Truth in the Time of Covid

 

Truth in the Time of Covid

©2021 Ross Williams

The popular news media are all on a crusade to rid the world of what they call “misinformation”. It often pleases those on the political right as well as us libertarians whose politics tend toward the perpendicular to believe that this media trait is confined to the liberal slash “progressive” [ironic term] slash socialist press.

It is not. This conceit, this arrogant impulse to be the gatekeeper of data and information, afflicts every news media outlet available. “It is news, it is true, only if we say it is. Anything which deviates from our position, irrespective of support or proof of the claim, is misinformation. If you try to give misinformation we will silence you.”

I'm currently involved in a pissing contest with a news outlet popular among conservatives and libertarians. It is popular primarily for not being CNN, ABC, MSNBC [et al]. The pissing contest is over a specific factual reality relating to the Kung Flu vaccines being pushed in the United States. Two of them, Pfizer and Moderna, are not vaccines at all. They are gene therapies. Johnson & Johnson is the only true vaccine in the bunch. The conservative news outlet – Newsmax – refuses to acknowledge this reality.

They base their claim that Pfizer and Moderna are not gene therapies on a defunct concept of what gene therapy is. Fifty years ago when molecular biologists first opined the notion of using genetic sequencing to control disease, they postulated altering the double-helix self-replicating DNA as the most direct route to their desired target. And maybe it is.

However, what they soon discovered is that when they screwed with DNA gene sequencing, they got disastrous results. Molecular instability. DNA was rendered into a puddle of proteins that no longer served as self-replicating DNA. And that's not to mention the theoretical result that a screwed-with DNA that was left molecularly stable might not be the same species when the screwing was over.

At some point between twenty and forty years ago, the research into gene therapy by altering gene sequences in DNA was abandoned by all but the true Frankensteins in medical research. Gene therapy research moved onto other avenues of genetic modification. It is a target-rich environment.

Genes abound in living cells. Only a very small portion of them exist in DNA as chromosomes. Most genes are in the RNA which control and regulate the other cellular bodies in plant and animal cells. And some are in the RNA which carry information between cellular bodies. These RNA – messenger RNA – mRNA – is what the Pfizer and Moderna injections are modifying, reprogramming to – without infection – stimulate cellular bodies to produce antigens to the specific protein sequences found on the surface of the Hong Kong Fluey virus. That is, by definition, gene therapy.

Yet the impulse to deny reality is strong. Even gene therapy researchers deny that their gene therapies are gene therapies. “The technology is closely related to gene therapy.” [Emphasis, mine]. Indeed. So closely related as to be indistinguishable in any practical, meaningful, legitimate way.

Their argument rests upon a juvenile – veritably lamarckian – pseudo-syllogism:

Gene therapy is the modification of genes in DNA to effect medical benefit.

If you do not modify DNA genes it can't be gene therapy.

Not even if you modify every other gene in the building.

Similarly [and where the lamarckianism is seen]:

Tigers have tails.

If that animal doesn't have a tail, it can't be a tiger.

Not even if it's a tiger whose tail was shot off in a hunting accident.

Let's just ignore the part where the major premise in each are merely notional constructs. It was only the initial [and abandoned] postulation of gene therapy that was limited to the genes in DNA. It is merely a commonality among tigers that they have tails; tigerness isn't defined by having a tail.

Their type of intellectual pedantry is unproductive and disingenuous. Are they afraid of the PR? “We can't have the hoi polloi knowing that we're modifying genetic code all throughout their bodies through these injections. Why, they'll think we're monsters trying to turn them into docile houseplants!”

Or are they simply stuck in professional hubris? “Real gene therapy as we hypothesized it two generations ago will have to wait until medical science advances; until then we've got this thing that waddles and quacks but isn't a duck.”

As for Newsmax itself, it is clinging to abandoned “science” for unfathomable reasons, labeling and thereupon silencing those who point out current scientific reality. Identify, if you can, a rational distinction between Newsmax and, say, Fakebook, on this topic. Or Twatter. Or indeed any of the labcoat fascists promoted by the political establishment which is pushing a narrative that a disease with a general population mortality rate hovering in the region of “a bad strain of influenza” is the second coming of the Bubonic Plague.

Is Newsmax attempting to save medical science from the public perception of frankensteinianism? “No, no, that isn't gene therapy, that's just plain old garden variety immunology.... Seriously, trust us...” Trust you? Have you seen the media's reputation lately? You're doing it no favors.

Or are they attempting to cut themselves a piece of the Propagandist Pie? “Hey, If CNN and MSNBC can cancel cult those who say things they don't agree with, so can we. We'll carve some little fiefdom in an out-of-the-way section of the subject. Really. Who's going to quibble this little point?” Um... someone who knows what he's talking about? Just a guess.

