By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

[Book review of How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccine by Dr. Peter Gøtzsche (Skyhorse, 2025)]

Over 30 years of studying and writing about drug policy, and documenting the fascinating machinations of regulators, drug companies, medical experts, and corporate spokespeople, I have often found myself staring into the dark hole of epistemology, the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature, sources, and limits of knowledge. Basically, when we say we "know" something, what does that even mean?

If one were to ask me, "How trustworthy or complete is our knowledge base underpinning the effects of prescription drugs or vaccines?" you might find my answer impertinent:

"If you want the real truth about drugs, don't ask doctors - ask lawyers."

Which is to say, the medical world is only able to deliver us so much truth; to go deeper where true knowledge lies, you have to employ law and philosophy, in an arena where you can ask real questions and question answers.

The world of clinical trials and medical regulators can put on a good show, even though many of us can see through the performative regulation and performative ghost-managed "science" designed to reassure investors and bamboozle doctors while utterly failing to provide information that's meaningful to patients. Rarely does the medical system slip off its armour of hubris to seek out true epistemological gold. If you think you already have the real truth, why would you search for any further?

In many examples over the last few decades, I have noticed that the rigour of the courtroom remains one of the best tools we have to scrutinize the validity and reliability of clinical evidence, understand its limits, and challenge the authority of experts and regulators. Establishing knowledge about drug effects is not a popularity contest.

Most of us would agree that information on the likelihood of expected drug effects should be assessed by the cleanest, most unbiased, and rigorous studies humans can devise.

Epistemology reminds us that scientific knowledge is provisional and fallible. In the context of drugs, it means acknowledging that what we believe to be true - such as a drug's level of safety or efficacy - may change with new evidence or reinterpretation of existing data. This humility is vital to prevent dogmatic adherence to outdated or incomplete information. Sadly, it often takes a courtroom, high stakes, and tons of money to get under the layers of performative 'science.'

Those thoughts came to mind after reading a new book by the Danish physician and researcher, Dr. Peter Gøtzsche, a giant among skeptics whom I've nicknamed the Dauntless Dane. He's a fearless, relentless truth-seeker whose penetrating blue eyes seem to look straight into your soul when he speaks.

He's frequently accused of being arrogant and unrelenting, but one thing is clear: He's never one to back down from a fight, and he's usually on the right side. Not one to shy away from difficult truths and bow to industry (and legal) pressure, his intellectual heft has been aimed at tackling important public health questions, such as the value of mammography, or evaluating the harms of psychiatric drugs.

Over a decade ago, I became aware of his work in mammography and interviewed him for my book, Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. I interacted with him frequently when researching and writing a book on the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization he was fundamental in creating, and by whose hand he was tarnished and thrown to the dogs. (that saga is thoroughly covered in several of his recent books).

I have seen the Dauntless Dane many times take a battering in the ring and can attest that beneath his formidable exterior is a mind of relentless clarity and dedication to truth.

His newest book, How Merck and Drug Regulators Hid Serious Harms of the HPV Vaccines (Skyhorse, 2025), stands as a fierce indictment of...

By Bruce W. Davidson at Brownstone dot org.

With over 30,000 reader reviews on Amazon, Michael Crichton's bestselling sci-fi novel Jurassic Park (first published in 1990) has become a cultural sensation, spawning a series of successful movies, one of which is in cinemas in Japan as I write. Yet despite this dino-disaster movie popularity, most people have failed to heed the warning Crichton makes clear in many of his novels about the terrible dangers of modern technology - especially biotechnology and genetic engineering.

As Jurassic Park's Ian Malcolm puts it, "genetic power is far more potent than atomic power" and potentially even more destructive. That destructive power manifested itself on a global scale during the Covid disaster, precipitated both by an apparently bioengineered pathogen and the genetically engineered injection widely promoted to combat it.

For a long time, Crichton's novels and films depicted catastrophes caused by technology going berserk and beyond the control of its human creators. For instance, in his 1973 movie Westworld, Crichton's story depicted an interactive amusement park replicating an American Old West town, with humanoid robots. To the consternation of the programmers, the robots eventually escape their control and commit brutal murders of many customers in the park.

However, these destructive robots are simply artificial technological simulations. The mayhem in Crichton's tales gets even worse when the natural world is involved. In Crichton's view, the world of nature is far more complicated and uncontrollable, making the destructive consequences of human attempts at manipulation all but inevitable.

