Category Archives: History

Eric Metaxas and “Letter to American Churches”

Discussion with Jordan Peterson

I haven’t heard of this author or his new book with the above title before but he sounds immensely interesting. Not least because he, having grown up in America, has a Greek (father) and German (mother) background. His mother having lost her father in the Second World War.

Here’s the video description:

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson and Eric Metaxas discuss his most recent book, “A Letter to the American Church,” which argues a betrayal of faith by those who stay silent in the face of tyranny. They parallel the arbiters of speech across history against those populating today, and detail the responsibility to act against falsehood that is intrinsically present in the Abrahamic tradition, yet increasingly absent in the American church today.

Eric Metaxas is an American author, speaker, and radio host. He has written award winning biographies, such as “Bonhoeffer,” as well as children’s books like “Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving,” Metaxas hosts Socrates in the City, a recurring popular event where he interviews writers and thinkers on theology, moralism, and philosophy. He also hosts the nationally syndicated Eric Metaxas Show, more broadly referred to as “The Show About Everything.”

In the podcast (1 h 33 min, on Youtube here, on Bitchute here), Metaxas explains that in his new book he says that the American churches are making the same mistakes the German churches made in Nazi Germany. They looked the other way and narrowed themselves down to “thin theology”. Some did speak up, but not until it was too late to achieve anything meaningful.

(I would add that this “letter” should be addressed to churches “in the American Empire”, which includes the UK and all of Europe.)

Another thing he says is that churches that defied the Covid measures and stayed open during lockdowns “increased four to fivefold”, while those that locked down “withered”.

I can certainly believe that.

He has an amazing personal conversion story that involves a dream, at the age of 25, about picking a golden fish out of the water. He knew in the dream that the fish is Christ.

He has previously written an impressive number and range of books, including biographies about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Martin Luther and William Wilberforce. According to Wikipedia, the latter was “the companion book to the 2006 film [on Wilberforce: Amazing Grace].”

In 2021, he published a book titled “Is Atheism Dead?” and last year the aforementioned “Letter to American Churches.”

The Mythology of Spaceship Earth

Article by Gary North, written in 1969, the year of the first landing on the moon.

The full article is here.

Excerpts:

The gap between moral wisdom and scientific knowledge has been a problem since the scientific rev­olution of the sixteenth century. Immanuel Kant, writing in the late 1700’s, struggled mightily with this very question: How can man bridge the intellectual chasm between scientific knowledge (the realm of law and necessity) and moral knowledge (the realm of freedom and choice) without sacri­ficing the integrity of one or the other? Hegel, Marx, and the mod­ern moral philosophers have all lived in the shadow of this dilem­ma, and the crisis of modern cul­ture reflects man’s failure to re­solve it. The responses to this dilemma, as a rule, take one or the other of two forms, symbolized by Arthur Koestler as the Com­missar on the one hand, and the Yogi on the other.

The Commissar is enraptured with science and technology; he is confident that scientific planning in proper hands can so alter man’s environment as to bring about a new earth and a new mankind. The Yogi takes the opposite tack of disengagement from “the world,” laying stress on each man cultivating his own garden. Find inner peace, he urges, and the ex­ternal world will take care of it­self. His assumption is that sci­ence and technology are neutral, that developing from their inner imperatives they will eventually find their own benevolent level.

[. . .]

Mr. Wicker, unfortunately, made a great leap of faith when he be­gan to compare our heavenly achievement with our supposed capabilities for solving more earthly tasks. He was not alone in this leap. Editorial after edi­torial echoed it, and I single him out only because he is widely read and generally regarded as one of the superior liberal pundits. He makes the leap seem so plausible: “So the conclusion that enlight­ened men might draw is that if the same concentration of effort and control could be applied to some useful earthly project, a similar success might be ob­tained.” He recommends a vast program of publicly-owned hous­ing construction, say, some 26 million new units by 1980.

Flora Lewis’ column was far more optimistic; her horizons for mankind’s planning capabilities are apparently much wider. “If the moon can be grasped, why not the end of hunger, of greed, of warfare, of cruelty?” She admits that there are problems: “They seem provocatively within our new capacities and yet maddeningly distant. We are told it is only lack of will that frustrates these achievements, too.” Nature is boundless, apparently; only our “lack of will” prevents us from unlocking the secrets of paradise and ending the human condition as we know it. This is the mes­sianism of technological planning. It is basic to the thinking of a large segment of our intellectuals, and the success of the Apollo flights has brought it out into the open.