Or are they all – CNN and Newsmax, both – just part of a greater cabal, protecting some heretofore unknown information tyrant, each in their own way?

Why does Newsmax allow commentary which claims that Wuhan Fluhan is fictitious, that it doesn't exist, that viruses themselves don't exist, that the notion of viruses is just a mechanism for the Bilderbergs, or the Rothschilds, or the Trilateral Commission, or the Freemasons [who these types believe control most world governments, anyway] to control the world?

If Newsmax really wanted to control misinformation, they'd stop these crackpots from vomiting their ideas. But no, the notion that a virus is nothing more than an invention of the Illuminati in order to control the world is opinion. Newsmax can't squelch opinion because it is the “free expression of ideas”, regardless of how many anti-psychotics the opinioneer is currently prescribed. But someone pointing out the scientific reality that a medical treatment which alters the way genes behave is properly called gene therapy is, and must be, silenced.

Follow the science® right up until it contravenes a local orthodoxy. At which point, it is “misinformation”.

R.I.P. Truth. R.I.P. Journalism.

NOTES:

1] Yes, those are NIH links contained above. The same NIH headed by that paragon of prevarication MISTER Anthony Fauci. The NIH is only a repository of research findings and a source of research funding. They do nothing scientific, medical or health-related on their own, and at this point it's doubtful that any one of them could pass a pre-med class. They are administrators; glorified librarians [particularly with respect to MISTER Fauci] having access to boatloads of taxpayer money with which to pay hostile totalitarian governments for designing bioweapons that are illegal to design in the United States.

But they collect a wide assortment of very interesting medical research findings, to include the two erstwhile contradictory findings listed above. The one claims that mRNA technology is gene therapy, and the other [obtained from Chinese researchers] claims it isn't... quite... gene therapy. Another fascinating hunk of research found in their archives is that surgical masks, applied properly under sterile conditions in a controlled medical setting do not, in fact, reduce the risk of post-operative infection in surgical patients. Yet we are asked to believe MISTER Fauci when he says that any old hunk of cloth, applied haphazardly by novices in the filthy environment of their car's front seat before they hike into the corner doughnut shop will keep that person and everyone near him from being infected by Shanghai Shivers.

2] Pfizer, in its SEC filings, acknowledges that FDA definitions require it be classified in the US as gene therapy:

Currently, mRNA is considered a gene therapy product by the FDA.  Unlike certain gene therapies that irreversibly alter cell DNA and may cause certain side effects, mRNA-based medicines are designed not to irreversibly change cell DNA. 

EU has practically the same legal requirements, and it is recognized as gene therapy in Europe as well.

3] Moderna's SEC filing contains essentially the same boilerplate.

Drugs are Racist, M'kay

 

Drugs are Racist, M'kay

– or –

I Went Looking for Racism but All I Found was a Sad Little Cultural Appropriation

© 2021 Ross Williams

I've recently been made aware of yet another 'woke' conspiracism which claims that the word 'marijuana' is racist. Not marijuana itself. The word. Just the word.

My initial reaction to this notion is that its proponents are exhibiting the same cloying desperation of any narcissistic White Messiah who got into the victim savioring business too late to get a legitimate oppression to champion and were thus left to invent one. Or else they're stoned.

In either event, I looked it up.

Apart from the same old boring-the-first-time renditions of puritanical prohibitionists using scare tactics and the heavy cudgel of government power to impose pseudo-moral authoritarianism in the US [which coincided in origin with the ditto over alcohol, for what it's worth] being rebranded as racist when it was nothing more than pseudo-moral authoritarianism, there was nothing in any of the sob sisterings claiming racist etymology of the word that could be found.

Apparently, the word marijuana is racist simply – in a man-as-god spaketh into being manner – because it is. This QED didn't clarify at all my personal dilemma in the matter, deciding whether the folks pushing this notion are inventing monsters under the bed from which to save the world, or whether they're merely 'medicated' into incoherence.

An interesting phenomenon, though, is that easily half of the treatises on The Word Itself is Racist found online contains [usually word for word] the following paragraph:

…“marijuana” didn’t exist as a word in American culture. Rather, “cannabis” was used, most often in reference to medicines and remedies for common household ailments. In the early 1900s, what have now become pharmaceutical giants — Bristol-Meyer’s Squib and Eli Lilly — used to include cannabis and cannabis extracts in their medicines.

This suggests that its adherents are nothing more than C-students who hadn't studied for the exam frantically plagiarizing each other's essays as they utterly fail to answer the question that had been asked: How is the word racist?

I plowed on.

The website devoted to etymological sources was virtually no help apart from containing a lovely snarkism by my personal snark hero.

