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“We are headed into darker times. War could return to Iran at any moment.” – Max Blumenthal, founder of The Grayzone news site

“We are in extremely dangerous times. You need to know the truth but you act on it at your own peril.” – Judge Andrew Napolitano, host of the podcast “Judging Freedom”

Both of these dire predictions were made at an event called Icarus Fest sponsored by The Grayzone and featuring its courageous journalists. Nonetheless, there was hope in the 150 or so dissident voices united to support peace and end US funding for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Attendees traveled to the Williams Center Rutherford, New Jersey from all over the US including Seattle for a day of discussion and Q&A. The audience was also united in its admiration for the brave correspondents who spoke. Later that evening comedian, broadcaster, podcaster and fellow dissident voice for peace Jimmy Dore performed. His stand-up act proved by speaking truth to power and fiercely defending the First Amendment, he is carrying on the legacy of the late, great George Carlin.

With Judge Napolitano’s presence, The Grayzone event was an opportunity for the populist progressive/socialist “left” and populist libertarian/constitutionist “right” to bypass divide and rule strategy of the oligarchs to unite for peace and diplomacy in opposition to Zionist, British and global elitist control over US foreign policy. These destructive forces are waging wars attempting to prop up the failing empire and the biased, controlled media manufacturing consent with its pro-war propaganda. A week earlier, Judge Napolitano moderated a panel featuring Blumenthal and his wife, journalist Anya Parampil, at the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity “Blueprint for Peace” conference held near, as Blumenthal calls it, “the corridor of death” lined with the paid conspirators of the military industrial complex.

Event topics were Ukraine, NATO and the War for Eurasia; Greater Israel: Where Does It End?; and American Empire in the Age of Trump. Thaddeus Russell moderated the panel on Ukraine comprised of Wyatt Reed and Kit Klarenberg. Grayzone journalists have been enduring “horrendous” circumstances attempting to cover the war in Donbas. Dissent is treated as treason, and accordingly, these reporters have been de-banked, arrested, censored, and accused of being terrorists or agents for Iran, Russia, and/or China. Americans are mostly ignorant about the war run by elites for the empire, Russell stated, and US foreign policy has been ruled by an irrational fear of Russia dating back for centuries. Interestingly, he pointed out Russia supported the American Revolution. The concept of total world dominance is a British idea and Russia is standing in the way of complete conquest by these globalists. It is not for us to decide how Russia handles the LBGTQ+ issue, one speaker noted.

Greater Israel panel moderator Sabby Sabs said the hatred of Palestinians is embedded in the culture in Israel. Israeli policy is putting Jews at risk with its celebration of genocide, Katie Halper said, and called those denying the murder of Palestinian children “morally bankrupt, foul ghouls. “ Being anti-Zionist is a key to her identity as a Jew, she noted, but anti-Zionist Jews are dismissed as self-hating. Journalists attempting to report the atrocities in Gaza have been killed. Blumenthal astutely noted Zionism is a messianic secular movement enforced by people who don’t believe in God yet they believe God gave them the land. No change in US policy is possible until AIPAC registers as an agent for a foreign government. Jeffrey Loffredo related details about his arrest and interrogation by Israel, how he was given emasculating pink sandals to wear and consigned to solitary confinement, and how he endured his regular requirement to subject himself to interrogation by the Israeli military.

During the panel on empire, Judge Napolitano, who described himself as an “antiwar and anti-empire fanatic” asked why no viable antiwar movement exists in America. There is currently no draft, responded Christian Parenti. Conscription, along with the evening network news’ exposure of the atrocities as well as the bodies of US soldiers in flag-draped coffins, ended public support for the Vietnam War. Aaron Mate blamed former President Obama who told protesters to go home; the DNC which concocted the Russiagate fable after the 2016 presidential election, and Hillary Clinton who refused to criticize the neoliberals. “A sub-culture of total intolerance spirals down to irrelevant issues,” he noted, while critical issues like war are submerged. Anya Parampil, citing the Founding Fathers’ non-interventionist perspective, explained why and how Trump is attempting to topple the government in Venezuela. Parenti talked about the unreality of those trying to keep the empire going and the repression of free speech at US universities. Napolitano denounced the arrests of law firm attorneys and the existence of 850 overseas US military bases.

Jimmy Dore passionately ranted in support of free speech and against censorship violating the First Amendment with laws to persecute and censor critics of US foreign policy or Israel. He appeals to his audience to understand they are being manipulated to fight each other when they should unite against the oligarchs to oppose the wars. “We live in an age of spectatorship, not spiritualism,” he said, describing himself as a “lazy Catholic” who has had personal experiences that have given him a knowing he will spiritually live forever.

Grayzone event videos are here.

Related links:

https://thegrayzone.com

https://judgenap.com

https://jimmydore.com

The post Grayzone Event for Peace appeared first on LewRockwell.

My wife, Ellen, and I have danced in many places: in Newark’s Rutgers’ Student Center and law school basement parties and the chic, but short-lived, Club America; also at New York City’s early-80s Danceteria, mid-80s Lincoln Center outdoor Summer Swing and the Nightingale dive bar on the Lower East Side. On our honeymoon, we got down—literally—in a very dark, subterranean Costa Rican concept disco called El Tunel Del Tiempo (The Time Tunnel). Two years later, we danced under moonlight and palm trees alongside a Vieques, Puerto Rico oceanfront patio/bar. We also carried on at the painfully-loud Rodeo Bar New Year’s Eve 1990 party with Ellen carrying a bellyful of a baby who became a rock drummer.

Decades later, kids raised, we Salsa-ed to an almost deafening ten-person band with a horn section in a packed, small Medellin club called Son Havana. Perhaps most memorably, we bopped until we almost dropped in some unfancy, yet exotic places in Nicaragua. On our first trip there, we did so in a big, circular, open-air, but crowded, corrugated zinc-roofed pavilion surrounded by a 20-foot-high chain-link fence in an urban shanty town at Masaya’s edge. In the mountain city of Matagalpa during a subsequent visit, the club had a dance floor aside a ceiba tree left in place and allowed to grow through a gap cut into another metal roof. It rained through that gap the night we were there, so we danced some of the time in an indoor/outdoor downpour.

We’ve often stuck out like sore thumbs, for decades by complexion and more recently, by age as well. We have some great memories from these nights: clapping or howling along with people in crowded, loud, dark places often to jumpy, unfamiliar tunes in Spanish with some incongruous stuff like a Donna Summer medley thrown in, as other partiers in these crowded, dark venues surrounded us and signaled us to bust moves inside their human circle. These experiences aren’t stories with a quirky plot or a funny ending. Rather, in addition to the affection shared between Ellen and I, there was, with the larger group, shared motion, exuberance, mutual affinity and some amusing visuals and comments.