Mr. Wicker wisely set for our government a limited goal. Miss Lewis does not necessarily limit the task to government planning alone, but it is obvious that she is basing her hopes on a technological feat that was essentially a statist project. At this point, several questions should be raised. First, should the state have used some $25 billions of coerced taxes in order to send two men to the moon’s surface? Would men act­ing in a voluntary fashion have expended such a sum in this gen­eration? In short, was it worth the forfeiting of $25 billions worth of alternative uses for the money? Second, given Mr. Wick­er’s plans, could we not ask the same question? Is the construction of public housing, and the use of scarce resources involved in such construction, on a priority scale that high in the minds of the American public? Would a non­inflationary tax cut not be pref­erable?3 It is typical of socialistic thinkers to point to emergency spending (e.g., a war) or some statist rocket program and rec­ommend a transfer of funds from one branch of the state’s planning bureaucracy to another. I have never heard them recommend a reduction of spending by the state. Spending precedents set in war time, like “temporary” taxes, seem to become permanent. Finally, in Miss Lewis’ example, is the mere application of the techniques of applied science sufficient to end warfare and cruelty? Or could it be, as the Apostle James put it, that our wars come from the hearts of men? Conversion, in and of itself, may not redeem tech­nology, but can Miss Lewis be so certain that technology can redeem mankind?

[. . .]

A LEAP OF FAITH

Therefore, to take a leap of faith from some particular in­stance of a “successful” govern­ment project—success defined as the operationally satisfactory com­pletion of a certain unquestioned goal—to the realm of economic planning involves a faith far greater than anything imagined by the medieval scholastics. Yet Dr. Irving Bengelsdorf, a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times, thinks that “there may be hope” along this line of thinking, in spite of the difficulties inherent in any computerized quantification of qualitative personal prefer­ences. He states the problem well; he cannot show how his answer is linked operationally with the prob­lem he states:

In contrast to the novel and un­cluttered venture of getting to the moon, [an] uninhabited, non-social, non-political moon, the problems of society are exceedingly complex to solve because any solution demands that, people have to change their daily ways of life, their interactions with other people. This is difficult to do. For, from birth, people already come overlaid with traditional prejudices, encrusted with hoary cultures, and swaddled in ancient customs. And these are hard to change.

But, there may be hope. Both the Apollo 11 flight and the Manhattan Project of World War II show that once a clear goal has been set, a vast, complex project involving large num­bers of people with different training and skills working together can achieve a solution.

Between the first paragraph and the second lies a social revolution. Also present in the gap is the un­stated assumption that we can re­duce the complexities of society to “a clear goal,” which is pre­cisely the problem governments have not learned to solve. I am at a loss to see how a wartime bomb project or a trip to the moon in­dicate anything except the amaz­ing capacity for spending that gov­ernments possess.

SPACESHIP EARTH

Barbara Ward, one of the most respected Establishment thinkers in Britain, and former editor of The Economist, has taken Buck­minster Fuller’s spaceship analogy and has turned it into an effective neo-Fabian propaganda device: “The most rational way of con­sidering the whole race today is to see it as the ship’s crew of a single spaceship on which all of us, with a remarkable combination of security and vulnerability, are making our pilgrimage through infinity.” [. . .]

[. . .]

The problem with all of this “spaceship reasoning” is that it assumes as solved those funda­mental problems that need solving in order to make possible the spaceship analogy. The thing which strikes me as ironic is that the language of the spaceship involves a chain of command approach to the solution of human problems. Those humanitarian intellectuals who decry the petty military dicta­torships in underdeveloped nations want to impose a massive system of command over the whole earth. That is what the call to world gov­ernment implies. The spaceship analogy necessarily views society as a vast army. Yet for some reason, Hayek’s identical conclusion about the implications of socialist planning is invariably rejected as absurd. It is the mentality of the militarist. Miss Ward even is will­ing to admit that our experiences in wartime helped to create the foundation of modern economic policy:

Thus, not by theory or dogma but largely by war-induced experience, the Western market economies have come to accept the effectiveness and usefulness of a partnership between public and private activity. . . . but there is now no question of exclusive reliance on any one instrument or any one method. The pragmatic market economies have worked out their own evolving conceptions of public and private responsibility and the result is the dynamic but surprisingly stable mixed economy of the Western world.

