#132: 50 States not in a Roe (Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying DarkHorse Livestream)
In this 132nd in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we discuss the state of the world through an evolutionary lens. This week, we discuss the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and how both individuals and political entities on both “sides” are responding to it. We discuss the implications of whether other organisms might use abortifacients, and how fuzzy categories are revealed with the discovery of a giant bacterium. We discuss whether ...
- Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast, live stream number 132, not even close to prime.
We are obviously in a remote location.
It has, I believe we've got the tech set up to work properly, but we are a little bit hobbled by some of the constraints of this location.
Anyway, please bear with us.
We are excited to be podcasting from here.
A slight delay for those of you who are watching live, but I think it's all good to go.
I think it's all good to go.
Any snoring that you hear is not coming from your own living room, I hope, but it is coming from our lovely Labrador, who is just off screen here.
And indeed, yes, here you go.
I don't think we can guarantee them that any snoring they hear is not in their own living room, because there could be somebody snoring there as well.
Okay, there she is.
You see, the dog is for real.
Yeah.
So today we're going to talk a bit about Roe being overturned.
As we had good reason to think it was going to be, and we talked about extensively in an earlier episode, we're going to be talking about Twitter-sanctioned violence.
And a bit about the CDC and VAERS.
That's a lot of initials.
That's the Centers for Disease Control.
Or is it the Center?
No, it's the Centers for Disease Control and, of course, the Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System.
And the connections between all of those things, which, interestingly, this week they all do link up.
Indeed, as is so often the case.
So we will, despite being from an unusual place because we're doing it this normal time, we will do a Q&A right afterwards.
You can ask questions at darkhorseemissions.com.
We encourage you to seek out A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century, which is now available not just in English, which is the language we wrote it in, but also in Spanish and in French.
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But if you'd rather wait a week or two, we're going to have a brand new store with more consistent quality and a little bit less censorship.
So we're excited about that.
A lot less censorship.
Yeah, actually a lot like Infinitely less?
Infinitely little.
How's that?
I'm not infinitely little.
I always point you to Natural Selections, which is where I do my sub stack.
I was talking last week about discussion of sex versus ancestry, understanding our ancestry from an individual perspective versus a population perspective, the kind of thinking that one has to begin to gain facility with in order to think evolutionarily.
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Very tomorrow, very tomorrow, so very tomorrow is our monthly private Q&A, which we'll be doing at 11 o'clock, 11 a.m.
to 1 p.m.
Pacific Time, from the same location where we're coming to you at from now.
At from.
At from, yes.
It's very colloquial around here.
I guess it is.
The questions have already been asked for that, but it's a small enough group that we're able to engage with the chat and answer questions sometimes that come up there, so it's a lot of fun.
You can find access to that at my Patreon.
Next weekend, Brett will be doing conversations associated with his Patreon.
And you can also access our wonderful Discord community at either of them.
You can engage in honest conversations about difficult topics, join a book club, unwind with virtual happy hours, and even karaoke!
This is from people on the Discord who tell me this.
Young or old, left or right, there's a spot for you around the campfire.
One more note I forgot to make at the top of the hour.
We are not going to be here next Saturday.
We're doing a Wednesday episode, Wednesday after next Saturday, so we're going to have a slightly wonky schedule here again shortly.
But we are here now, and like I said, we'll be doing a Q&A.
And of course the other primary financial source of support for us is our sponsors, to whom we are as always grateful.
We have Two brand new to us sponsors this week, and one almost brand new.
And because we're working without excess screens, without any nuts that I can see, I'm going to be doing the reads this week.
But I encourage you, Brett, to jump in and ad lib as you see fit.
All right.
I will be reading along in my mind.
Mind-reading.
Well, I guess you would call it that.
Yes, I would.
Confusing as that might be.
Okay, our first sponsor this week is brand new to us and we are excited to be partnering with them.
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Thesis makes no tropics.
No tropics.
You know, I hope I'm pronouncing that right.
Is it no tropics?
Oh, maybe I was pronouncing it.
I thought the no part was wrong.
No tropics is right if you stay in the temperate zone, I think.
Yeah.
No, no trope.
My God.
Thesis makes... New tropics.
I don't think it's new.
That's the point.