Are we great dancers? Not really, though one night in a large, waterfront Gloucester, Mass bar with a funky jazz band, of my friends labeled me “the best, straight, white, male dancer” he had seen. In life, one’s happiness often depends on who one is compared, or compares oneself, to. Despite all of TV’s trivia, singing and dancing contests, not every human activity needs to be a competition. When one goes all-in, what was once fun can turn into work.

Ellen and I have a basic sense of rhythm, coordination, and a core, cross-genre repertoire and we’re comfortable moving to music. Ellen’s a better dance follower than I’m a leader. As in life, she knows what I’m trying to communicate. As some—mostly women—say, women have to do everything men do, only backward and in heels. Though I can skate backward in circles in ice hockey skates and hardly any women can. So take that!

I feel the same way about dance as my brother’s artist friend, whom I mentioned last week, felt about the vaxxes: it’s something I’m supposed to do. Not as, with the vaxx, a concession to social pressure or some misplaced sense of duty, but instead, to celebrate my love for Ellen, community with unknown others and gratefulness for having vital and flexible bodies with unspecified, yet inevitable expiration dates.

—

This past Friday evening, Ellen and I went to a county/arts group-sponsored outdoor “Salsa by the Bay” in Perth Amboy, New Jersey’s hillside Bayview Park. Perth Amboy is a densely populated, de-industrialized city of 55,000. Most of its old houses have small, if any, yards. A belt of highways and former factories—now warehouses—set its western and northern edges. Raritan Bay makes up the city’s eastern and southern boundaries. Perth Amboy’s location isolates it from the many other cheek-to-jowl cities and towns in the New York Metropolitan Area. It’s alone in a crowd.

Friday had the best weather of any day/night this summer. Before the eight-person band began to play, we sat on a park bench on a small hill, basked in a light breeze and gazed out at the wide bay and the sailboats in the marina in the foreground below as the sun dropped beyond the hill horizon behind us. Once you get a few miles from the Turnpike, New Jersey isn’t as ugly as they say.

The band played from nearly sunset until after dark. We danced nearly the whole hour-and-a-half. We were rusty and didn’t remember the full array of moves we had developed while, during peak Scamdemic, we did Saturday Night Salsa in our living room.

While those nights were pleasing, it’s much better to be among a crowd of people who are actively on the floor. The women dress up and make-up to varying degrees. Some of them arrive in groups and happily dance with each other until men approach them and ask them to. Men don’t dance with each other. At least in the places we go to.

Being in a public dance setting clearly displays the pleasing and sometimes amusing physical and social differences between men and women. Life is more real and enjoyable when we don’t pretend that women and men are the same.

On Friday night, about 200 people, 80% Latin, 10% Black and 10% White, stepped the Salsa in close proximity on the impromptu floor of stone pavers about 100 feet in front of, and 30 feet in elevation above, the gazebo/bandstand, which had the bay behind it. Though no one was drinking, everyone was smiling. There were even a few kids under five bouncing to the music at their parents’ knees. No one wore a mask.

I hadn’t been in a public dance setting since before the Scamdemic began. Seeing so much motion and joy was beautiful. It sucked that such gatherings were forbidden during a contrived crisis.

—

At any decent party, as on Friday, many people pair off in close proximity to other couples. On that evening, I thought briefly, and with derisive detachment, of all of the microbes being exchanged as dancers held hands, wrapped their arms around and breathed on each other and those nearby. No one seemed to be thinking about germs. Microbes have always been here. Before 2020, clubgoers never hid from these. They didn’t even consider them.

It’s not clear when or why the public largely, though belatedly, abandoned its Covophobia. It’s not as if The Virus—whatever it was or wasn’t—has disappeared. Some people are still said to be dying from it. I learned the day before Salsa Night that one of my relatives, vaxxed to the max, has just “gotten Covid” for at least the third time. In 2021, this same person stormed out of a room I had entered without a mask. She didn’t return until after I went home an hour later. Warning to re-entrants: I might’ve recklessly left some germs behind. Though somehow, I never got sick.

Any remotely healthy person could have safely danced at close range and/or with strangers any time during the Scamdemic. Dancing is a fun, low-cost Covid survival test. If you could move your body on two feet for ten minutes, The Virus couldn’t kill you. If you could dance even a little, you were far better protected from SARS-CoV-2 than was the most isolated, masked, vaxxed and boosted person who couldn’t. This had, by mid-March, 2020, already been proven by research. Why didn’t officials “Follow The Science?”

Since 2020, some people have aged out of salsa-bility, as Ellen and I soon might. During the past five years, as they were told to hide from others and wait for The Virus to be “crushed,” and their joints or organs worsened from age or inactivity, many aging but still-breathing individuals missed their last chances to do various enjoyable, physical and mental health-building activities like this. No one at any age should have forgone fun because the government and media effected a politically and economically-driven Scam. Life is short: ain’t nobody got time to waste.

—

I’m not sure about this but I suspect that some of the males and females at Friday’s Salsa by the Bay either danced with people they knew, or with strangers, and went home and put their bodies even more closely together than they did while the band had blared and its members repeatedly and characteristically sang “Bai-le! Bai-le!”

Such unions often occur in the post-dance darkness. I speak from some experience here. When they do, even more microbes are exchanged. Oh, the humanity!

On this germy theme, some officials who demanded that everyone quarantine themselves were caught having extramarital affairs during the lockdowns. New York City’s “Covid Czar” admitted that he participated in orgies. To civilians who didn’t already know that officials were playing them, such arrogant conduct should have underscored how phony the Covid response was.

If disease statistics are ever again to be believed, STD rates dipped for a few months in March-June 2020. Some attributed this to decreased testing. Regardless, thereafter, these rates continued their years of increase, especially among gay males. STD rates among that demographic far outnumber those among the general populace.

Public health officials selectively tolerate health risk, based on political correctness. If public health officials really want to crush infectious diseases, why don’t they police-tape the doors on gay bars?

They might say that doing so wouldn’t stop such interaction; sex seekers, gay or straight, will just default to hook-up websites. Though just as Covid dissidents’ messages were censored as “misinformation,” public health officials could block internet hook-up sites “to advance the public interest.” Why don’t they apply, to STDs, the core Covid Era principle that any intervention is “worth it, if it just saves one life?”

For that matter, how did a government that not only endorses but profits from sales of alcohol, tobacco and now, marijuana, justify locking down, masking, testing and injecting an entire society when only the old and baseline unhealthy were at any— and microscopic—risk?

Those who still think the Covid interventions were driven by the public health concerns of earnest experts should wake up and realize that they fell for a massive lie.

Read the Whole Article

The post Dance Floors and Coronamania appeared first on LewRockwell.

I continue to believe that it is more important to watch what Donald Trump does rather than focus on what he says. However, his remarks during the meeting of his cabinet earlier this week regarding negotiations to end the war in Ukraine are alarming and merit attention. When asked about Sergei Lavrov’s comment that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky is not legitimate, Donald Trump dismissed the statement, saying:

It doesn’t matter what they say. Everybody’s posturing. It’s all bullshit, okay. Everybody’s posturing.