THE CHAOS OF NONECONOMICS

I would have put it a different way. I would have pointed to the signs of our contemporary sys­tem’s increasing inefficiency, cor­ruption, and extralegal practices which we more usually associate with those warfare economies from which she says we borrowed our planning techniques. What we have created is non-economics, and Miss Ward proclaims the ben­efits of such a system:

But, on the whole, in economics the Western world can move from posi­tion to position with little sense of contradiction and incompatibility. We had no very fixed views before so we do not have to bother too much about what we believe now. It is a consider­able source of strength.

This, then, is “reason, spaceship style.” It is the triumph of intel­lectual chaos, and it is inevitably recreating the economy in its own image.

GROUNDING THE SHIP

Dr. William G. Pollard, a physi­cist who was a part of the Man­hattan Project, has written a little book which tries to undergird the spaceship analogy with a theolog­ical framework. His theology is radical, but he is honest in seeing the purpose of the Apollo flights as being ultimately religious. He thinks it marks the end of the era of science-worship. Diminishing marginal returns are about to set in:

Sending men to the moon and bringing them back in 1969 may prove to be from the perspective of the twentieth century the central symbol of the golden age of science in the twenty-first. Like the great pyramids of Egypt or the lofty cathedrals of medieval Europe, this feat will stand out as a peak expression of the spirit of the golden age; the maximum economic investment which a great civili­zation could make in a feat which served no useful purpose other than making manifest the lofty height to which the spirit of an age could rise. It will not be worth repeating except perhaps by Russia for the purpose of sharing in its glory. Thereafter, even more massive applications of science and technology to basic human needs will have become so urgently neces­sary that no further diversion of available talent and resources to manned space flights can be per­mitted.

We can hope that he is correct, but who knows for certain? The government was so successful, as it usually is, in achieving a feat “which served no useful purpose” other than its own glory, that we may have more of the same. But this much should be clear: the analogy of spaceship earth is more than an analogy; it is a call to religious commitment. The call is to faith in centralized planning.

At the beginning of this essay, I pointed to the dual theories of regeneration, symbolized by the Yogi and the Commissar. They feed on each other, take in each other’s intellectual washing, so to speak. If we are to confront the mythology of spaceship earth, it must be in terms of a rival moral philosophy, one which has social and economic implications, as well as technological implications. We must deny the validity of any vision of man as central planner, a little god who would arrange in an omniscient fashion the lives of all men in all the spheres of their existence, as if we were some per­manent military crew. We must acknowledge the validity of the late C. S. Lewis’ warning in The Abolition of Man that when we hear men speaking of “man’s tak­ing control of man,” we should understand that it implies certain men taking control of all the others.

When men seek to divinize the state, they succeed merely in cre­ating hell on earth. The Christian church fought this point out with the Roman Emperors, both pagan and Arian. The state may not claim to be God’s exclusive or even chief representative on earth.”’ The the­ology of spaceship earth would have us return to the religious political theory of the ancient world, all in the name of progres­sive technology and planning.

The astronauts are back on earth. We must seek to keep them here. It is time to ground our spaceship programs, both interplanetary and domestic. Let the captains go down with their ideological ship. There are better ways of allocating our scarce resources than in construct­ing spaceship earth.

Why do the nations rebel?

Psalm 2 appears to be a comment on the Tower of Babel

Psalm 2:

1 Why do the nations conspire[a]
    and the peoples plot in vain?
2 The kings of the earth rise up
    and the rulers band together
    against the Lord and against his anointed, saying,
3 “Let us break their chains
    and throw off their shackles.”

4 The One enthroned in heaven laughs;
    the Lord scoffs at them.
5 He rebukes them in his anger
    and terrifies them in his wrath, saying,
6 “I have installed my king
    on Zion, my holy mountain.”

7 I will proclaim the Lord’s decree:

He said to me, “You are my son;
    today I have become your father.
8 Ask me,
    and I will make the nations your inheritance,
    the ends of the earth your possession.
9 You will break them with a rod of iron[b];
    you will dash them to pieces like pottery.”