They don't make any tropics.
Okay.
Thesis is awesome, actually.
We're really excited to have them as a sponsor.
They make something that is spelled N-O-O-T-R-O-P-I-C-S.
I think it's pronounced.
Together, I think that we think it is pronounced.
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Yeah, I think it's very cool that they basically use a scientific method for discovering which ones might be relevant to you, not assuming that your mother's or your brother's druthers will Dictate your own.
So yeah, it is a pretty cool approach.
Yeah, indeed.
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That is actually the perfect way to describe the ideal senescence profile.
Right?
Yep.
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It's not naive.
It doesn't imagine that you're going to live forever or that you will have endless, endless, endless youth, but die young as late as possible.
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All right.
We'll be planning to start with Ro.
I think so.
Yeah, I think that's probably the right place to start.
So let us just first say we are at the 25th of June 2022 and the Supreme Court has just overturned Roe as was expected based on the leak from the Supreme Court some weeks back.
Which we talked about in an episode dedicated almost entirely to the leak, what it would mean, what abortion meant for people on episode 125 on May 4th, which was the week that the leak came out in an episode that we titled Alito Goes Along.
Alito goes a long way, right?
You can check that one out.
So now it has finally come to pass, and I think there are a number of things that I do not hear being discussed elsewhere, at least not as I think makes sense that we should talk about.
One has to do with the fact that the The Roe decision has played a role in American politics that will now change radically.
And we don't really know how exactly.
But I will say, as someone who has been very interested in the hazard posed to us by the duopoly and the need for us to escape that stranglehold on our politics,
that every time somebody comes up with a mechanism whereby we that every time somebody comes up with a mechanism whereby we might escape the hegemony of the duopoly, we are always threatened with, you can't do that because if you do attempt to do anything other than elect one of the main party What you will do is you will elect the worst of these candidates and you will jeopardize row, right?
And now there's a version of this on the right as well, but the basic point is because of the importance of row to both sides, There is always this sort of Damocles that hangs over us, where we are not allowed to contemplate any political future other than red and blue.
Which is odd, because when people are studied, it turns out that the vast majority of Americans are more or less in agreement on this issue.
We talked about this a little bit in our prior episode.
A fair bit.
I showed the responses, the results of some surveys that have been done that show the vast majority of Americans are in favor of abortion, but not under all circumstances up until the moment of birth.
Yes, Americans... Abortion with some restrictions, and we do vary in terms of what those restrictions might be, but the vast majority of us are not extremists on one side or the other.
Yes, more or less there is a small group that believes abortion should never ever be legal and people grow more uneasy with it the later in pregnancy it happens.
And that agreement among most of us is actually a pretty good match for what was in the Roe decision.
So there's a lot of people who are uneasy with The basis of the Roe decision, but effectively the Roe decision shows exactly this pattern where it did not allow abortion at any moment in pregnancy.
In fact, it was limited by trimester.
So we had this decision, but it was now overturned on the basis of the underlying legal questions, which we won't get into here.
But there is some question now as to what happens to us politically now that we have had the appointment of Supreme Court justices who were willing to overturn Roe.
The decision has now been overturned, which kicks this back to the states.
The states have now drawn battle lines where some states are ratcheting up Their laws against abortion in some cases very extreme restrictions and other people are Making provisions to provide access to abortions to people who live in states that are becoming more restrictive.
So now that that is happening at the state level, what does this do to, for example, our presidential politics?
Are we now at liberty to talk about alternatives to the major party candidates?
Or is this now going to become a new set of battle lines where the point is we must effectively restore Roe, presumably with a new decision?
My sense growing up in the 70s, 80s, but I guess my more adult sense of sort of the late 80s and 90s, was that hanging out mostly with Democrats, as I did, That we understood that Republicans were sort of a group of different special interests that didn't naturally have a coalescing shared set of values.
That there were the people who were there for anti-choice, there are people there for 2A, and others presumably, but those are the two big ones.
And by contrast, it was always implied, and sometimes explicit, oh well the Democrats have sort of a, you know, A platform that makes coherent sense.
And I don't know that to be true.
That's not the point of what I'm saying right now.