Crichton declares his stance about this explicitly in his introduction to the 2002 novel Prey, which is about biology-based nanotechnology. He explains, "The total system we call the biosphere is so complicated that we cannot know in advance the consequences of anything that we do," which therefore is a "powerful argument for caution."

Continuing in that vein, he makes an astonishing prediction: "Sometime in the twenty-first century, our self-deluded recklessness will collide with our growing technological power. One area where this will occur is in the meeting point of nanotechnology, biotechnology, and computer technology. What all three have in common is the ability to release self-replicating entities into the environment."

Gain-of-function viral bioengineering and self-replicating mRNA vaccines delivered by lipid nanoparticles have now made this forecast a reality.

Crichton's theme is not the usual sci-fi disaster trope about the human race misusing scientific advances for war or other evil ends. His point is that both highly complex technological systems and the biological world are inherently uncontrollable and tend toward chaotic breakdown, regardless of our attempts to keep them under control.

Crichton drives this point home in a number of ways. Many chapters in Jurassic Park are titled "Control" as a way to make his theme explicit. The people sitting in control centers on the dinosaur island only have an illusion of control, which disappears when the computer fails or unexpected things happen.

The entrepreneur who planned and runs the island, John Hammond, keeps reassuring people around him that there is "absolutely no problem on the island." In response, the mathematician Malcolm (obviously speaking for Crichton) calls Hammond a "great fool" for his overconfidence and calls the island "an accident waiting to happen." In one of his spontaneous mini-lectures, Malcolm debunks "the grand vision of science…the dream of total control."

Another problem looming large in the story is that of human ignorance about nature. Even the dinosaur experts do not really know much about them. Their knowledge is limited, based on skeletal remains and speculation. For example, the dinosaurs turn out to be much faster than expected, so the devices used to control them are too slow.

In addition, the paleo...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org.

On 23 August 2025, award-winning science journalist Robert Whitaker, founder of the evidence-based Mad in America website, published a very important article:

"Not even the unborn are safe from psychiatric harm: Medical organizations and the media dismiss the large body of research telling of fetal harm from exposure to antidepressants during pregnancy."

I summarize here Bob's detailed article, adding my own thoughts and explanations about the issues.

On July 21, the FDA convened a panel on antidepressants in pregnancy, with a focus on possible harms to the fetus from exposure to the drugs.

The panelists' brief presentations, and their plea for informed consent, did not sit well with medical organizations. They issued statements denouncing the panel as biased and misinformed; declared that the evidence showed that SSRIs and SNRIs are effective and safe treatments for prenatal depression; and claimed that the real concern was untreated depression. Major media echoed uncritically this flawed and erroneous expert consensus in their reporting on the panel.

The professional organizations betrayed the public's right to know. They were putting their guild interests - protecting their prescribing practices and belief in the efficacy and lack of harms of antidepressants - ahead of their duty to provide an honest basis for informed consent. As detailed below, they misled the media, and the media in turn misled the public, in both cases very seriously so.

One of the panelists, Michael Levin, concluded that since serotonin is important for embryonic development, "manipulating its use by cells with SSRIs is very, very likely to cause certain kinds of defects."

Animal experiments have proved him right. Fetal exposure to SSRIs leads to altered brain development, numerous risks to fetal health, and deficits in behavior after birth. At birth, fetal SSRI exposure in rodents is associated with low birth weight, persistent pulmonary hypertension, increased risk of cardiomyopathy, and increased postnatal mortality.

After birth, such exposure is associated with delayed motor development, reduced pain sensitivity, disrupted juvenile play, fear of new things, and a higher vulnerability of affective disorders (such as anhedonia-like behavior). These behaviors are regarded as signs of anxiety and depression in animals.

With the animal studies showing also an increased risk for miscarriage, pre-term birth, and congenital malformations, the first wave of studies in humans focused on these concerns, in addition to low birth weight and persistent pulmonary hypertension. This research produced an abundance of findings that the risk of such adverse events is elevated with fetal exposure to SSRIs in comparison to healthy controls.

A fair number of studies tell of how in utero exposure to SSRIs alters brain development in humans and lead to other harms. For example, a study by Kaiser Permanente of Northern California of 82,170 pregnant women showed that if the depression was treated with counseling, the risk of a pre-term delivery was reduced by 18%, whereas treatment with an antidepressant increased it by 31%. In both cases, there was a dose-response relationship.

