Catastrophe Is All Around Us Jeffrey A. Tucker, Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research and Elvis Presley, the king of rock n' roll, a Jew? and Has Anyone Told You Yet? Don’t Drink and Vaccinate By Hana Levi Julian and Shlomo Carlebach and Samaria capital of the Shomrom one of two
Yehuda Lave is an author, journalist, psychologist, rabbi, spiritual teacher, and coach, with degrees in business, psychology and Jewish Law. He works with people from all walks of life and helps them in their search for greater happiness, meaning, business advice on saving money, and spiritual engagement.
to Judaism"), encouraging disenchanted Jewish youth to re-embrace their
heritage, using his special style of enlightened teaching, and his
melodies, songs, and highly inspiring story telling.
Samaria capital of the Shomron one of two
Samaria (Hebrew: שומרון, Shomron; Ancient Greek: Σαμάρεια, Samareia; Arabic: السامرة, as-Samira) was an ancient capital of the northern Kingdom of Israel in the 9th and 8th centuries BC. The ruins of the city are located in the Samaria mountains of Israel, almost 10 km (6.2 mi) to the northwest of Nablus. Israelite Shomron (lit. "watch-tower"; also written "Shomeron") was located in the heart of the mountains of Samaria, a few miles northwest of Shechem. The "hill of Shomron" is an oblong hill, with steep but not inaccessiblesides, and a long flat top. According to the Bible , Omri, the king of the northern kingdom of Israel (reigned c. 870s BC), purchased this hillfrom Shemer its owner for two talents of silver, and built on its broadsummit the city to which he gave the name of "Shomron", i.e., Samaria, as the new capital of his kingdom instead of Tirzah (1 Kings 16:24). As such it possessed many advantages. Omri resided here during the last six years of his reign
Omri is thought to have granted the Arameans the right to "make streets in Samaria" as a sign of submission (1 Kings 20:34). This probably meant permission was granted to the Aramean merchants to carry on their trade in the city. This would imply the existence of a considerable Aramean population It was the only great city of Israel created by the sovereign. All the others had been already consecrated by patriarchal tradition or previous possession. But Samaria was the choice of Omri alone. He, indeed, gave to the city which he had built the name of its former owner, but its especial connection with himself as its founder is proved by the designation which it seems Samaria bears in Assyrian inscriptions, "Beth-Khumri" ("the house or palace of Omri"). (Stanley)
According to Biblical tradition, Samaria was frequently besieged. In thedays of Ahab, Benhadad II came up against it with thirty-two vassal kings, but was defeated with a great slaughter (1 Kings 20:1–21). A second time, next year, he assailed it; but was again utterly routed, and was compelled to surrender to Ahab (1 Kings 20:28–34), whose army, as compared with that of Ben Hadad, was no more than "two little flocks of kids." The Bible teaches that in the days of Jehoram, Ben Hadad again laid siege to Samaria. But just when success seemed to be within their reach,they suddenly broke off the siege, alarmed by a mysterious noise of chariots and horses and a great army, and fled, leaving their camp with all its contents behind them. The famished inhabitants of the city were soon relieved from the abundance of the spoil of the Syrian camp; and it came to pass, according to the word of Elisha, that "a measure of fine flour was sold for a shekel, and two measures of barley for a shekel, inthe gates of Samaria" (2 Kings 7:1–20). According to Josephus, the ancient name of the site Shomron (Samaria) was changed to Sebaste by King Herod the Great, in honor of Augustus Caesar.[1]
Has Anyone Told You Yet? Don't Drink and Vaccinate.
Are you about to receive, or have you already received an inoculation against COVID-19? If the answer is "yes" there's something you ought to know.
Don't drink (alcohol) and vaccinate. We know it sounds funny but this is for real.
Alcohol alters the nature of microorganisms in the gut that help defend the body against bacteria and viruses, according to immunologist Professor Sheena Cruickshank of the University of Manchester, who spoke with Metro UK.
Likewise, Emergency medicine expert Dr. Ronx Ikharia found that three glasses of Prosecco reduced the number of white blood cells, including lymphocytes, by up to 50 percent. These are the blood cells that attack viruses with antibodies; they play a key role in determining the immune response to foreign intruders — like the COVID-19 virus and its newly-emerging variants.