The point of what I'm saying right now is somehow, even if that was true back then, it seems increasingly, as is really hard to ignore at least in the last five or ten years, that is certainly descriptive of the Democrats as well.
For a while it was gay marriage that was the one thing that Democrats were told you absolutely can't Can't leave, you know, leave the fold for, but throughout everything it's been abortion.
This has been the issue about which we are not allowed to look at any of the other planks in the platform and say, yeah, but actually I disagree with so many of the other changes you're making over here.
What about everything else?
So this is a question, and I think actually the dynamics of the two parties changed radically during the Clinton administration.
So there was a time prior to the Clinton administration when, for all of its faults, the Democratic Party was effectively the party of working people.
And it represented their interests against, for example, corporate interests, which were naturally at odds.
The Clinton administration innovated this change where effectively they became a second corporate party.
They abandoned the issues that unite working class people and in some ways, as a mirror of the Republican Party that already existed, what they did is they adopted symbolic issues in order to drive people to the polls to vote for them, right?
It does seem like it changed in the 90s during the Clinton years.
It changed in the 90s and, you know, my claim, which some will take as cynical, is that effectively you have two parties that are involved in influence peddling.
Two parties that have a business model and their business model involves winning enough votes to have power and then monetizing that power by selling it to special interests, right?
And the fact is working people are not a special interest in the same sense that, let's say, the fossil fuel industry is a special interest.
So, now that we have two of these parties, these issues that are used to divide us are also used to motivate us.
And the key thing to understand is that the parties do not inherently need large numbers of people, right?
What they need to do is win.
You can win with a very small fraction of the electorate.
Most of the electorate can be tuned out and you can still win the same amount of power and then you can monetize it in the same way.
So in some sense, the parties don't care that they're turning us off.
What they care about is winning enough power to distribute to their actual constituents who are these moneyed interests.
But nonetheless, we are this week now facing a new landscape that I don't think any of us understand well yet.
We've lived under the sword of Damocles for so long that it isn't clear whether we will just see, you know, a change in the narrative and we will see the same motivation, or whether this will remove some of the motivation from one side or the other.
Right?
I would argue that in some sense that this likely, you know, is harmful to... Well, I see, you know, it's on both sides.
It's harmful to the Republicans, the motivation to get people to the polls to overturn this decision, which is viewed as essentially evil on the one side.
That is eliminated because now they've crossed the finish line on that goal.
But it can be used to suggest that it's even more important that we get no more appointees that look like the last four, I guess.
I may have that number wrong.
To the Supreme Court.
Right.
And there was, I think, absurd talk about packing the court prior to the most recent election.
It may be that this kickstarts that discussion.
But there was another aspect I wanted to raise.
There's something that haunts the discussion of Rho, and I almost never hear it discussed, especially on the left.
And when it is discussed on the right, it is discussed in terms that make it inaccessible.
And that has to do with the question of What is upstream of the right or lack thereof to an abortion?
And that is the question of how we are all to behave sexually, right?
Within this debate, Is the question about where is it that one's control over whether or not to produce a child is correctly exercised.
And the right tends to lean in the direction effectively of a more restrictive sexual environment is the place to control whether you get pregnant.
And in fact in our last discussion we talked about the fact that their position was incoherent if they are not also supportive of the right to an abortion in the case of rape or incest.
Right, because if you have that right, then the point is there is a control that can be exerted at the level of deciding who sleeps with whom.
But if we don't allow people to access this right, even when they've been raped, then obviously that's self-inconsistent.
So the question is, we've got two sides of this debate.
The left, the Democrats, Effectively portray the question of sex and who has sex with whom as entirely an individual decision.
And certainly many of us have some sympathy with that position.
On the other hand, is it really just a personal decision?
In other words, It has some implication for, for example, the spreading of sexually transmitted diseases.
It has some implication for the coherence of our societal environment over the presence of two parents in a household.
Really, I think there's a hidden debate here, which is what do we collectively believe about sexual liberty?
What is the right position?
And the left seems to favor a free-for-all.
And the right seems to favor a reactionary position, one that in some sense is maybe appropriate to a pre-birth control environment.
And nowhere do I see a constituency that is balancing these two things and recognizing that a free-for-all actually has all kinds of negative implications, whereas a reactionary environment makes no sense with birth control freely available.