Another harm is the neonatal abstinence syndrome, which is common, e.g. it occurred in 30% of 60 newborns exposed to SSRIs in utero. Researchers have published an extensive list of abstinence symptoms, which includes jitteriness, poor muscle tone, weak cry, abnormal crying, respiratory distress, seizure, abnormal behavior, sleep abnormalities, poor feeding, vomiting, uncoordinated sucking, and lethargy.

In a study using the World Health Organization's database for adverse drug effects, researchers classified 84% of the reported abstinence symptoms as serious.

The Doubt Industry at Work

The rodent studies, which were not confounded, clearly showed how fetal exposure to SSRIs regularly leads to maladaptive adult rodents. Correspondingly, in comparison wit...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

When Demetre Daskalakis resigned as Director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at CDC, his letter to leadership carried a tone of finality and moral conviction. "Enough is enough," he declared, explaining that Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s leadership had made it impossible for him to continue.

The letter has been praised as principled, but when read closely it is less a defense of science than a portrait of the very rhetorical habits that drove the public away from CDC in the first place: appeals to authority, catastrophic predictions, ad hominem attacks, and factual distortions.

Consider his charge that he can no longer serve in an environment that "treats CDC as a tool to generate policies and materials that do not reflect scientific reality and are designed to hurt rather than to improve the public's health."

This is a false dichotomy. It frames the choice as binary: either one accepts CDC's "scientific reality," or one is accused of designing policies to harm. Yet the last five years have shown what most Americans already know: what CDC has called "science" has often been neither transparent nor replicable, but political judgment dressed in a white coat.

He accuses the new HHS of narrative enforcement, when, in reality, CDC has become infamous for the same partly on his watch. Lockdowns, school closures, and vaccine mandates were not the inevitable products of neutral science - they were policy choices, frequently contradicted by the very data the CDC refused to release. Kennedy did not cause that collapse of trust. Power overreach and failed policy did.

Still, Daskalakis appeals to institutional sanctity: "unvetted and conflicted outside organizations seem to be the sources HHS use over the gold standard science of CDC." But the claim that CDC represents "gold standard science" rings hollow.

The agency's failures are well documented: contaminated Covid tests that delayed early detection, failure to use standard qRT-PCR to control for false positives, shifting guidance on masks that left the public whiplashed, withheld vaccine safety data buried in VAERS and VSD, and FOIA evasions that stonewalled independent scrutiny. To describe this record as "gold standard science" is an appeal to authority wholly unsupported by the evidence.

The catastrophism in his letter is striking but rings hollow. He warns that Kennedy's policies will "bring us to a pre-vaccine era where only the strong will survive and many if not all will suffer." He's pretending that Kennedy has said he wants no vaccines for anyone. This is a combined fallacy: false dichotomy and slippery slope. Questioning the safety of excipients, the timing, number, or necessity of vaccines does not condemn the country to Darwinian misery.

In fact, mortality from infectious diseases like measles, pertussis, and diphtheria had already declined long before mass vaccination, thanks to sanitation, nutrition, and reduced exposure to livestock reservoirs. The fact of loss of protection due to waning immunity is not found in his resignation.

Balanced debate about risks and benefits does not mean "returning to the dark ages." It means practicing science as it should be - open, skeptical, and transparent and will full accountability on scientific claims.

At points, the rhetoric becomes openly hostile. ACIP members are dismissed as "people of dubious intent and more dubious scientific rigor," and Kennedy himself is cast as an "authoritarian leader." These are ad hominem attacks, not arguments. They dismiss individuals rather than engage with data or reasoning.

I've worked with Secretary Kennedy long enough to know him as a sensitive, thoughtful, non-reactionary, considerate leader. He is so considerate it can at times nearly irk his underlings who would like to see him come to decisions faster. But that's because they have already made up their minds. Kennedy works arbitrarily and uses contrarianism -...

By Tomas Fürst at Brownstone dot org.

The 21st century is said to be the century of data. So, if Alice claims that Covid vaccines saved millions of lives but Bob says they killed millions, it should be really easy to decide who is right. Just get the data, right?

We obtained the data for the Czech Republic. I still can't believe we have it, but it is here. It is the official data obtained from a government agency through a FOIA request, and it is available for everyone to download and analyze. The data contains over 11 million rows - a single row for each Czech resident who was alive on January 1, 2020, or was born between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2022.