He characterized Lavrov’s remarks—and the broader Kremlin rhetoric on Zelensky’s legitimacy—as meaningless showmanship, emphasizing that such claims should not obstruct peace efforts. Trump did not directly defend Zelensky, but instead focused on downplaying the significance of Russia’s statements and suggested that “everyone is just putting on a show” in ongoing negotiations.

I believe that Trump genuinely believes this, and he is dangerously mistaken. President Putin and Foreign Minister Lavrov are not posturing when they try to explain to clueless westerners that they do not believe that Zelensky is the legitimate President of Ukraine. While Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not explicitly “cancel” the presidential election, as Ukrainian law prohibits holding elections during martial law, which has been in effect since Russia’s full-scale invasion on February 24, 2022, the reality from the Russian perspective is that a negotiated agreement with Zelensky could easily be overturned or rejected once Ukraine holds the required election.

The scheduled presidential election, expected in March or April 2024, was automatically postponed due to this legal restriction under Article 19 of Ukraine’s “On the Legal Regime of Martial Law,” which bans presidential, parliamentary, and local elections during martial law. Martial law has been extended in 90-day intervals by the Verkhovna Rada (Ukraine’s parliament), with the latest extension as of July 2025 lasting until November 5, 2025.

Based on Zelensky’s multiple public remarks since his last meeting with Trump at the White House, it is clear that he is completely disinterested in reaching a peace agreement with Russia.

Stephen Bryen has just published a new piece on his Substack, and it provides an explanation for Zelensky’s recalcitrance… NATO is going to attack Russia. Steve writes:

While Putin has flown off to meet with his two buddies, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un, in China on an unprecedented four day jaunt, NATO, with full US backing, is stepping up its effort to hand the Russian army a major defeat and, following that, introducing NATO troops to “stabilize” Ukraine.

What is the evidence? First and very noticeable is the US decision to ship 3,350 missiles to Ukraine, ostensibly to be paid for (someday?) by the Europeans (which ones is not defined). These are known as Extended Range Attack Munitions (ERAM), a type of air launched cruise missile missile. The Aviationist reports that “Ukrainian Air Force’s F-16s, Mirage 2000s and its fleet of Russian-origin MiG-29s, Su-25s and Su-27s would be able to operate it. This new weapon would be an addition to the AASM Hammer and GBU-39 SDB already employed by Ukrainian fighters.”

According to open source intelligence, ERAMs have a range of 250 miles. However, that is the range once launched by an aircraft. Washington says it opposes Ukrainian missile attacks on Russian territory, and while it is restricting the use of long range HIMARS, it is not restricting the use of ERAM. Reportedly ERAM carried a 500 lb. warhead, far larger than any Ukrainian UAV and more than double any of the different HIMARS missiles (M31 Utility Warhead, ATACMS warhead). It may be that ERAMs can be fielded with cluster munitions, although much about the ERAM is uncertain.

Ignore what Trump says, watch what he does. Deploying ERAMs is not a gesture of peace or de-escalation. While it is possible that this action was taken without Trump’s knowledge, now that the information is public he has not countermanded the order.

Steve goes on in his article (I encourage you to read it in its entirety) to highlight the faulty assumptions that NATO planners and leaders are making:

NATO has understood Russia’s use of North Korean troops as an admission that Russia faces manpower shortages and instability in the Russian army, and that Russia is taking heavy casualties in the Ukraine war. NATO may be reading Putin’s statements that he has no intention of attacking Europe now or in future as an admission that he cannot attack Europe with an army that is too small and one that has been broken by the Ukraine war. Part of the pushback can be found in the Saratoga Foundation report, “A Systems View of Russia’s Early Failure in Ukraine.”

Now Russian sources are reporting two developments that indicate that a new offensive will soon materialize, heavily supported by NATO, and aimed at Crimea.

Those sources say that the US and its NATO partners have significantly increased overhead intelligence gathering preparing for the coming attack.

Once again we have Western leaders — both military and political — wrongly interpreting Russia’s execution of a special military operation as a sign of weakness. The belief that Russia is suffering “manpower shortages and instability” is beyond ridiculous. During the course of the last 42 months, Russia has doubled the size of its army and is now conducting multiple offensive operations in Zaporhyzhia, Dniepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Kharkiv and Sumy. Even if we accept as true the false Western claims about Russia suffering massive casualties, the fact remains that even with such losse Russia has 1.3 million men in uniform and carrying arms. Instead of being “broken,” the Russian army has enhanced its capabilities and developed new techniques, especially with the use of drones, that far exceed anything NATO is capable of doing.

Besides conducting the ground war, Russia continues to enjoy a lopsided advantage in the use of missiles and drones. It has carried out massive strikes on missile production facilities and other key logistic nodes in the past week, and shows no sign of weakness on that front.

A NATO-backed attack on Crimea will put increased pressure on President Putin to shift from the Special Military Operation to full war footing. NATO’s inability to supply Ukraine with something as simple as artillery shells is just one indicator of NATO’s impotence if it decides to up the ante with Russia.

This article was originally published on Sonar21.

The post Donald Trump Still Does Not Understand the Russia’s Position Regarding Ukraine appeared first on LewRockwell.

Ever since I first encountered the medical field, something struck me as off about their relentless focus on blood pressure. Before long, I began to notice that the blood pressures the same acquaintances (e.g., relatives or friends) shared with me varied immensely. As I was pondering this, a long-time spiritual teacher shared with me their belief that the relentless focus on blood pressure was due to it being much easier to measure than blood perfusion (healthy blood flow).

Then, as I became more acquainted with the medical field, I began to notice a consistent pattern—whenever a drug existed that could treat a number or statistic, as the years went by, the acceptable number kept on being narrowed, making more and more people eligible to take the drugs that treated the number.

For example, as I discussed recently, once the statins drugs entered the market (which unlike their predecessors, could effectively lower cholesterol), the acceptable blood cholesterol levels kept on being lowered, and before long almost everyone was told they would die from a heart attack unless they started a statin—despite statins have an almost non-existing mortality benefit (e.g., taking them for 5 years at best makes you live 3-4 days longer) and causing (often severe) side effects for roughly 20% of users. Broadly recommending these drugs hence appears unconscionable, but as I showed in that article, these unjustifiable guidelines were a product of clever pharmaceutical marketing and targeted bribery of public officials.

In this article, I will attempt to show how something similar happened in the field of blood pressure. As this is an immensely controversial position to take (e.g., measuring and documenting blood pressure is one of the most routine procedures during a medical visit), I’ve done my best to clearly present the evidence for this perspective so you can make your own determination.

