyurl.com/3jc8uce8).
· Congressional Hearing. A hearing on long-term harms of the COVID-19 shots was held in the House of Representatives on Jan 12, featuring Dr. Peter McCullough, Dr. Ryan Cole, and Dr. Kirk Milhoan (http://tinyurl.com/265dasem).
Unlimited Liberalism
In Cass Sunstein’s 34 tenets of liberalism, the last is the most perilous for the tradition: the lack of a clear limiting principle. None of the tenets mention the the moral and anthropological status of human beings, or the enduring source of morality in Western civilization: the Ten Commandments and the Sermon on the Mount—not personal agency (tinyurl.com/4fbz2hz2).
Overton Window Shifts for AMA
Plotting the donor scores of physicians who had made political contributions from 1980–2020, Kevin Bass, Ph.D., shows a stark change. In 1980, the share of physicians on the right side was substantially larger than on the left, with a small proportion rated “very left.” By 2020, there was a very large peak at “very left,” a small one at “very right,” and remarkably few in between (http://tinyurl.com/3c7k9sjy).
In 2022, the New Yorker described the political transformation of the AMA. At the June 2019 meeting of the House of Delegates, the medical-student delegation decided to try to change the organization’s long-standing explicit opposition to “single-payer health care.” To allow delegates to support the measure without facing backlash, proponents asked for a secret ballot. The measure failed by only 38 votes (47% “aye” to 53% “no”). [The AMA reconsidered the measure in November 2023 and remains for the moment in favor of a “pluralistic” system.]
“The profession stands at a crossroads—between a burgeoning progressivism driven in part by newfound diversity, on the one hand, and its age-old desire for greater economic security, on the other” (http://tinyurl.com/236xz6xc).
AAPS Calendar
Sep 18-21, 2024. 81st Annual Meeting, San Antonio, TX.
ACTION OF THE MONTH
Scholarships are available to help medical students and residents attend the AAPS 81st Annual Meeting, Sept 18-21, 2024, in San Antonio. Details at https://aapsonline.org/2024am.
Conscience Rights Attacked
Planned Parenthood is celebrating the Biden regime’s rollback of conscience rights protection for medical professionals who refuse to participate in aborting unborn babies and transgender surgeries. Planned Parenthood CEO Alexis McGill Johnson referred to abortion as “health care services” and religious freedom protections as “refusal of care rules.”
The Biden Dept. of HHS is rescinding portions of a 2019 Trump Administration rule, which has not taken effect, related to enforcement of statutory conscience rights.
Roger Severino, now vice president of domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation and former director of the HHS Office for Civil Rights (OCR), said that the Biden regime “announced the disbanding of the Conscience and Religious Freedom Division within the Office for Civil Rights [and] abandoned the enforcement in litigation of a multitude of cases that were brought by OCR under Trump.” The new final rule guts the regulation that “simply placed conscience enforcement at the same level as every other civil right.”
The statutory right remains, but Conscience Project director Andrea Picciotti-Bayer said the new rule could make it difficult to get complaints heard and clouds hospitals’ obligations. She is concerned that clinicians and institutions of faith may be driven out of business (http://tinyurl.com/2p77u7c4).
Court Orders V-safe Data Released
In Freedom Coalition of Doctors for Choice v. CDC, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas ordered the release of the free-text data collected by V-safe for COVID-19 vaccines. By the time the CDC suddenly and unexpectedly pulled the plug on the V-safe program last May, it had collected 7.8 million text entries. It released the “check the box” part of the data in September 2022 to ICAN—but only after a lawsuit and a court order. The easy-to-check boxes concerned things like pain at the injection site. Serious adverse effects like myocarditis or stroke would be in the hard-to-search free-text section, Jeff Childers points out. The CDC will have one year to release all the data.
The judge wrote: “Rapid vaccination of a huge percentage of the American population is nothing short of astounding, and the endeavor continues. As of May 11, 2023, the CDC reports that more than 81% of Americans have received at least one dose, including nearly 32 million children. Understandably, there is substantial public interest in the data that supported, and continues to support, the government’s promotion of the COVID-19 vaccines and boosters” (http://tinyurl.com/mtm3dfef).