For each individual, the data row contains the year of birth, sex, exact date of death from any cause (if the individual died within the three studied years) and exact dates, types, and even batch numbers of all Covid vaccines given to that individual. The cause of death is, unfortunately, not provided. To the best of our knowledge, this is the only officially released dataset that links all-cause mortality to Covid vaccination status at the level of individuals on the scale of a whole country.

Before we return to Alice and Bob, I need to tell you a bit about the Czech Republic. Everything is much more homogeneous here than an American can imagine: There are no significant ethnic minorities here. We have universal, free, and very regulated health care, so pretty much everyone gets the same care (allowing for some corruption here and there).

From the communist times, we inherited the system of compulsory "personal citizen numbers" (state-provided IDs), so everyone is very well accounted for: It is impossible to be born, or die, without the state noticing immediately.

Consequently, the Czech official data is almost exactly correct (unlike e.g. the British Office of National Statistics, which somehow manages to lose a couple of million unvaccinated Brits). In other words, this Czech dataset is so precise, clean, homogeneous, and detailed that nothing comparable will ever be available in the US. So, if answers can be found in this type of data, they will be especially apparent and irrefutable in the Czech data.

It is not completely straightforward to compute all-cause mortality (ACM) in a particular age cohort according to vaccination status. One would be tempted to count the number of deaths in that cohort and divide it by the cohort size at a particular time. But this would be incorrect because people keep shifting among the vaccination cohorts, so that their sizes keep changing.

For example, consider Auntie Betty, who entered the study on January 1, 2020, as unvaccinated. She got her first dose on March 13, 2021, went on to get the second dose on April 13, 2021, and died 25 days later. Thus, she contributed 437 person-days to the unvaccinated cohort, 31 person-days to "dose 1 only" cohort, 25 person-days to "dose 1 and 2" cohort, and one death to "dose 1 and 2" cohort. This type of breakdown must be done for every age cohort and every individual.

Only then can the number of deaths in each vaccination cohort (further stratified by age) be divided by the number of person-days spent by individuals in that cohort to get the correct value of ACM.

Further technical details are written in the original paper, but we basically carried out the procedure explained above to compute the monthly ACM rates stratified by vaccination status, sex, and age. The ACM was then compared to the expected mortality based on pre-pandemic data.

The expected mortality also needs to be computed carefully. One might be tempted to simply compare the computed ACM to pre-pandemic mortality rates (I am afraid that most authors do just this). However, this would be wrong again. Many people died during the pandemic (for various reasons) and since they are not going to die again, mortality must be expected to decrease after the pandemic.

Thus, from the pre-pandemic data, we estimated the probability of d...

By Aaron Kheriaty at Brownstone dot org.

The following was originally published in Humanum and is reprinted here with permission.

Because we would all prefer to forget the Covid crisis and move on, the following may have already faded from our collective memory. Only a few years ago, Australia rounded up citizens exposed to Covid, including asymptomatic people, and shipped them involuntarily to detention facilities against their will. Videos of Australian quarantine centers made their way onto social media before tech censors, at the behest of governments, dutifully scrubbed them from the internet.

Many provincial governors in Australia abused their emergency powers: while not every Australian state chose full-throated authoritarianism, several of them did. Canada likewise built detention facilities for infected persons, and the state of New York fought an ongoing legal battle to do so.

Authoritarian measures during the Covid crisis went beyond forced detainment of suspected or actual cases.

The Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS) in Australia, which provides medical malpractice insurance to all the country's physicians, published twelve commandments for physicians on their website to avoid disciplinary "notifications" - an Orwellian euphemism for investigations overseen by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, the governing entity overseeing all physicians. The MIPS Commandment #9 instructed Australian doctors as follows:

Be very careful when using social media (even on your personal pages), when authoring papers or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.

Read that last sentence one more time: "evidence-based material" refers to peer-reviewed scientific papers or other sources of credible medical information. So, if Australian doctors mention findings of a published study which are not consistent with "public health messaging" - i.e., the approved views of the public health bureaucrats in power - these physicians could potentially lose their ability to practice medicine.

Notice that this applies also to physicians "authoring papers," meaning that if a doctor conducts research and his findings contradict "public health messaging," he'd better think twice before publishing the results.

Likewise, in the US, the Federation of State Medical Boards (FSMB), an authority on medical licensure and physician discipline, passed a policy in May 2022 on medical misinformation and disinformation that guides all state medical boards and the nation's physicians they license. My home state of California took up the FSMB's suggestion to codify these recommendations in law with Assembly Bill 2098.