Conventional Blood Pressure Perspectives

Since blood vessels are elastic structures filled with fluid, that fluid holds them under pressure. Blood pressure, in turn, is typically measured by determining how much external force is needed to exceed the artery’s pressure and compress it so that blood no longer flows through it. Low blood pressure (hypotension) is a problem because it prevents blood from reaching the areas where it’s needed (e.g., orthostatic hypotension or POTS describes a common situation where people become lightheaded as they stand up due to insufficient blood being pushed into the brain), but in most cases, medicine instead focuses on the consequences of high blood pressure. Within the existing model, those consequences are:

•Weakened blood vessels become more likely to break open and leak as higher blood pressure pushes against them. This for instance is why Emergency Rooms aggressively lower the blood pressure of patients who show up with symptoms of “hypertensive emergency” such as a severe headache and a significantly elevated blood pressure. Likewise, whenever a critical blood vessel ruptures (e.g., the aorta or one in the brain), once the bleed has been confirmed, the first step in managing it is to lower the patient’s blood pressure (so less blood leaks out) after which they are sent to surgery.

•Excessive pressure on the arteries strains and damages them, causing the lining of the vessels to become damaged and gradually develop atherosclerosis.

•Excessive blood pressure damages the internal organs (termed end-organ damage), leading to premature failure and early death (e.g., from a heart attack or kidney failure).

Because of this, high blood pressure is viewed as one of the greatest preventable causes of cardiovascular disease and thus a chief focus of all medical visits is ensuring a patient achieves a sufficiently lowered blood pressure.

Unfortunately—that chain of logic has quite a few gaps in it.

Variable Blood Pressure

Blood pressure (BP) is immensely variable. For example, pressures at the periphery (where BP is typically measured), which when studied is found to vary by around 14 points. This thus frequently leads to individuals being erroneously diagnosed with hypertension and put on blood pressure lowering medications despite having normal blood pressures (leading to those medications making them hypotensive).

This phenomenon in fact is so common (constituting 15-30% of hypertension diagnoses) that it is often referred to as “White Coat Hypertension,” a name derived from the fact stress is one of the things that commonly elevates blood pressure, and since visiting a doctor is a stressful experience, many patients hence have temporarily elevated blood pressures there. Because of this, the guidelines suggest having patients who are diagnosed with hypertension have multiple measurements to confirm it (e.g., with home blood pressure monitoring), but unfortunately, this often does not happen.

Note: one common source of error when measuring blood pressure is the wrong sized cuff being used for the patient. Another is that patients frequently have significantly different blood pressures in each arm. This helps to explain why it is commonly estimated that 25% of those diagnosed with hypertension do not have it.

Likewise, there is a surprisingly poor correlation between peripheral blood pressure and the central blood pressure inside the aorta. For example, one large study found a significant difference between the blood pressure within the aorta and the arm, and that the aorta pressure had a much stronger correlation to the likelihood of cardiovascular disease.
Note: different classes of blood pressure medications have very different effects on central versus peripheral blood pressure.

What Affects Blood Pressure?

If fluid at a set pressure tries to move through a tube, as the tube shrinks, the pressure it creates (e.g., on the walls of the tube) will increase, while if the tube enlarges, the pressure it exerts will decrease. The body in turn continually controls where blood in the body goes by changing the heart rate and fully or partially constricting the arteries, allowing it to shunt blood to where it is most needed (e.g., by dilating arteries in that area).

Blood pressure is thus a product of two factors: the amount of blood in the arteries and the constriction or relaxation of the arteries containing it.

Note: since arterial BP is greater than venous BP, it’s what’s measured externally (as veins compress long before arteries do and only arterial blood has a signature pulsatile wave created by the heartbeat).

Since each beat of the heart pushes blood into the arteries and hence increases the pressure within them, two different blood pressure values exist—the baseline pressure (known as the diastolic pressure) and the pressure when the heart contracts (known as systolic pressure). The blood pressure values you see (e.g., 140/90), represent that maximum and minimum.

Note: one reason why this stretching is important is because when the vessels contract back to their normal size once the systolic pressure fades, that recoil pushes blood further along into the circulation.

Blood pressures lowering medications hence work by loosening the arterial walls, reducing the total blood in circulation, or weakening the contraction of the heart (or through some combination of those effects).

What Causes High Blood Pressure?

Most cases of high blood pressure (90-95% of them) are what is known as “essential hypertension” or “primary hypertension” which is a fancy (and rarely questioned) way of saying “elevated blood pressure without a known cause.” More importantly, the fact there is no known cause for most cases of elevated blood pressure has been a widespread belief in medicine for decades. Typically, the only cause we hear about is “eating salt,” despite the fact that the most detailed review of this subject found that drastic salt reduction typically results in less than a 1% reduction in blood pressure.

For the remaining 5-10% (known as secondary hypertension), recognized causes include reduced blood flow to the kidneys (which sets off a signal to raise the blood pressure because the kidney believes there isn’t enough blood perfusion), sleep apnea, or having a rare tumor which dumps large amounts of adrenaline into the blood (which constricts blood vessels and increases the heart rate).

Note: a kidney (especially the left) being in the wrong position (which is quite common) can functionally compress the renal artery. However, until an actual stenosis (narrowing) of the artery, this can be quite difficult to identify with conventional measurements. Additionally, as I showed in a recent article on the importance of sleep, poor sleep is immensely damaging to cardiovascular health and those effects extended to blood pressure (e.g., one study found a single night of partial sleep deprivation raised SBP [systolic blood pressure] by 6, another found SBP raised by 6 and DBP by 3 while a third study found it raised SBP 4.5 and DBP by 2.6 alongside using fMRI imaging to show it also impaired the brain’s control of blood vessel function).

Since the cause of hypertension isn’t known, medicine thus focuses on specific risk factors that are known to be associated with it such as being over 65, having diabetes, eating too much salt, insomnia, obesity, not exercising, stress, being an alcoholic or other people in your family having high blood pressure. Keep these risk factors in mind as you read the next section.

Note: of these causes, I and many of my colleagues believe one of the most under-appreciated ones is anxiety, as frequently, effectively treating anxiety (which is discussed further here) can resolve a case of high blood pressure, which would otherwise receive (often indefinite) pharmacologic treatment.

Read the Whole Article

The post Unmasking The Great Blood Pressure Scam appeared first on LewRockwell.

Three recent peer-reviewed studies, including two published this week, provide “IRREFUTABLE Grounds for Immediate Market Withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA Injections,” according to a leading expert on the dangers of mRNA vaccines.

“Two MAJOR papers were just published in the past 48 hours, building directly on our recent landmark study,” wrote Nicolas Hulscher, an epidemiologist and administrator at the McCullough Foundation.

“Together, the international evidence has converged: mRNA injections are unsafe, ineffective, contaminated, and in violation of international law,” Hulscher said.