10 Therefore, you kings, be wise;
    be warned, you rulers of the earth.
11 Serve the Lord with fear
    and celebrate his rule with trembling.
12 Kiss his son, or he will be angry
    and your way will lead to your destruction,
for his wrath can flare up in a moment.
    Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

Footnotes

  1. Psalm 2:1 Hebrew; Septuagint rage
  2. Psalm 2:9 Or will rule them with an iron scepter (see Septuagint and Syriac)

Ivermectin Could Have Saved Millions of Lives, Why Was It Suppressed?

"This mass experimentation can legally be interpreted under the Nuremberg Code as a genocidal attack on humanity."

Article by Richard Gale and Dr. Gary Null.

Excerpts:

In 2004, the US Congress passed an amendment to the Federal Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act known as Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). This piece of legislature legalized an anti-regulatory pathway to allow experimental medical interventions to be expedited without proper safety evaluation in the event of bioterrorist threats and national health emergencies such as pandemics. At the time, passage of the EUA amendment made sense because it was partially in response to the 2001 anthrax attacks and the US’s entry into an age of international terrorism. However, the amendment raises some serious considerations.  Before the Covid-19 pandemic, EUAs had only been authorized on four occasions:  the 2005 avian H5N1 and 2009 H1N1 swine flu, the 2014 Ebola and the 2016 Zikra viruses.

Each of these pathogen scares proved to be false alarms that posed no threat of any pandemic proportions to Americans.  The fifth time EUAs were invoked was in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic, which seemed far more plausible than previous EUAs.

Before the government can authorize an EUA to deploy an experimental diagnostic product, drug or vaccine, certain requirements must be fulfilled.

First, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) must have sufficient proof that the nation is being confronted with a serious life-threatening health emergency.

Second, the drug(s) and/or vaccine(s) under consideration must have sufficient scientific evidence to suggest they will likely be effective against the medical threat.  Despite being insufficient, the evidence must at least include preclinical and observational data showing the product—diagnostic test, drug and vaccine—targets the organism, disease or condition.

Third, although the drug or vaccine does not undergo a rigorous evaluation by the FDA, it must at least show that its potential and known benefits outweigh its potential and known risks.  In addition, the product must be manufactured in complete accordance with standard quality control and safety assurances.

However, when we look back at the government’s debacles during the Covid-19 pandemic, two other EUA requirements should be spotlighted. On the one hand, an EUA cannot be authorized for any product or intervention if there is an FDA approved alternative product already available, unless the experimental product clearly shows to have a significant advantage. Moreover, and perhaps more important, EUAs demand informed consent. Every individual who receives the drug or vaccine must be thoroughly informed about its experimental status and its potential risks and benefits.  Recipients must also be properly informed about the alternatives to the experimental product and nobody should be forced to take it.

One final EUA requirement is that there must be robust safety monitoring and reporting of adverse events, injuries and deaths potentially due to the drug or vaccine. This is the responsibility not only of the private pharmaceutical manufacturers but also the FDA, physicians, hospitals, clinics and other healthcare professionals.

Obviously there are important cautions to be considered after reviewing the EUA requirements and the dangerous implications if they are not properly followed or at worse abused. Foremost are the inherent heath risks of any rapid response of experimental medical interventions, especially novel drugs and vaccines.

As we observed during the FDA approval process and roll out of Pfizer’s and Moderna’s mRNA Covid-19 jabs and J&J’s adenovirus vaccine, no long-term human trials were conducted to even estimate a reliable baseline of their relative efficacy and safety.

But perhaps equally important, the public should only place their trust in these EUA-approved experimental drugs and vaccines if their evaluation by federal health authorities is conducted in a manner that is completely transparent and takes every potential ethical challenge into consideration. However these cautions were categorically ignored and transgressed in every conceivable way. Moreover, conflicts of interests plagued the entire EUA review process.

Most egregious was that Anthony Fauci at the NIAID and other federal officials had full knowledge that other FDA-approved drugs existed that could effectively treat Covid-19 infections. The antiparasitic and antiviral drug Ivermectin best stands out.

Ivermectin was first introduced to the market in the early 1980s as an anti-parasitic drug for veterinary infections. However, its effectiveness was observed to be so remarkable and multifaceted that researchers started to investigate its potential for treating human diseases.  In 1987, the FDA approved ivermectin for treating two parasitic diseases, river blindness and stronglyoidiasis, in humans.