I traveled to Sacramento to testify against this legislation when it was debated in the State Senate.

The law would empower the state medical board to discipline physicians - including revoking their medical licenses - for spreading "misinformation," defined in the law as statements that contradict the current scientific consensus. Undermining its own central claims, the text of AB 2098 made three statements about Covid that were already outdated by the time I testified, because science constantly evolves. Science relies on evidence, not on consensus, which is why I argued in my testimony:

A physician with a gag order is not a physician you can trust. Advances in science and medicine occur when doctors and scientists challenge conventional thinking or settled opinion. Good science is characterized by conjecture and refutation, lively deliberation, fierce debate, and openness to new data. Thus, fixating any consensus as "unassailable" will stifle medical progress. Frontline physicians challenging conventional thinking played a key role in advancing knowledge of...

By Debbie Lerman at Brownstone dot org.

mRNA Vaccines DID NOT UNDERGO a legally regulated drug approval or manufacturing process

It is important to recognize that an EUA is not part of the development pathway; it is an entirely separate entity that is used only during emergency situations and is not part of the drug approval process. (2009 Institute of Medicine of the National Academies publication, p. 28)

All mRNA products on the market and in development today became available as a result of the declared Covid pandemic, through legal pathways intended for CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) emergencies - in other words, war or terror incidents involving weapons of mass destruction (WMD).

These WMD-related laws include Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) and blanket legal indemnity granted through the PREP Act.

The manufacturing agreements for the Covid mRNA vaccines were military Other Transaction Agreements (OTA) signed by the Pentagon. This type of "other than contract" agreement is intended to supply the military with cutting-edge technology while bypassing pesky regulations and red tape. It is not intended for civilian use.

No Regulatory Oversight = No Scientifically Valid Claims

These laws and contractual instruments do not require any regulatory oversight for the development, manufacture, distribution, or administration of countermeasures covered under the EUA and PREP Act. Any oversight activities, clinical investigations, or reporting of trial methods/practices/results are entirely voluntary on the part of the developers/manufacturers.

In other words, any trials, inspections, experiments, or other activities carried out on these products do not have to comply with any safety standards, laws, or regulations that apply to the development of non-emergency medical products.

This is not speculation or interpretation. It is the letter of the law. These articles will walk you through the convoluted legalese:

What is EUA?

What is the PREP Act?

According to these laws and the OTA contracts, the developers/manufacturers of the countermeasures are solely responsible for conducting whatever trials or experiments they choose, under whatever conditions they want, with whatever reporting standards they decide to follow. There is no enforceable legal or regulatory oversight on any of these activities.

THEREFORE, any claims about the products made by the manufacturers are NOT based on clinical trials conducted according to regulatory guidelines or scientific standards and CANNOT be the basis for regulatory approval under non-EUA drug development frameworks.

This is stated very clearly in the quote at the beginning of this article, which I will repeat here. (It was brought to light by Katherine Watt, who has done the most thorough and extensive research on these and related laws):

It is important to recognize that an EUA is not part of the development pathway; it is an entirely separate entity that is used only during emergency situations and is not part of the drug approval process. (2009 Institute of Medicine of the National Academies publication, p. 28)

Here's how the FDA and CDC explain what EUA means, compared to other "Access Mechanisms" for medical products:

Here's what this table tells us about EUA:

1. The process of granting EUA is not likely to generate any information about a product's effectiveness.

2. The process of granting EUA is not designed to provide evidence of safety or effectiveness, but safety signals might be identified.

3. It is unlikely that, once a product is granted EUA and administered to some patients, any useful information will be obtained to benefit any future patients.

4. There is no systematic data collection on effectiveness or safety with EUA, and no data is published in medical journals as part of the regulatory approval process.

5. No informed consent is required, but patients who "volunteer" to take the product must be told they can refuse and that the product is unapproved/avail...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

In June 2025, the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) vaccine advisory panel met for the first time since being overhauled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Kennedy had promised that his new appointees would demand full transparency and scrutinise the evidence before making recommendations.

He charged the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) with ending what he described as the "rubber stamp" culture of the old guard.

One of its first major votes was whether to endorse Merck's new RSV monoclonal antibody for babies, nearly identical to Sanofi's version approved in 2023.

The CDC assured the committee there were "no safety concerns."

That assurance helped the vote pass 5-2, and newly appointed CDC Director Susan Monarez soon signed off on the recommendation, paving the way for a nationwide rollout this autumn and winter in the US.