One study published this week, “COVID-19 Injections: Harms and Damages, a Non-Exhaustive Conclusion,” found that the injections contain engineered elements in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention. The study found that the COVID-19 jabs had damaging effects on recipients’ cardiovascular, reproductive, and immune systems:

• Cardiovascular system: strong links to myocarditis, heart attacks, strokes, and arrhythmias
• Reproductive system: high rates of pregnancy loss, stillbirths, and neonatal deaths
• Immune system: collapse marked by viral reactivation, autoimmune disease, and cancer acceleration

The second study published this week, “Regulatory and Safety Assessment of COVID-19 mRNA-LNP Genetic Vaccines in Japan: Evidence for Revocation of Approval and Market Withdrawal,” noted that 103 million people in that country were injected without any nationwide safety investigation or long-term monitoring.

Researchers concluded that the COVID-19 shots were “misclassified as ‘vaccines’  rather than gene therapy products, allowing the product to bypass stricter regulatory standards.

“Critical studies (were) never conducted,” according to the study authors, who documented legal and ethical breaches, including concealment of harms, suppression of mortality data, and approvals granted without clinical trials. 

The two new studies confirm a report earlier this year produced by Hulscher, Dr. Mary Talley Bowden, and Dr. Peter McCullough, published in the journal Science, Public Health Policy and the Law, that claimed risks from COVID-19 vaccines “far outweigh theoretical benefits.”

“COVID-19 vaccination campaigns around the globe have failed to meet fundamental standards of safety and efficacy, leading to mounting evidence of significant harm,” the researchers explained.

More than 81,000 physicians, scientists, researchers, and concerned citizens, 240 elected government officials, 17 professional public health and physician organizations have demanded withdrawal of the COVID-19 vaccines from the market.

The total number of COVID-19 vaccine deaths reported to VAERS-adjusted deaths exceeds 589,000 in the U.S. and 17 million around the globe.

“Together, these three studies converge on the same conclusion: Immediate global withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA injections is essential to prevent further loss of life,” Hulscher declared on X.

“Now is the time to stand on the right side of history — or be remembered by future generations as complicit in one of the greatest tragedies of our time,” he added.

This article was originally published on Lifesite News.

The post New Studies Provide ‘Irrefutable’ Grounds for Immediate Withdrawal of COVID-19 mRNA Shots appeared first on LewRockwell.

A 23 year old transgender freak fired into a church killing two children and wounding many. The concern expressed by Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis?  “The shooting should not be an excuse for people to direct hate at our trans community.”

The unexamined question is why did random shootings of strangers appear for the first time in 1966? There was no such thing in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. At Georgia Tech students had guns in their dorm rooms and fraternity houses. At UVa students had guns and whiskey in their dorm rooms. No one was shot. Today guns are prohibited on campuses, and there are constant shootings that have spread to work places, shopping malls, and churches.

Clearly, something has changed to cause behavior, which my generation never would have considered, to become increasingly common. What is the cause?

Is it the endless number of vaccinations? The antidepressants needed? My generation did not have the vaccinations and antidepressants and did not need them. Is it the distancing from God caused by endless liberal attacks on Christianity? Is it the milieu of hatred created by endless denunciations? Is it the lack of restraint and self-control that modern child raising produces?

It doesn’t help to understand what has happened to blame guns. Karl Marx would scoff at the reification of inanimate objects by liberals. As long as causes, such as gun control, use the shootings for their agenda, we will not obtain insight into what has produced a 23 year old person who can fire away at children in a church.

The replacement of moral and responsible behavior with irrational murder for no visible purpose desperately needs explanation. Has Satan taken over, thereby removing morality as a constraint on imperfect humans?

This is an interesting question. Is it a question of pills, vaccinations, broken homes, the 2nd Amendment, or any other stock explanation, or are we, weakened as we are by the decline in religious belief, faced with the triumph of evil over good?

Watching the world’s indifference to the Israeli extermination of the Palestinian people, has Satan decided that now is his time?

Has Satan made a good decision? Is there any moral strength anywhere in the world capable of resisting Evil?

Where is the effort to abolish nuclear weapons which can abolish Earth?

Is the traditional alliance of Israel with Satan taking us into The End Times?

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“Today, many people use psychology as a new form of mysticism: as a substitute for reason, cognition and objectivity, as an escape from the responsibility of moral judgment, both in the role of judge and judged. Psychologizing is condemning or excusing specific individuals on the grounds of their psychological problems, real or invented, in the absence of, or contrary to, factual evidence.” – Ayn Rand, The Psychology of Psychologizing, 1971.

The professional cognoscenti class can’t seem to figure out Donald Trump’s “personality”, as if every world and domestic conflict is implausibly a consequence of Trump’s psychological dynamics, bombastic speech outbursts on “X” and his frequent use of the working-class word for horse dung. Even the highly educated commentariat at libertarian Judge Andrew Napolitano’s “Judging Freedom”online forum have joined the fashionable trend of attributing their perception of Trump’s moral failings to his personality. What follows is an attempt at understanding Trump, not a defense of Trump. (Disclosure: I did not vote for Trump in 2024).

Trump’s Knowledge Class Psychologizing Critics

One of the most recent attempts to explain Trump comes from former British intelligence officer and diplomat, Alastair Crooke who asserts Trump is not a self-made man but has a magnetic “Jungian” personality. By “Jungian” (from psychologist Carl Jung) Crooke means motivated by mythical archetypes, but not in the same authoritarian mold of Hitler or bombastic Mussolini. But no one is self-made, least of all presidents. The most un-self-made US president was the mentally normal university president Woodrow Wilson who gained office by an election rigged by the Bank of London, proceeded to abolish constitutional government by the people, established the Federal Reserve and forced isolationist America into the unnecessary WW1, entirely fought to keep the Germans from aligning with Russia against Britain (see Gerry Docherty, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, 2014 and John Maxwell Hamilton, Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda, 2024).

Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar, apparently echoing his BRIC’s sentiments, says Trump is an ‘incendiary’ self-absorbed all-powerful god-like Roman emperor who is a moral failure (BRICS, Brazil, Russia, India, China new world order).

Eminent former US Army officer and conservative Douglas MacGregor asserts Trump is impulsive and is not the person we voted for and is controlled by the oligarchs he surrounded himself with as well as London and New York banks. MacGregor asserts that what Trump promised during the 2024 election is all myth. Moreover, MacGregor says Trump is deluded to think that he must sell 1,000 US cruise missiles to Ukraine to attack civilian targets in cities in Russia to bring an end to the war (i.e., war crimes). But Trump can only go so far in gainsaying powerful senator Lindsey Graham, Congress and the Military Industrial Complex.  MacGregor says Trump is coerced by Britain’s delusions of grandeur that they can exert the same power they had as a Neo-Colonial Empire pre-1945.  But Trump rudely left Europe’s top leaders standing in a hallway for 45 minutes outside his office before he held court over the future of NATO with them. Was it theater?