Since then an enormous body of medical research has grown showing ivermectin’s effectiveness for treating other diseases. Its broad range antiviral properties has shown efficacy against many RNA viruses such avian influenza, zika, dengue, HIV, West Nile, yellow fever, chikungunya and earlier severe respiratory coronaviruses. It has also been found effective against DNA viruses such as herpes, polyomavirus, circovirus-2 and others. The drug is capable of modulating a host immune response during viral infections and reduces pro-inflammatory cytokines that contribute to viral tissue damage.

Unsurprisingly, its discovers Drs. William Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine. Ivermectin was not a drug simply hidden away in a back closet; rather it has been prescribed to hundreds of millions of people worldwide. Given its decades’ long record of in vitro efficacy, it should have been self-evident for Fauci, the CDC and the WHO to rapidly conduct in vivo trials to bring ivermectin into becoming a first line of defense for early stage Covid-19 infections and for use as a safe prophylaxis. For example, if funding were devoted for the rapid development of a micro-based pulmonary delivery system, mortality rates would have been miniscule and the pandemic would have been greatly lessened. Repurposing ivermectin could have been achieved very quickly at a minor expense.

[. . .]

Early in the pandemic, physicians in other nations where treatment was less restricted, such as Spain and Italy, were sharing data with American physicians about treatments they found were effective against the SARS-2 virus.

In addition, there was a large corpus of medical research indicating that older drugs with antiviral properties could be repurposed. Doctors who started to prescribe drugs such as ivermectin and HCQ, along with Vitamin D and zinc supplementation, observed remarkable results.  Unlike the dismal recovery and high mortality rates reported in hospitals and large clinics that relied upon strict isolation, quarantine, and ventilator interventions, this small fringe group of physicians reported very few deaths among their patient loads. Even those deaths reported were more often than not compounded by patients’ comorbidities, poor medical facilities and other anomalies.

Very early into the pandemic, medical papers were showing that ivermectin was a highly effective drug to treat SARS-2 infections. In April 2020, less than a month after the WHO declared Covid-19 as a global pandemic, Australian researchers at the Peter Doherty Institute of Infection and Immunity had published their paper “The FDA- approved drug ivermectin inhibits the replication of SARS-CoV-2 virus in vitro.” Monash University’s Biomedicine Discovery Institute in Australia had also published an early study that ivermectin destroyed SARS-2 infected cell cultures by 99.8 percent within 48 hours. But no government health official paid any attention.

[. . .]

Although the EUA amendment provides some protections to authorized drug and vaccine manufacturers, it was the Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (PREP) in 2005 that expanded liability protections. In addition to protecting private corporations, PREP also shields company executives and employees from claims of personal injury or death resulting from the administration of authorized countermeasures. The only exceptions for liability are if the company or its executive offices are proven to have engaged in intentional and/or criminal misconduct with conscious disregard for the rights and safety of those taking their drugs and vaccines.

During the pandemic, the FDA issued widespread EUAs with liability immunity for the PCR diagnostic kits for SARS-2, the mRNA vaccines and anti-Covid-19 drugs such as Remdesivir, molnupiravir and Paxlovid.  Even the PCR test failed to go through a robust evaluation to determine whether it could accurately predict a SARS-2 infection. Curiously, the Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services invoked the PREP Act on February 4, 2020 giving liability protections; this was over a month before the pandemic was officially announced, which raises serious questions about prior-planning before the viral outbreak in Wuhan, China.

From the pandemic’s outset, Fauci embarked on the media circuit to promise Americans that federal health agencies were doing everything within their means to get a vaccine on the market because there was no available drug to clear SARS-2 virus infections. As we have seen with respect to ivermectin alone, this was patently false. Rather the government placed an overriding emphasis on vaccination with a near total disregard for implementing very simple preventative measures to inhibit infections from progressing. Once mass vaccinations were underway, we were promised that the SARS-2 virus would be defeated and life would return to normal. In retrospect, we can look back and state with a degree of certainty that American health authorities and these products’ corporate manufacturers may have violated almost every EUA requirement. Everything that went wrong with the PCR kits, the experimental mRNA vaccines and novel drugs could have been avoided if the government had diligently repurposed effective and safe measures as pandemic countermeasures. Very likely, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Shortly after the pandemic was formally announced, and with no promising treatment in sight, the FDA recommended HCQ but then quickly reversed its decision in June after Fauci publicly announced the future arrival of Gilead’s novel drug Remdesivir. The FDA’s approval of Remdesivir baffled many scientists, according to the journal Science, who were keeping a close watch on the drug’s clinical reports about a “disproportionally high number of reports of liver and kidney problems”