But Russian health officials were the first to advise their citizens – those who were receiving the Sputnik vaccine, specifically – to avoid alcohol, and they told them to dry out for two months, explaining that it might dampen the body's ability to respond to the vaccine. That recommendation has since been reduced somewhat.
"We strongly recommend refraining from alcohol for three days after each injection," Alexander Gintsburg, head of the Gamaleya National Center of Epidemiology and Microbiology in Moscow, told the New Scientist publication. The warning doesn't just apply to the Sputnik V vaccine, but all COVID-19 vaccines and indeed all other vaccines, the publication noted. "This is quite obvious," Gintsburg commented.
Drinking alcohol in certain amounts suppresses the immune system, researchers found in a 2012 study in Sweden. "Low to moderate alcohol consumption was related to lower levels of inflammation markers but had no impact on immune response," the researchers found.
"Excess alcohol is shown to suppress a wide range of immune responses predisposing the host to various infections, and in particular pulmonary ones. On the other hand, moderate consumption of alcoholic beverages may enhance immune response," the researchers wrote.
It would seem the best advice would be to take the path of moderation, and to abstain from alcohol for a few days on both sides of the inoculation, just for safety's sake. Nahila Bonfiglio, a writer at Nautilus: Science Connected, suggested in an article published Tuesday, "it seems that a short period of sobriety is advisable. Taking at least three days off from drinking before you receive the first dose of vaccine and at lest the same amount of time on the other end will help the vaccine to more effectively inoculate you against COVID-19."
Elvis Presley, the king of rock n' roll, was born on January 8, 1935, in Tupelo, Mississippi to a poor Jewish family. Elvis was deeply devoted to his parents, especially his mother, Gladys, a Jew, who raised him to have a strong faith in God. Elvis's heritage ran uninterrupted through his maternal grandmothers. His Great-Great Grandmother on his mother's side, Martha Tacket, was an observant Jew. Elvis made sure the entire world knew he was fiercely proud to be a Jew. He took every opportunity to wear his beloved Star of David and Chai necklaces, and made sure the media photographed them. Then, when his beloved mother died, he included a Star of David on her gravestone. Elvis made the decision to honor her as a Jew. Elvis used to carry a yarmulke in his pocket, and he was fascinated by Jewish music. As an adult, he loved donating to several Jewish organizations. One day the Memphis Jewish Welfare sent a delegation to Graceland to see him and ask if he could contribute. Every year, he used to donate $1,000 to the Memphis Hebrew Academy, and so they thought maybe they could get the same donation. This time, unlike in times past, they explained to Elvis they took care of Jewish orphans. Clearly moved, Elvis excused himself for a minute. When he came back, he handed the delegation a check. They didn't know what to expect. They thought $1,000 would be nice. But the check was for $150,000, well over one million dollars today. The organization later telephoned him and said, "Elvis, you must have made a mistake." Elvis, who had a deep love for the Jewish people, simply replied: "I didn't make a mistake, I know what I'm doing." keep wellSteve Sattler
As a naturally optimistic person, it vexes me that the word catastrophe has echoed in my mind since early March 2020. It's the word the great smallpox eradicator Donald Henderson used in his 2006 prediction of the consequences of lockdown, a word that wasn't around then. His masterful article addressed the idea of travel restrictions, forced human separation, business and school closings, mask mandates, limits on public gatherings, quarantines, and the entire litany of brutality to which we've been subjected for nearly a year, all summed up in the word lockdown.
Dr. Henderson warned against it all. This is not how you deal with disease, he said; at a minimum society needs to function so that medical professionals can do their work. Diseases are managed one person at a time, not with grand central plans. That was the old wisdom in any case. Under the influence of vainglorious modelers, ideological resetters, and politicians hoping to make names for themselves, most of the world tried the lockdown experiment anyway.
Here we are nearly a year since I wrote my first article warning that governments presumed themselves to possess the quarantine power. They could use it if they wanted to. I didn't expect they would. I wrote this piece as a "for your information" public service just to let people know how terrible governments could be.
I had no idea that quarantines would be only the beginning. At this point we know what we did not know then. They are capable – by they I mean even governments in presumably civilized countries with functioning democracies – of the unthinkable, and they are capable of persisting in the unthinkable for an appalling amount of time.
Now the lockdowns are our life in the US, unless you are lucky enough to live in Florida, Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, and perhaps a few other places. Here in these outposts of what we used to call civilization, life seems normal. Our readers in these states don't even think about the virus much, and they read my articles and find them overwrought, like I'm describing life on another planet.