Nuclear weapons inspector Scott Ritter says Trump is a pretend tough-guy bluffer and a narcissistic Neocon war hawk who continues to indirectly fund the Ukraine War despite his campaign promises to end it.  Ritter sees Trump as Netanyahu’s lackey, but Netanyahu secretly takes orders from the Bank of London. Israel is not a self-made sovereign nation but was formed by London banks to control and plunder oil-producing states in the Middle East. Ritter says Trump doesn’t understand Russia, but does Ritter understand Israel is synthetic and weaponized?  Israel is like the scapegoat child in a dysfunctional family who must do the “acting out” (behave badly) for European family elites and banks. Ritter is aware, but doesn’t mention, that should Trump refuse to countenance Britain he may end up like the other US presidents removed by British banks: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and JFK (witness the US Civil War, see Xavient Haze, The Suppressed History of American Banking: How Big Banks Fought Jackson, Killed Lincoln and Caused the Civil War, 2016).

Obama Pentagon advisor Col. Larry Wilkerson says Israel is “our tool but we make it look like we are their tool”.  He says this deceptive role reversal is insanity. According to Wilkerson, Trump is poorly informed and has no independent advisors outside the Deep State (like himself) and follows junk advice. But Wilkerson acknowledges Trump’s instincts are to force Britain to fight its own wars. Wilkerson says Britain is living out its imperial dreams through the US as if it were still an empire.

Ayn Rand’s Psychology of Psychologizing and Trump’s Role Conflicts

One might think Trump must have a split or multiple personality disorder to garner all these critical psychological caricatures. To get a more accurate Polaroid-like real time picture of Trump we must abandon the American-Freudian tendency to describe politicians using psychoanalytic cliches.  This is why libertarian Ayn Rand opposed evaluating politicians by psychologizing and mythologizing, preferring  ‘objectivism’ instead in her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged.

A conflicting social role framework is better than pop psychology from which to understand Trump in the circumstances he finds himself in circa 2025. The Big Picture circumstances involve the weaning of America off its alliances with the former European Colonial World Order (Britain, Netherlands, France, Germany) who are faced with bankruptcy and have instigated wars to capture the spoils of Russia, Ukraine and Gaza to rescue themselves.

One need not embrace the notions that Trump “trumps” his opponents with superior 4-D Chess skills, is a religious messiah, or has an ingrained pathological personality.  Rather, Trump’s self, like our own selves, is not solid or fixed and moves from one expected situation and audience to another, called role alternation. If one wants to clearly understand Trump, they must enumerate the situations in which there is role conflict between all the roles he must play. But this isn’t done in modern journalism. Instead, short-hand psychological cliches often prevail (see Anton Zijderveld, On Cliches: The Supersedure of Meaning by Function in Modernity (1979).

Unlike the roles most people must fulfill, the role of president is chock full of political opponents, vested interest groups, the deep state and murderous enemies that result in seemingly inconsistent and confusing role behaviors to outsiders and critics. The irreconcilable moral conflicts of the presidency does not necessarily mean that Trump lacks “character”, necessarily has a split personality, or is a psychopath (see sociologist Peter L. Berger on the inconsistency between social roles in his Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963). It means he is all too human. But he is in the proverbial situation of having to serve two-or-more masters at any one time.

This is why even the master teacher of how one sometimes must do evil, Niccolo Machiavelli, asserted that rulers must do religious penance for their evil actions in necessary emergency situations. But rulers should also avoid gratuitous public confessions or dramatic displays of their moral guilt. Nonetheless Machiavelli held that penance does not annul ultimate moral culpability for doing evil for which one may lose their soul.  Machiavelli said that evil cannot be wished away or denied, because one can never get away with doing evil under cover of doing good (Niccolo Machiavelli, An Exhortation to Penitence, 1523 and Discourses I:6). However, I rather doubt anyone, outside devout Christians or Muslims, do private penance or confession with respect to the Gaza-Ukraine Wars. Trump may not be a psychopath with no conscience, but he has made it clear he wants to be the “winner”, which opens the door to moral dilemmas.  However, Trump’s ridiculous proposal to develop Gaza as a resort is interpreted to be a nonserious political diversion to assuage Israel. Same with his pretend bombing of Iran. Ayn Rand’s ethic of “objectivity” offers clarity in such situations but no resolution to the moral dilemma involved.

Trump’s Situation Box and Split Speech

Moreover, Trump is subtly re-aligning the US with the new economic order of BRICS by condemning Russia and China in public while otherwise ingratiating himself with Putin and Jinping. Does speaking tough to appease the military and industrial complex while speaking backstage with Russia and China reflect a “multiple personality disorder”, impulsivity, idiocy or realpolitik? I tend to believe Trump’s contradicting speech is pragmatic but often uses bombastic diversion from his real behind the scenes dealings. Trump’s speech for domestic consumption is not the same as his emissarial discussions.

The charges of Trump being a psychological sock puppet oddly comes at a time when:

• Trump successfully pulled off an ice-breaking summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska.
• Has temporarily mobilized the National Guard to cut off any repeat of the staged race riots and arson in Blue Cities financed by 25 high tech corporations centered in San Francisco in 2020-2022.
• Has requested the DOJ to pursue RICO anti-racketeering charges against George Soros who used US AID funds to weaponize city prosecutors against the safety of the citizenry.
• Has taken moves to capture control of the Federal Reserve Bank.
• Has exercised his power to rescind $4.9 billion in foreign aid under the USAID program for “woke, weaponized and wasteful” spending authorized by Congress on the grounds it contradicts US interests.
• Trump’s HHS Director Robert Kennedy Jr. fired the new CDC director after which the CDC staff spilled into the street to protest under the rationale of a threat to public health. No AI replacement at CDC.

No, the Ukraine War is not solely about NATO incursions and threats to Russia’s safety. Rather, the war is an attempt by bankrupt Monopoly Capitalist Globalists centered in London to steal and plunder the resources and oil of East Asia and the Southern hemisphere with threats of proxy wars fought by the US and Israel, while threatening nuclear war (see Alex Krainer, The Coming Collapse of Britain, August 2024). Nor is the US-Israel proxy war with Russia in Ukraine a war against “Communism”, as the British manufactured Russian Gulags never happened (see Solzhenit-SPIN: Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag was a Deep State British Lie, Aug. 19) and the Cold War was a hoax (Richard Poe, How the British Invented Communism (and Blamed It on the Jews, 2024). And after 1991, Russia abandoned Soviet style Communism, only to have their markets plundered by Wall Street.

Facetiously, at least Trump has plenty of experience with bankruptcies and turning around money losing casinos!  I’m not a Trump promoter, but psychologizing and mythologizing indicates to me such writers don’t know whether the binds that Trump finds himself in would stand the test of morality or not; they can only psychologize or mythologize it.