Similarly the FDA issued a warning statement against the use of ivermectin. Although Merck was ivermectin’s manufacturer, the company discredited its own product.  Shortly after ridiculing its drug, the Alliance for Natural Health reported, “Merck announced positive results from a clinical trial on a new drug called molnupiravir in eliminating the virus in infected patients.” Molnupiravir has a poor efficacy rate across the board including viral clearance, recovery, and hospitalizations/death (68 percent). One trial, funded by Merck, concluded the drug had no clinical benefit. More worrisome, molnupiravir was found to potentially contribute to lethal mutations in RNA viruses. The drug also has life-threatening adverse effects including mutagenic risks to human DNA and mitochondria, carcinogenic activity and embryonic death.

And still the FDA considers these novel patented drugs to be superior to ivermectin. Favoring a vaccine regime and government-controlled surveillance measures to track every American’s movements, American health officials blatantly neglected their own pandemic policies’ severe health consequences. Ineffective lockdowns, masks, social isolation, unsound critical care interventions such as relying upon ventilators, and the sole EUA approvals of the costly and insufficiently effective drugs brought about nightmares for tens of millions of adults and children. Again, the FDA worked in concert with the pharmaceutical industry to increase profit and revenues rather than improve human health and assure patient safety. This was all undertaken under Fauci’s watch and the heads of the US health agencies in direct violation of the EUA requirements to only authorize drugs and medical interventions when no other safe and effective alternative is available. As we have seen, alternatives were available and these were well known throughout the government health agencies. Instead of acting upon them and awarding EUAs to HCQ, ivermectin and other potential off-patent drugs, the government preferred to submit to their pharmaceutical masters’ demands and the financial mills that feed the CDC’s and FDA’s coffers.

The 3-year history of the pandemic highlights a sharp distinction between dependable medical research and pseudoscientific fraud.

We witnessed the CDC adopting a common Soviet era practice to redefine the very definition of a vaccine and the parameters of vaccine efficacy in order to fit their economic and ideological agendas.

This explains Washington’s frequent uninformed decisions and its aggressive public relations endeavors to silence medical opponents.  According to cardiologist Dr. Michael Goodkin’s private investigations, several of the most cited studies discrediting ivermectin’s antiviral benefits were funded by the NIH and Bill Gates and intentionally manipulated in order to produce “fake” results. These studies were widely distributed to the AMA, American College of Physicians and across mainstream media to author “hit pieces” to demonize ivermectin. The government’s belligerent and reactive diatribes, brazenly or casually advocating for censorship, were direct violations of scientific and medical integrity and contributed nothing towards developing constructive policies for handling a pandemic with a minimal cost to life. The consequence has been a less informed and grossly naïve public, which was gaslighted into believing lies.

Now that ivermectin, and to a lesser extent HCQ, have been recognized by more and more physicians as part of a first line defense to prevent and treat SARS-2 infections, we can realize that the FDA’s EUAs for the Covid-19 vaccines and novel experimental drugs were in fact an attack on the amendments and PREP directives.

Neither the vaccines nor drugs warranted emergency authorization because effective and safe alternatives were readily available. No doubt a Congressional investigation would uncover criminal misconduct, and this misconduct and conscious fraud have contributed to numerous unnecessary medically-induced injuries and deaths. Moreover, these violations of the PREP Act may have the potential to lead directly into medical crimes against humanity as outlined in the Nuremberg Code.

Between 1946 and 1947, Nazi medical doctors were tried in Nuremberg, Germany. Known as the “Doctors’ Trial”, the court found 16 of 23 doctors guilty of human experimentation that involved conducting experiments with lethal drugs and substances, sterilization, forced euthanasia and other heinous acts. These medical atrocities were conducted on some of the most vulnerable populations.

Seven Nazi doctors were executed by hanging. What became known as the Nuremberg Code after the tribunal is not a legally binding document, however it has held significant ethical and historical importance for medical research and human experimentation. The Code is regarded as a milestone in the development of international criminal law. It has informed international and domestic guidelines and regulations on human subjects, and many countries have implemented legal and ethical frameworks inspired by the Code to regulate their medical research and protect their citizens from medical abuse.