The US seems to have two economies, one open and one closed. You see the difference on social media: people at the beach, malls, living life more or less normally. Meanwhile, in the lockdown states, businesses are shuttered, people are demoralized, fights over masks are breaking out in stores, the arts are wrecked, and multitudes are still cowering in their homes. The unemployment differences between the two reveal exactly what's going on.
We are experiencing what is a migratory demographic shift that could compare to 19th century legend. From what is being reported by U-Haul and other moving companies, people are fleeing from closed to open. Reports United Van Lines: "Among the top inbound states were South Carolina (64%), Oregon (63%), South Dakota (62%) and Arizona (62%), while New York (67%), Illinois (67%), Connecticut (63%) and California (59%) were among the states experiencing the largest exoduses." And this all happened since the summer when it became unbearably obvious that the bastards were not going to stop tormenting their people.
Moving, however, is not a panacea. Normal life seems to be breaking down. The government mails are running 2 to 3 weeks behind. Companies can't even close their books because the tempo of life has dragged to a crawl. Tech support takes many hours on hold. Accountability for failure to deliver on services seems to be evaporating. Groceries experience sporadic shortages in unpredictable ways. We no longer know the rules and yet fear breaking them.
Health care is not functioning normally, with non-Covid patients hurled out too soon while positive tests land you in ICU whether you need it or not. (My own 81-year-old mother was hospitalized with a serious condition and then thrown out because she didn't test positive for SARS-CoV-2). Vaccine administration has been mostly chaos because society is not functioning normally. Weddings and funerals are still out. We are being socialized to treat everyone, including ourselves, as nothing but pathogenic disease vectors.
The hatred and threats of violence in online venues are out of control. Society has never been more angry or divided in my lived experience. Tech giants are still censoring dissent, trying to force everyone to believe the pronouncements from the World Health Organization even though they change week to week, as if they are working hard to realize Orwell's vision of the future. The blue check marks and people with access daily advocate trampling on the rights of those who can't live their lives online.
The mainstream media that most people once trusted continues to pretend as if this catastrophe is a result of the pandemic rather than the pandemic response. Just look at the number of headlines that begin "Pandemic Has Caused…." and then fill in the blank with any one of the many terrible things happening now: a third of restaurants bankrupt, opioid deaths, alcoholism, suicide ideation, female unemployment, demoralized and abused children missing a whole year of schooling, loved ones separated by borders, murder rates soaring, vaccinations missed, cancer screenings forgone, and so on. It's all the pandemic, they say.
Why won't the media name the lockdowns as the culprit? It's not just denialism. The implication is that we had no choice but to shatter life as we know it. Lockdown is just what one does in a pandemic. It's utterly not. Nothing like this has ever taken place, never in history. This remains an egregious attack on fundamental rights, liberties, and the rule of law. The results are all around us. That the news media refuses to name the reason feels like gaslighting, except that we know they are lying, they know they are lying, and they know that we know they are lying. It's just an unwritten rule in journalism now: never name the lockdowns (unless you bury it in the 13th paragraph of an otherwise boring article).
And even after a full year, the public remains mostly deeply ignorant of the age/health gradient of Covid-19 fatalities, even though we've known this since February of last year! According to the CDC – even conceding the accuracy of testing and exigencies of fatality classification – it's 99.997% for 0-19 years, 99.98% for 20-49 years, 99.5% for 50-69 years, and 94.6% for 70+ years. It's nursing homes that have been a main vector for disease outcomes. The threat to school-age kids approaches zero. The more information we get the more normalized the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen seems, a respiratory and flu-like illness we have seen become pandemic before it became endemic just like another dozen times in the last hundred years. We didn't shut down society, and, for that reason, we managed them just fine.
Is it that numbers like the above are just too abstract to mean anything to people? More likely, the numbers mean something but that meaning is overwhelmed by the nonstop panic porn one sees on the media each day. People can no longer distinguish these various terms that media pundits throw around to signal how terrible this disease is: outbreaks, cases, outcomes, deaths, spread, infection rates, hospitalizations – it's just a huge and blurry blizzard of terrible.
Citing a bit of reality-based data cannot make a dent in the pathological Munchausen Syndrome that has been unleashed. Primal fear has swamped rationality for the better part of 10 months. So people douse themselves in sanitizer for fear of the enemy they cannot see, and presume everyone else is trying to infect them. They put up with attacks on their rights under the belief that it is for their own good.