Even former advisor to President Reagan, Paul Craig Roberts, in his article “Can Trump Find a Way Out of the Box He is In?” wrongly believes NATO incursions on Russia are the sole blame for the wars when it is more likely they are wars of extraction, piracy and kleptocracy between two systems of world governance: the fast-declining globalist European former colonialist British (American) empire and the emerging BRICs New World Order of cooperation, sovereignty, sound money, and the prospect of peace. Trump apparently wants to eventually transition the US to the BRIC’s bandwagon. My guess is that Rand would find that objectively more virtuous than psychologizing about Trump’s personality.

Is Trump His Own Court Jester?

Ancient Greece and Rome institutionalized the role of the court jesters, satirists and poets such as Juvenal, Horace, Homer and Aesop who had the freedom to talk and mock princes candidly, albeit comically, without punishment. In medieval Britain, there were street jesters such as Punch and Judy that used puppetry and comedy to exercise their license to free speech. The Roman emperor Commodus was his own jester, which may explain the so-called insanity of other Roman rulers such as Caligula and Nero who attempted to transcend the invisible chains that bind rulers from telling the truth. But the French Revolution ended the institutionalized role of the court jester. And Jeffrey Epstein was no court jester!

In his book The History of Court Fools by Dr. John Doran (1858), stories are told of princes who have had to play the role of fool or their own jester.  One such ruler was Nassir of the Netherlands who took delight in puppet shows. At one such puppet show, the king encroached close to the stage and using a pair of scissors cut the strings to the puppets, adding some comedy to the presentation.  Perhaps Trump’s sometimes “unpredictable” actions, bullyism, and crude speech should be understood in the same context of cutting the puppet strings with its “Perfidious Albion” of parasitical and war mongering Great Britain and Western Europe rather than some nebulous clichés of psychological moral failures.

Psychologizing Trump is Useless: Or is Trump His Own Court Jester? Judge Andrew Napolitano, Alastair Crooke, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Col. Douglas MacGregor, Col. Larry Wilkerson, Ayn Rand The Psychology of Psychologizing, Paul Craig Roberts, Wayne Lusvardi

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Eric Zuesse

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Thanks, Saleh Abdullah.

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Writes Patrick Foy:

Here’s an especially important and informative update by Professor Mearsheimer on the two outstanding Washington-generated and enabled conflicts, the war over Palestine and the war in Ukraine. Many facts and insights. Both wars I regard as evidence of U.S. foreign policy failure. American neocons and neoliberals, on the other hand, regard them as successes because they demonstrate Washington’s world leadership. As usual, I ask, to what end? The so-called leadership is clearly misguided.

The clips [starting at 17:20 on the video] of Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich addressing his domestic audience about the true nature of Israel’s actions in Gaza support what Mearsheimer and a handful of others have been saying all along. Mearsheimer notes that Smotrich’s, “honest description…stands in marked contrast to what Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel’s supporters in the United States are saying about Israeli policy. Smotrich’s remarks are both sickening and illuminating.”

True to form, when it comes to Israel and Ukraine, America is being used by the Washington foreign policy elite to further hidden agendas.

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Vicki Marzullo wrote:

I always said Trump sucks on foreign affairs.

See here

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Chris Sullivan wrote:

Hamas might be a really bad outfit, but what does anybody actually know about it?

If I’m not mistaken, Israel and the US helped it get going and it carried the election when the US was so concerned about “democracy.”

I know that the major “news” organizations never report anything accurately or truthfully, so I have no way to decide what Hamas is. The October 7th account has been shown to be largely false and that’s probably the case with everything we’re told.

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Writes Christopher Mosley:

May Hayek’s works peck out the eyes of Chinkcock Musk’s LarkinLink. The gays are cool but feudalists are foo foos.

I’m working on a reworking of the Gadsden Flag. I despise Thomas Hobbes more than Ayn Rand despised Kant. I’m thinking maybe a sword with Mason’s compass as the hilt wielded by eagle claws beheading the figure on the cover of Leviathan.

Btw, I’m willing to donate funds to the Mises Institute for purchasing copies of Society Against The State by Pierre Clastres. May campuses far and wide wield the spirit of freedom with strength against Leviathan!

I fear no lesser beast!

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Writes Christopher Mosley:

He’s trying to hijack the Time Machine that is Universe. 

Now you understand his motives. I offer an alternative model that better aligns with anarchocapitalism, free will and true will.

Every event is infinite but not every event is meaningful to every God. Some have compromised with the pessimistic assumption only one universe or timeline exists, i.e, to build a Time Machine one must accept an entire timeline. I say physics allows for being multiple places simultaneously. Skip the songs you choose not to hear. Wills will coexist. 

Robert Anton Wilson’s Irish Bronx accent emphasizing the word THOU might be the greatest Thelemic commentary ever given.

You ready to save the world? Let the adventures begin!

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Christopher Mosley wrote:

Here’s another thought experiment.

The Federal Hemp Farm Act specifies that no U.S. state, U.S. territory, nor Indian reservation may interfere with the interstate commerce of federally compliant hemp products. Suppose Trump’s golf course sells Alabamians federally compliant hemp products either in Florida or via postal services and Itchy Cooch Ivy is advised by a lower court that HB445 does not interfere with The Commerce Clause. Would this not be a flagrant violation of The Commerce Clause, the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, and the lasez faire of Mar A Lago?

Tell her to piss on Goat Hill’s burning of Bob Marley vinyls please.

Thank you.

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John Leake

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Whenever I get the infrequent opportunity to walk the wild deserted Cape Cod outer Atlantic beach in the early morning, I exult in the sea’s silent roar. It extinguishes the cacophonous dreck that fills the air of everyday life in a society whose depravity accelerates faster than shore birds can fly.

This morning, because there was a little rain and rough surf the beach was deserted except for the usual assortment of birds. So we sauntered the long strand for an hour until we finally encountered a person as the sun flashed from behind the clouds. Inside the cocoon of the crashing waves and the whistling of the wind, with the clouds blowing fast, the seals just voiceless heads bobbing in the shallow water, and the birds hushed by the waves’ wild roar, a strange silence settled over me. I felt cloistered in a place of peace, similar to William Butler Yeats’ sentiment in his poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree: “And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,/ Dropping from the veils of the morning . . . .”

Silence. Without it, we are bereft of meaningful words and end up talking repetitive gibberish, small talk. There are many people who can’t shut up; their jabbering is a disease. Tranquilized with trivia, they lose their ability to communicate.

Silence is a word gravid with multiple meanings: for many a threat; for others a nostalgic evocation of a time rendered obsolete by technology; for others still a sentence to boredom; and for some, devotees of the ancient arts of reading, writing, and contemplation, a word of profound, even sacred importance. As the ancient Greeks knew so well, musing is the music of the artist’s heart.