Tip of the Month: Beware of sting operations by the federal government based on secret telephone recordings. Nebraska congressman Jeff Fortenberry was secretly recorded by an FBI informant who told him that some donations to his campaign were probably made by foreigners. Without informing Fortenberry of this recording, FBI agents showed up nine months later by surprise at his farm to ask him whether he had taken foreign campaign contributions, and he said not that he was aware of. For that he was prosecuted for saying something different to an FBI agent from what an FBI informant said to him on the secretly recorded call. To avoid this entrapment, consider responding to surprise visits by federal agents by telling them to put all their questions in writing and that you may decline to answer them. The safest approach: don’t answer at all. There is no obligation to do so. The government knew who donated to Fortenberry, so why did he answer? In this era of weaponized government, every answer is a potential basis for prosecution.
What Is ‘Far-Right’?
Objecting to the stabbing of your nation’s schoolgirls is “far right,” according to Ireland’s police commissioner Drew Harris, writes Mark Steyn. Harris is investigating martial-arts champion Conor McGregor, who tweeted about the stabbathon saying that “Ireland is at war,” for “hate speech.”
The Netherlands is trying to make a convicted criminal out of “far right” politician Geert Wilders, the most popular politician in the Netherlands, for “group insult” of Islam. Trump might be called the American Geert. “Until Biden came along, no other settled western democracy had been as zealous as the Netherlands in prosecuting opposition politicians for their policy platforms.” The globalists’ standard operating procedure for high-profile dissidents may become like the Biden regime’s: “The leader of Party A will unleash the resources of the world’s most lavishly funded Deep State on the leader of Party B and persuade anyone around him to cop a plea on crimes they didn’t commit—mainly because those crimes don’t actually exist” (tinyurl.com/2c2t6ch8).
‘Race Neutrality’ Perpetuates Inequity
In cases brought by Students for Fair Admissions, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down affirmative-action policies at the University of North Carolina and Harvard. Lawrence O. Gostin, J.D., et al. write that these decisions “threaten progress in medicine and health,” because “stark differences in opportunities and outcomes persist, fueled by a 400-year history of systemic racism.” True equity would mean the same shares of each racial group are poor, unemployed, lacking a high-school diploma, or living in a crowded setting—or diagnosed with kidney failure. Black people living in counties with more Black primary care physicians have lower mortality rates. [Q.E.D.] Diversity “saves lives,” wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in dissent (JAMA 9/19/23).
For nearly 50 years, affirmative action has been justified as a “compelling state interest,” even if disproportionate representation was not due to racial discrimination (JAMA 10/10/23).
Dr. Hartsuch Sues over Prior Restraint of Speech
Emergency physician and former Iowa State Senator David Hartsuch, M.D., is suing the Iowa State Medical Board for injuring patients and doctors by “prior restraint” of use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for treatment of COVID-19. Prior restraint is judicial suppression of material that would be published or broadcast, on the grounds that it is libelous or harmful. In U.S. law, the First Amendment severely limits the ability of the government and its state actors (i.e., medical and pharmacy boards) to do this, writes Peter McCullough, M.D. In an interview with Dr. McCullough, Dr. Hartsuch discusses his treatment of severe cases (http://tinyurl.com/yj9en3fu). The boards have not disputed any facts but are trying to evade judicial review.
Correspondence
Medicare Final Rule. The 2024 Medicare Physician Fee Schedule (http://tinyurl.com/3pstsnbf) has page after page of analysis and summaries and lobbying efforts. I wonder how many billions of dollars are wasted on physicians “gaming” the system to obtain more money, and CMS “gaming” the system to pay less? Like a casino, the house (CMS) always wins.