Despite serving as the baseline for modern medical ethics, it is unfortunate that no binding international treaty or declaration has been specifically initiated that directly abides by all of Nuremberg’s obligations.  Nor has the Nuremberg Code been officially adopted in its entirety as law by any nation or major medical association.

On the other hand, other international treaties, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki (which is not legally binding), the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical Research on Human Subjects incorporate some of Nuremberg’s main principles that aim to protect people from unethical and forced medical research.

Although the US signed the ICCPR as an intentional party, the US Senate never ratified it. The ICCPR’s Article 7 clearly states, “No one shall be subject to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” which can legally be interpreted to include forced medical experimentation implied as cruel, inhuman treatment. Other ICCPR articles, 6 and 17, are also applicable to medical experimentation to ensure ethical conduct, obtaining proper informed consent and the right to life and privacy. For a moment, consider the numerous senior citizens in nursing homes and hospitals who were simply administered experimental Covid-19 vaccines without full knowledge about what they were receiving. And now how many children are being coerced by the pseudoscience of health officials’ lies to be vaccinated without any knowledge of these mRNA products’ risk-benefit ratio?

International organizations, such as the United Nations, have the moral obligation to investigate violations to human rights outlined in the Nuremberg Code. Now that it has been convincingly ascertained that Pfizer and Moderna intentionally concealed their mRNA vaccine trials’ safety and efficacy data and the government repeatedly lied to the American public, it is time to hold these parties to account. Forced and mandated Covid-19 vaccination violates the Code’s demand for “voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential” and the ICCPR’s prohibition that “no one shall be subjected without his free consent to medical or scientific experimentation.” Mandates to take dangerous experimental vaccines have ruined families, and livelihoods.

The US is also a signatory to the Helsinki Declaration, which, although not directly aligned with Nuremberg, shares much in common. The Declaration also shares some common features with the EUA amendment and PREP Act. These include voluntary informed consent—which is universally accepted, adequate risk and benefit information about medical interventions, and an emphasis on the principle of medical beneficence (promoting well-being and the Hippocratic rule of doing no harm). It also guarantees protections for vulnerable groups, especially pregnant women and children, which the US government and vaccine makers directly violated by conducting trials on these groups with full knowledge about these vaccines’ adverse events in adults. In addition, weighing the scientific evidence to assess the risk-benefit ratios between prescribing ivermectin and HCQ over Pfizer’s, Merck’s and Gilead’s novel experimental drugs conclusively favors the former.  This alone directly violates the ethical medical principles noted above.

However, the failure to repurpose life-saving drugs is less criminal than the motivation behind it to make room for a new generation of genetically engineered vaccines that have never before been adequately researched in human trials for long term safety.  This mass experimentation, which continues to threaten the health and well-being of millions of people, is global and can legally be interpreted under the Nuremberg Code as a genocidal attack on humanity. If the emerging data for increasing injuries and deaths due to the Covid-19 vaccines is reliable—and we believe it is—the handling of the pandemic can be regarded as the largest medical crime in human history.  In time, and with shifting political allegiances and public demands to hold our leaders in government and private industry accountable, the architects of this medical war against civilization will be brought to justice.

Jordan Peterson interviews Robert F. Kennedy jr.

The "rogue" Democratic candidate

Video here. (1 h 35 min)

>>>>>>

Update (24/06/2023): I heard a day or so ago that Youtube has taken the video down. Indeed it has been. No problem, see it here instead.

<<<<<<

Noteworthy points from Kennedy’s statements in the interview:

In the US, 70% of all newsshow adverts are from the pharmaceutical industry.

The pharma industry is a “criminal enterprise”. The 4 principal companies (he mentioned Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Merck and another one I didn’t catch) have collectively paid $35 bn dollars in criminal damages and penalties over the past decade. For lying to doctors, defrauding regulators, falsifying science and killing hundreds of thousands of people.

Pharmaceutical drugs are the 3rd largest cause of death in the US after cancer and heart failure.

Medical journals have become vessels of the pharma industry. The Cochrane charitable organisation has been an important counter-balance to this situation. [They recently debunked the myth that masks help prevent covid.] However, Bill Gates has recently started funnelling money into them, so he’s probably going to undermine them.