Writing is at first, like an imaginary friend, a silent companion. Conceived by its author in silence, it asks to be received in the same spirit. And silence – contrary to the popular notion that it, like nothing, is nothing, a void, a lack of something – is the receptive spirit that encompasses all the meanings words can give. That silence is golden is an aphorism we have all heard but rarely heed. Nevertheless, it is out of that great unknown that words are born; great writing is the child of silence.

So too reading should be a venture into that unknown, an adventure upon which one embarks with eyes and ears wide open and the constant chatter of one’s private “thoughts” silenced.

But silence, like so much else in today’s world, including human beings, is on the endangered-species list . Another rare bird of flamboyant plumage and very like a black swan – “Rara avis in terris nigroque similima cyno” in Juvenal’s words – is slowly disappearing from our midst. The poison of noise is killing it.

And out of this lack of silence comes the silence of lack, the inability to use words to communicate meaningfully. As sung so wonderfully by Simon and Garfunkel in The Sounds of Silence:

And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
No one dared
Disturb the sound of silence

Ironically, as books have become more plentiful, silence has become scarcer. Most books now arrive with the clatter and bombast of the same advertising hype used to sell laxatives and pain-killing drugs. And they are received in the same spirit, often producing similar results. These loud arrivals often make the so-called best seller lists (as if number seven on that list could be the “best” seller along with number one), a curious place where quality is measured by quantity and the noise of publicity pays off handsomely. Many of these books are what D. H. Lawrence called “printed toys,” loud little devices that spin and spin and always seem to end up where they started – nowhere.

When I speak of noise I am not primarily speaking of the din we associate with city life: cars, trucks, sirens, etc. Such noise, alas, is heard even in small towns where birdsong often disappears behind the grinding of gears. That kind of noise is hard to completely avoid and it is in any case the least disruptive of the silence I have in mind. There is another kind of noise that is self-imposed, and whose purpose, consciously or not, is to make sure one is not “caught” by silence. That, as those who flee from silence know, can be dangerous to one’s reigning assumptions about self and the world. They prefer the comfort of noise because it silences the imagination, and imagination, as William Blake has told us, is the world of eternity, and to the eyes of the person of imagination, nature is imagination itself. It is only through the eyes of imagination that one can slip away and hope to break loose from the mind-forg’d manacles of convention and propaganda that society places on us all from birth.

Just this morning, very early, I read an essay that brought this home to me once again. In “Psychic Treason,” Curtis White begins by telling us that he is living in a world that no longer exists, a sentiment that should ring true for most people in this chaos of everything world. He tells us how his world changed:

I once lived in a vital world whose only limit was no-limit, ‘free frame of reference,’ as the Haight Street Diggers thought. It was a world of beatniks, Buddhists, hippies, free-jazz poets, pacifists, wandering guitar soloists, postmodern fabulists, soulful anarchists, and collaborative maunderers. It was also a world of close readers, deconstructors, and afficionados of the beautiful, all performing in the heady atmosphere of refusal, a general strike of the Imagination.

This world and its open assumptions about possibility slowly dissipated over a thirty-year period. As the late Sly Stone put it, ‘The possibility of possibility was leaking out.’ It seemed quite dead by the millennium, our collective mind aspirated into glass pipettes by techno-oligarchs and assorted others who bore us no love. We were left with Data World, the Great American Smartphone Society. We have been priced out of cities, so there are no avenues to barricade, no ‘scenes’ where artists and musicians can hang out, and our universities are in ruin, occupied by ‘ indentured students,’ in Elizabeth Tandy Shermer’s telling phrase, studying only what the boss wants. And what the boss wants has nothing to do with poets. Even at Canterbury’s Christ Church University, the destination for Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, poetry is ‘no longer viable in the current climate.’

White’s world is not the world everyone once inhabited, as others can attest. Everyone’s world of yesterday is somewhat different, but each contains nostalgic images that not just draw us back but forward – an imaginative nostalgia for a future that sustains the heart, even when the past one remembers never existed in pure form. White writes:

Happily, it will always be possible to create stories that liberate us from the stories of our masters. This is what William Blake called for when he wrote in Jerusalem (1815), ‘I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s; I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.’

. . . . Blake’s quote is “heavy,” as hippies used to say, because it asks, as Tolstoy put it, “What is to be done?” The answer to that question might simply be “tell better stories.” Live through better stories. Live through stories that will be understood in an as yet unimagined world, just past the next bend in the river, where the Imagination lives in all its inherited riches. So, let us be Nietzschean, all too Nietzschean, without fear or giddiness, and seek liberation for ourselves and others.

We all know people who go from morning till night, day in and day out without ever pausing to enter the sounds of silence. One doesn’t have to look for them; technology has made them the rule. They move like techno-ghosts up and down the lanes and byways, seashells stuck in their ears (“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind,” Ray Bradbury writes in Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953) or rectangular vibrators sticking out of their back pockets, proud symbols of the manacles that hold them captive to their minds’ bedlam. They drift through their lives in the cocoon of technological noise  They are informed, with it, tuned in – to everything but the life of their own souls. The real world passes them by. Always ready to photograph something that they do not see, they ignore that rare bird of flamboyant plumage that sits on their heads, singing plaintively. They may even read books, those candy-colored non-book books filled with millions of meaningless words, distracting little noises that allow them to avoid the silence that might force then to confront self-knowledge that is the stuff of great books, true art.

For the art of writing implies the art of reading. The writer creates and the reader recreates; both demand silence, the cessation of all noise that serves to prevent true thought. The machines must be turned off. “Our inventions,” Thoreau noted, “are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.”

It is not hard to turn a switch or pull a plug; the hard part is wanting to. Harder still, but equally necessary, is the quieting of the mind, the silencing of the incessant internal chatterboxes that accompany us everywhere and prevent us from experiencing the world.

For in the end one cannot hear or see the world or the penetrating truths of great writing unless, like the artists who create in silence, we turn off the noise of the social world and enter the silence. Only then, will one’s imaginary silent companion begin to sing.

In her bittersweet memoir A Freewheelin’ Time, Suze Rotolo, Bob Dylan’s girlfriend in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, echoes Curtis White’s point about how the past is as much about the imagination and the future as the past. Her book is equally about the plight of young women in those days and the vibrancy of the Village’s creative community as about her relationship with Dylan. Writing in the early 2000s before her untimely death, she notes:

Greenwich Village bohemia exists no more. It was the public square of the twentieth century for the outsiders, the mad ones, and the misfits. Today all that remains are the posters, fliers, and signs preserved on the walls as a reminder of that bygone era when rents were cheap and New York replaced Paris as the destination for the creative crowd.

Those who feel they are not part of the mainstream are always somewhere, however. Greenwich Village is a calling. Though it is now priced out of its physical space, as a state of mind, it will never be out of bounds. . . . The creative spirit finds a way.

That way is found whenever and wherever one enters the cocoon of silence to hear the rare bird of flamboyant plumage sing. It is then we can live through better stories as we tell them.

Reprinted with the author’s permission.

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