But further analysis suggests the CDC's presentation may have buried evidence of harm - particularly neurological risks like seizures - raising doubts over whether ACIP members had the full picture before casting their votes.

Early Warnings in the Trials

Professor Retsef Levi, who cast one of the two dissenting votes, noticed a troubling pattern across four major clinical trials - Sanofi's MEDLEY, MELODY, HARMONIE, and Merck's CLEVER.

In each, there was a consistent imbalance in "nervous system" serious adverse events, most often including seizures, in the treatment groups compared to controls.

"Should we not be concerned about these potential safety signals?" Levi asked during the meeting.

Merck's Dr. Anushua Sinha downplayed the concerns, saying there had been "extensive analysis of the events" and that Merck's investigators had deemed that none of the nervous system harms were related to its product.

In short, ACIP was asked to take Merck's word for it.

Levi acknowledged the numbers in the clinical trials were small and indicated that his decision would hinge on the post-marketing surveillance data.

The Post-Marketing Data That Was Shown

That post-marketing data came from the CDC's Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) system, tracking safety reports for nirsevimab, Sanofi's RSV monoclonal antibody already on the market and nearly identical to clesrovimab, the drug under review.

The presentation was delivered by Matthew Daley, a paediatrician at Kaiser Permanente Colorado - part of an organisation that has received funding from Sanofi, the manufacturer of nirsevimab.

When seizure outcomes - Levi's primary concern - appeared on screen, the slide stayed up for barely a minute.

The results were split into two groups based on the age when babies received the injection (red box in graphic):

Babies aged 0 to 37 days were 3.5 times more likely to have a seizure after injection but this was not statistically significant.

Babies aged 38 days to under 8 months were 4.38 times more likely, but this was also not statistically significant.

Daley concluded that the CDC's data showed "no significant increased risk."

The Post-Marketing Analysis That Was NOT Shown

What Daley did not present is crucial.

When the two age groups are combined and analysed using a meta-analysis, babies were nearly four times more likely to have a seizure shortly after the injection (3.93, 95% CI 1.21-12.79).

This result is statistically significant (p=0.02), making it unlikely to be a chance finding - a fact confirmed by three independent experts.

By splitting the cases into two groups, the signal of harm effectively vanished. ACIP members were never shown the pooled result.

The choice to divide the data at 37 days is puzzling.

There is no clear clinical or biological reason for that cutoff - it looks entirely arbitrary, fueling suspicion it was chosen after the fact, once the results were known.

Other Study Design Limitations

The way the CDC set up its analysis introduced another flaw.

It used a self-controlled risk interval design, counting seizures only ...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

On a flight back to South Africa from attending a conference in South Korea recently, I watched the gripping biographical film, Lee (2023; directed by Ellen Kuras), with Kate Winslet in the title role of Lee Miller, intrepid Vogue magazine photographer, who photographed some of the most harrowing scenes of the Second World War, and has been hailed for her courage to do so under life-threatening circumstances.

Cinema such as this fulfils an indispensable role in bringing to the public the stories of heroines and heroes who might otherwise only be remembered by a few people.

Today, under circumstances which arguably surpass even the two World Wars of the 20 century as far as potential mortality figures and prolonged suffering are concerned, there are several, if not many, men and women who deserve a similar cinematic celebration of their crucial role in combatting the unscrupulous, ongoing attempts by a coterie of neo-fascist globalists, to commit democide, mostly by stealth and deception.

One of them is surely the German-American lawyer, Dr Reiner Fuellmich (sometimes spelled 'Füllmich'), who has been languishing in a German prison on trumped-up charges since October 2023, after being arrested and abducted at an embassy in Mexico by agents of the German state when he and his wife were in the process of renewing their passports.

His 'crime?' Speaking truth to power about the globalist attempt to engineer the collapse of society globally in order to 'build back better' (yeah, right…) since the advent of the 'plandemic' in 2020.

As long ago as 2020, Dr Füllmich declared that 'Those responsible for the Corona fraud scandal should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity and charged with civil damages,' and 'At the political level, everything must be done to ensure that no one ever again has such power to deceive humanity or manipulate us with their corrupt agendas.' He also stated fearlessly that:

The coronavirus hysteria is the greatest crime in human history, millions of lives ruined for something that more closely resembles the common cold. People all over the world are now waking up and protesting the unnecessary, draconian coronavirus restrictions.