Lawrence R. Huntoon, M.D., Ph.D., Lake View, NY
Rat Farms. French colonials installed a modern sewer system in the French quarter of Hanoi. A second-order effect was to create a rat paradise, free of predators and full of food. When bubonic plague was detected, authorities offered a bounty for every dead rat, or later, rat tail. Then they noticed tail-less rats and found private-sector rat farms to maximize bounty collections. Modern iterations of perverse incentives and unintended consequences include higher education, “healthcare,” intelligence gathering, and national defense.
Charles Hugh Smith, http://tinyurl.com/54c3xb6h
Judgment Is a Moral Responsibility. Do not allow the Left to cow you into abstaining from judging. Exposing the immorality of its positions is the most effective way to uproot it from our society. However, judgment lacking moral foundation is empty. That is the only form of judgment the Left is capable of. Empty judgment is, at best, sanctimonious bullying—at worst, unjust usurpation of liberty through force. We need to rid our society of this cancer and replace it with just judgment founded on morals.
Mark McDonald, M.D., http://tinyurl.com/2dak3s5b
Insanity. A proposed Maine bill would authorize a court to “take temporary jurisdiction because a child has been unable to obtain gender-affirming…care.” Physicians might be suspended for not agreeing with a child about gender. Or for refusing to help take a child from a parent who will not permit “gender-affirming care” —because such a child is allegedly being abused. The explosion of gender dysphoria is a social contagion spread by social media, and will be a disaster in a few years.
Douglas Farrago, M.D., http://tinyurl.com/mdf55rw7
Transparency. Thanks to the efforts of the Public Health and Medical Professionals for Transparency initiative, the FDA was forced to release the regulatory data for the Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna vaccines approved on Aug 23, 2021. Anyone can access the documents; however, for Cominarty 16+ alone, there are 2,639 documents (http://tinyurl.com/msrzmcv5). To do a credible job is a massive amount of work, difficult, dangerous, and painstaking, and would need funding from an entity without a tie to pharma, decision-makers, pharmacovigilators, or groups who are on opposite sides of the ideological debate over vaccines. This is why we declined to be interviewed by a major TV station about the vaccines’ performance.
Tom Jefferson and Carl Heneghan, tinyurl.com/2cdujn3p
Mandating ‘Fairness.’ Inequality is a strict and absolute necessity to get the world to work. Remove Inequality by force, which is the only way it can be removed, to satisfy the cravings for Fairness, and the End must come. We will DIE. Nothing will survive Equality. With DIE hiring, people are put into position because of their demographics, to increase Equality and not Quality. This is doomed to failure. One fellow estimates “There are about 1.2 million whites in the U.S. with an IQ above 140, about 225,000 Asians, but only about 4,000 blacks” (http://tinyurl.com/4x56f8n6). Even given the usual caveats about intelligence testing, it is clear there is not enough Diversity to go around. Thus the unqualified must be hired, and because there are only finite positions, the qualified must be passed over. We will DIE. But not without some laughs. When women reach a certain proportion of leadership, they demand everybody plays nice. So we have Scientific American whining about manly astronomy writing, with collisions and blowing up of mighty galactic objects.
William Briggs, Ph.D., http://tinyurl.com/5dbjcx9y
WHO Scam. WHO can make recommendations, but its authority is only a treaty, which is only as effective as the good will of the parties. No court can enforce a treaty. They ought to call international law Kabuki theater for diplomats and politicians. The scam is that a WHO rule can be a cover excuse for mandates by national authorities—“we had no choice but to comply.” As Bruce Pardy writes, “The WHO proposals will protect power from accountability…. The new regime will not override sovereignty, but that is small comfort. Sovereignty provides no protection from your own authoritarian state” (http://tinyurl.com/2p8jdk6z).
John Dale Dunn, M.D., J.D., Brownwood, TX
Downfall. In his book The Defeat of the West, Emmanuel Todd writes that a key reason for the disintegration of the West is the death of Protestantism, which imposed universal literacy to access Scripture, the work ethic, and strong morality. “Now that we are free, en masse, from metaphysical beliefs…, we live the experience of the void…. a multitude of mimetic midgets.”
John Day, M.D., http://tinyurl.com/3kctr7p6