The fiscal and monetary policy response has been equally egregious, all premised on the idea that money printing and spending – it all goes together these days – can possibly be a substitute for private investment and actual people buying and selling things. That combined with continued protectionist measures in the last days of the Trump administration make for the worst combination of policy malpractice in generations, or perhaps ever. The pain of recovery will be monstrous.
Many of us spend a good part of our days poring over the latest research, which reveals their terrible toll of the lockdowns, the inescapable horror that it is the lockdowns not the pandemic that has done this. It shows the absence of any relationship between lockdowns and lives saved. It shows that a significant number of excess deaths are due not to disease but to drug overdoses, depression, and suicide. It shows the tremendous problems with PCR testing, the nondriver of "asymptomatic transmission," the incredible proliferation of disease misclassification, and the absurdity of the idea that political solutions can intimidate and arrest a virus.
We do all this research every day, and then turn on the TV to find the nation's top medical spokesman (a certain Dr. Fauci of fame and fortune) knows nothing and cares nothing for any of the research. He is a performance artist who just likes being on TV, being fawned over while he advocates the permanent overthrow of our rights and liberties. And yet even his colleagues and others in the profession, who know his long-running racket very well, dare not call him out for fear of losing grant money, being ostracized within their institutions, and trolled on Twitter. He is a scary man with the power to make or break careers, so rather than take the risk, others just shake their heads and turn the channel.
Sheer cowardice explains most of the dearth of dissent. It's easy to forget how cravenly careerist people become when they are afraid. Most people would rather lie or be silent than risk facing disapproval of friends and colleagues. Cancel culture makes this worse. Doctors who dare talk about natural immunities or the talisman of masks and distancing find themselves investigated by medical boards. Academics who speak out are accused of encouraging superspreaders, blasted by colleagues including students. It's way beyond witch hunts at this point. As a result, you can easily get the impression that everyone agrees with the desperate need to dismantle civilization as we know it.
None of this is sustainable. When it was "14 days to flatten the curve," I feared for the future of investment, public confidence in government, lost revenue for small and medium-sized businesses, and their permanent shock that would come from the realization that government can and will do something this horrible. Another two weeks went by and we were writing furiously to warn the world of the deadly consequences of this course. April 13 came and AIER released the most strongly worded editorial then in print: we need complete liberation now. The Wall Street Journal followed and said the same two days later.
In those days, the prevailing theory of the virus was that you cannot stop it but you can slow it down. Tall or short, the area of the curve is the same. Why prolong the pain? The talking point at the time was to preserve hospital capacity. But over time, this plausible idea mutated into a full suppressionist agenda. Slow the spread became stop the spread. It was a small step until the "experts" defaulted to a medieval view of disease: run away! Actually, that's too flattering: it was a gradeschool view of cooties that became the new and thoroughly fake science.
Then we arrived at the current moment in which professional virus fighters, having failed miserably to suppress the virus, have turned against the public, blaming those who do not comply with complete enthusiasm. Fauci says some version of this daily on TV: if everyone would just comply, we won't have to lock down anymore. Unless morale improves, the beatings will continue.
After two weeks, there was still time to undo major parts of the damage of lockdowns. After 10 months, not so much. There will be loss of life for many years to come plus population-wide psychological, social, and economic damage. The catastrophe has not been averted. It is far worse than any of us could ever have imagined at this time last year. The world has shifted and drastically, and the pain and suffering are unspeakable. Our governments are the pathogens that have done this to us. They were aided and abetted by fake news, fake experts, fake intellectuals, fake science, and a fake view of life.
At this late date, we've lost confidence in most of what we used to trust and think was normal. Despair is taking over. Many of those who were willing to fight in the spring and summer have given up, tired of writing, tired of protesting, tired of yelling. The attempt to demotivate the opposition is working. This is a huge error.
What, then, is the path to the future? We can stay on the present catastrophic course or we can reverse it. The sooner governments wise up and stop hurting everyone like this the sooner the healing can begin. It will take years, decades, but a version of the rule of medicine from the ancient days pertains: first stop doing harm.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Editorial Director for the American Institute for Economic Research.
He is the author of many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press and nine books in 5 languages, most recently Liberty or Lockdown. He is also the editor of The Best of Mises. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and cult