It is impossible to give an exhaustive account of all the activities of this indefatigable lawyer who, (initially) together with colleagues comprising the Corona Investigative Committee, set out to expose the lies and crimes of those driving the process set in motion at least as early as with the 2008 global financial crisis.

A good place to start, if one does not know about Fuellmich's courage and resolute attempts to expose the globalists, is the series of 'Grand Jury - The Court of Public Opinion' sessions (recorded on video) from early 2022, when he brought together a number of authorities in their respective fields to speak on the different aspects of what, as mentioned above, he has dubbed 'the greatest crime in human history.'

On Day One of this series Dr Fuellmich started the proceedings by making a number of 'opening statements,' which offer a summary of the reasons for these globally accessible sessions, and on Day Eight he made closing statements after all the evidence had been presented by the various speakers who are authorities in their respective disciplines.

It is worth listening to all these presentations to be able to grasp the full extent of the work that Fuellmich, together with his colleagues, has done on behalf of the rest of humanity.

The most recent statement made by Dr Fuellmich from the prison where he is being held is this one, where he reports on his latest court appearance in front of a judge who made the ridiculous, judicially contradictory demand that anyone representing Dr Fuellmich in court would have to be in agreement with the German government to begin with.

From all the statements (such as this one) that Dr Fuellmich has issued from prison, where he has been kept in solitary confinement, it is very clear...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

So much of what is considered science today is really just art. It's a subjective interpretation of the meaning of data. Data does not speak for itself. It does not tell you cause and effect. It provides no predictive map for the future. It's often incorrect or merely a proximate rendering of the full reality. Even the best and most experienced experts and invested stakeholders cannot overcome this problem.

The implications of this insight are vast.

Let's start with an easy example.

Did you see Gladiator II? It had many of the same actors as the first movie that swept the awards and captivated audiences worldwide. It had bloody fight scenes. It had great music. It had creepy relationships, wicked power plays, feats of derring-do, displays of all kinds of cruelty and heroics, plus CGI of a recreated Roman Colosseum, this time with the floor flooded with water for a sea battle.

And yet the movie left audiences with not much. The experience was overall evaporative and the message elusive. The magic was missing. That special story arc of drama that swept us up in the first was strangely absent. At some point halfway through - and speaking as someone who loved the first - it struck me that I could walk away and not really care how it ended.

This often happens with sequels. It's not just because the directors and producers see an easy buck by roping in audiences to throw down for tickets, hoping to relive the experience of the first. Sequels are often a pale copy of the first because the producers, scriptwriters, and directors are themselves not entirely sure why the first one was great.

The movie makers can workshop this all day and for weeks. They can gather focus groups. They can talk to experts. They can pay the actors the big bucks. Everyone will have a theory, and they can try to recreate and reboot the thing as best they can. But at some point, no matter how hard they try and with many millions on the line, they leave the magical creative world of art and enter into the mundane task of recreation. With all their efforts, the drama is drained away.

No one knows for sure when or how that happens.

This example comes to mind in the midst of the continued meltdown over the logo change at Cracker Barrel. It seems obvious in retrospect that eliminating Uncle Herschel (a real person who was the uncle of the founder) and the barrel was a bad idea. It comes at a time of rising nostalgia and deep public suspicion of major corporations and their perceived attack on basic values.

Maybe it is not entirely clear why this one logo change would have ignited populist fury in normal times but when you consider the loss of trust in everything, this struck people as deeply offensive.

We learn from deeper reports on the decision that it was not arbitrary. The new CEO Julie Felss Masino, hired in 2023, was tasked with bringing back customers and the stock price after it was slammed during Covid lockdowns. That's a huge challenge for anyone, especially given the roaring inflation that followed the money printing of the period.

Julie reached into her communications undergraduate degree and her Master's of Business Administration and found a possible answer. The goal is to attract a younger generation. She had heard from her social set many times that the union of the word "cracker" with a white guy in overalls has racist overtones. Maybe it refers to cracking the whip. Maybe it is a signal that only whites are allowed. Maybe the overalls suggest it is only for farmers or aging nostalgists.

In any case, it seemed obvious to her that an update was in order.

Further, the executive team brought in focus groups. They did customer surveys. They assembled all the empirical evidence they could find. In the end, they discerned that they would win more with a change than they would lose from those who would miss the old sign. This intuition was further backed by a plan for interior changes. Down with all the bric-...