Kennedy thinks he has a chance as a Democratic candidate for presidency because polls show he would fare better against Trump than Biden would. However, the trick is to get this information out to the public, because the elite that control the legacy media certainly don’t want Kennedy to win (nor do they want Trump to win).

Biden won’t want to debate. Neither will Trump on the Republican side. So Podcasts and other alternative media are the way forward.

JP has this question: The Right knows where its “pathological” limits on the fringe are, and that is e.g. Holocaust-denial, racism etc. The Left does not seem to know an equivalent limit. Where does Kennedy see the limit of politics that can be countenanced?

Kennedy side-steps the answer (a bit of a red flag for me), he says he’d rather think about building bridges than disassociating himself.

JP clarifies that he thinks the left-wing idea of “equity” (equality of outcome) is pathological.

On the subject of climate warming, Kennedy says he definitely believes its happening and that man-made CO2 and methane are significant culprits. However, he is strictly against fearmongering and top-down, tyrannical solutions. He would remove all subsidies for energy and “use the free market”.

He exudes some naivete when he says that once the wind and solar farms are set up they will deliver free energy, all that is missing is a proper grid. I think he’s surprisingly wrong here. Solar panels will have to be replaced from time to time, as will wind turbines (and both will become hazardous waste).

However, interestingly he says that he is an environmentalist not out of fear for the future but out of love for nature (that chimes with me a lot).

Regarding Ukraine he says we have trapped the Ukrainians in a supposedly humanitarian mission. All we are doing is extending the war, therefore shovelling money into the US military-industrial complex.

Christianity is now in a post-Constantinian era

Writes Justo L. González in the second volume of his “The Story of Christianity”:

One of the main issues confronted by all Christians in the twenty-first century is how to live in the post-Constantinian era. What is meant by this phrase is that the church can no longer count on the political support that it enjoyed since the times of Constantine. As we have seen in the preceding chapters, in a process beginning with the American and French Revolutions, Western Christianity had to face the challenge of secular states that, although not always hostile, tended to ignore it. For Eastern Christianity, on the other hand, that process began when Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.

(p. 373)

“Question authority”

"Until we take over", the new authoritarians said to themselves

Writes Tom Woods in today’s newsletter:

What are the textbooks going to say?

That’s what I asked Scott Horton on the Tom Woods Show in our episode on the Durham Report [also here], which definitively exposed the “Russiagate” nonsense as the hoax any non-comatose person knew it was.

But here’s the problem.

American historians are reliable stenographers of the regime. They tell the story the way the Establishment wants it told. Can you imagine an American history textbook admitting that in their zeal to get Trump, entire agencies compromised themselves and major political figures fabricated bizarre stories of Russian collusion?

Historians — some of whom probably once believed the old leftist slogan “question authority” — dearly love the FBI, the CIA, all these agencies. A handful tell bad stories about them from the past, but those stories from the past evidently inspire zero skepticism about them among historians today.

“Question authority” was never meant to be taken seriously. It meant: undermine authority until we take over, and then use that authority to entrench ourselves via lies and dirty tricks.

Matt Taibbi has been on the left his whole life, and has no particular reason to want to exonerate Donald Trump. Except for one thing: he dislikes lies and liars.

Here’s Taibbi’s response to the report:

“I read Special Counsel John Durham’s ‘Report on Matters Related to Intelligence Activities and Investigations Arising Out of the 2016 Presidential Campaigns’ yesterday in a state I can only describe as psychic exhaustion. As Sue Schmidt’s ‘Eight Key Takeaways’ summary shows, the stuff in this report should kill the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory ten times over, but we know better than that. This story never dies. Every time you shoot at it, it splits into six new deep state fantasies.

“I’ve given up. Nearly seven years ago this idiotic tale dropped in my relatively uncomplicated life like a grenade, upending professional relationships, friendships, even family life. Those of us in media who were skeptics or even just uninterested were cast out as from a religious sect — colleagues unironically called us ‘denialists’ — denounced in the best case as pathological wreckers and refuseniks, in the worst as literal agents of the FSB.”

I myself hear the words “Russian disinformation” or “Russian asset” or “Russian talking points” and instantly think: I am speaking to a very low-IQ, highly suggestible person, who repeats whatever phrases are fed to him.

Time after time these fantasies of Russian conspiracies have proven false, and yet the story won’t go away.

Here’s hoping this time they’re slayed for good — heck, even Anderson Cooper admitted the report was “devastating” to the FBI.