Dictionary.com was a little more helpful, if only to describe what the word is not. To quote: “the traditional association with the personal name María Juana is probably a folk etymology.” And Mary Janes around the world thank dictionary.com for this.

The English word cannabis is not English at all. It is Latin. The Romans picked up the word [apparently] from the Greeks, who spelled it [in the Roman alphabet] kannabis. The Greeks got it from [or gave it to, no one is certain at this point], variously the Hebrew language [qannabbos, or kanbos], Arabic [kunnab], and/or the Thracian or Scythian languages.

Or possibly the Greeks got it from the Assyrians [qunnappa], who got it from an even-earlier Hebraic origin [qaneh], which derived it from Sanskrit [bhanga], which loaned it to the Persians [bang].

In short, each term that is, or looks like, or sounds like, or resembles a truncated version of [and the horses they respectively rode in on] cannabis is nothing more than the Indo-Iranian language root's term for the thing. The plant. The herb and the 'herb', both. And of course, Indo-Iranian is anthropology-speak for “white”, as in caucasian.

This includes the Slavic [konopi] and the pre-Germanic [*hanapiz, where the “*h” seems to be linguist shorthand for the sound which approximates hocking up phlegm]. This baby-Germanic source seems to be a combination – even if only through wishful thinking – of the Finn-Urgic words kene [hemp] and pis [to burn].

The word hemp is, itself, a thoroughly “white” term. The Finns, as mentioned above: kene, gave it to the rest of the Scandinavians through the thoroughly Germanic habit of consonant-shift as hamp, or hampa. The Germans, being relocated Scandinavians, have hanf. The Dutch: hennep. The English, being dislocated Germans who were constantly ransacked by the pre-German Germans of the Vikings, acquired hemp out of it all.

'Hemp' is, therefore, nothing more than a truncated version of 'cannabis' that had undergone Grimm's Law. And it is completely, totally and irrevocably “white”.

On the other hand, the Mandarin term for the plant and most particularly its flowers is ma hua.

Thousands of Chinese people were more or less forcibly imported as laborers into the west side of the Americas in the late 19^th century, right around the time that the word 'marijuana' emerged. The Chinese laborers were, in social hierarchy of the time and place, inferior to both the American whites and blacks, as well as the next-rung-down Mexicans and Tejanos, or “Texicans”, most of which spoke one version or other of the native language of Mesoamerica: Nahuatl.

It is probably not a coincidence that the Nahuatl word for “manual laborer” is, through varying degrees of mistransliteration and variable dialects, mallihuan, which morphed into mariguan. It is possibly a combination of mallicatl [field laborer] and macohuia [to hire same]. [Many will claim that the Nahuatl word, mallihuan, properly translates to “prisoner”, but the mesoamerican peoples didn't have prisons, per se, and therefore had no use for a term for a person that they didn't know who or what he was. They did capture enemies in battle who were, technically, imprisoned, if temporarily. They were ritually vivisected and were called, in Nahuatl, teomicque.]

Does it really take a rocket scientist to infer the American mishearing of ma hua in close proximity to the mariguan who called it that, thus invented the pseudo-'spanic 'marijuana' out of it all? “Maria Juana” and “Mary Jane” become nothing more than uncleverly coincidental homophonic back-formations.

In order for a term to be racist it must, at a minimum, specifically mock a race. According to the wokesters, only “minorities” [as conceptualized in “the West”] are capable of being racistly mocked. 'Marijuana' as derived from the mariguan's ma hua only mocks the white westerners who couldn't comprehend what they were hearing out of the mouths of the one-degree inferior Mexicans and the Nth-degree inferior Coolie laborers.

If 'marijuana' is indeed racist, it is not racist toward those whom it is stylish to virtue signal on behalf of. It would only be racist to white Americans, and for the purpose of pointing out their cultural pseudo-superiority. “What a bunch of rubes!! They hear ma hua and they pronounce it mari-wanna!! Hahahahahaha!!”

What the wokesters demand be used in the place of 'marijuana'...? 'Cannabis'. A whiter term could not be found.

'Marijuana', as a word, is derived of an ethnic language. Two, actually. Granted, it is derived of a wholly misinterpreted hearing of those ethnic languages, but derived it nonetheless is. At best it becomes a white bastardization of a white misinterpretation of ethnic sources. There's nothing racist – in contemporary usage of the term “racist” – about it. It is a very tepid, bland and [if you'll pardon the white-washing] vanilla example of cultural appropriation.

In the end, I've learned a lot in this research exercise. I've learned much specific etymology. But more to my personal dilemma, I've learned that the pseudo-pious still insist on saving the world from goblins invented completely in the minds of the pseudo-pious. And I've learned that many people are too stoned to be able to answer the questions they were asked.