Well, there's a lot there.
I mean, I'm not sure that I want to soliloquy back at you.
I think maybe this would be better done if we can exchange things a bit more dynamically.
But two things that I remember right off the bat in terms of how I would respond are your framing, which I think is accurate, although I think many people on both sides would disagree with it.
...reveals that, on this issue, the people on the left, as it were, the people who are pro-choice, at least the extremist pro-choice people, are really arguing for a highly individualist set of policies, a set of policies which is driven by individual needs.
And the people on the right, the people who are anti-choice, are in fact arguing for a collectivist position, which of course is the exact opposite of what we usually think of when we think of left versus right.
You know, left tends to be the collectivist position and right tends to be the individualist position.
And what we have here is the inverse.
So that's intriguing on its own.
And then I think there's a lot more to be explored with regard to what I think was your final point here around the reactionary move on the right to the social impact of obliterating the right to abortion, which of course the overturning of Roe v. Wade has not obliterated the right to abortion, but has obliterated the federally-procified, Protected.
Protected, thank you.
Right to abortion no matter where you are in the United States.
That is generally framed by people on the right in terms and with a clear ethos that is frankly not just reactionary but regressive, traditionalist, sexist, misogynistic.
And that in part is, you know, the fact that that is true is part of why, certainly not all of why, but part of why many women reject the argument out of hand because they see in it that there is also wrapped up in it a desire to maintain a sort of like but part of why many women reject the argument out of hand because they see in it
as if we are, you know, coming from, you know, a thrown out piece of the original man, which in the 21st century, in most of the 20th century, most people were coming to understand that this is not in fact the case.
And both birth control and safe and legal abortion do provide a freeing and empowerment such that women are able to have more agency with regard to what we choose to do with our lives.
But.
But.
We never hear on the left, those people, we almost never, I feel like I've heard little glimmers of this, but we almost never hear the other question which is, what effects does this have on society?
Which is the question that you are raising here.
And in part, sorry before you respond to that, in part because it's been I'm coming up with all the wrong words.
It hasn't been criminalized.
It's been sort of demonized.
The very conversation has been demonized because the only people who've been having it are on the right, have a very hardcore stance against abortion under any circumstances.
And so if you ever even raise the question of, let's just talk about what the effect of abortion is going to be on society, you get labeled as right-wing, even if you very much are not.
Yeah.
There is no room in the conversation, and maybe this is obvious, but it's like there is a telltale sign of a conversation that has been so embedded in a political environment that it's dysfunctional by its very nature.
And that telltale sign is that any step in the direction of nuance is punished, right?
Right.
And you know, I must say, and you know, you have said this on your sub stack, Caitlin Flanagan has said something like this.
Was it in the Atlantic?
But there is something almost frightening about the, um, The inability to escape a dynamic where you are either effectively enthusiastic about abortion or you can't even contemplate it for, you know, a barely implanted Zygote that is the product of rape.
And the problem is this strands all of us, or almost all of us, right?
In a conversation that we can't even have, right?
Do I want government as a manifestation of our collective will?
Telling you, you know Who you're allowed to sleep with of course not on the other hand I think anybody would have to look at the sexual environment that we have and say, you know It's a fairly decent test of what happens when you just basically suspend all the rules And the answer is it's not good for people.
It doesn't make them sexually satisfied among other things.
It's a complete failure in that regard What's more it results in us?
sexualizing very young girls, which doesn't give them the opportunity to move into the world and be serious about other things because it does instantiate this, you know, your sexual value is your value as the primary driving force.
So it's a very unhealthy environment.
And all of the tools that you might use to fix it are forbidden because they're taken to be a political sin in an environment where abortion is understood as the singular issue in which you have to have an extreme position.
Yeah.
Do you have that picture I sent you, Zach?
This is going to seem like a non-sequitur.
No, it seems like a lemur.
This is a lemur.
For those listening, not watching, this is an individual, Varisia variegata, ruffed lemur.
Individuals of this species, I don't think it was this subspecies, but of this species, lived on the island, Nosy Mangabey, just off the coast of Madagascar, where I did my dissertation research.
And there, this was in the late 90s, I was told by a local man, a naturalist, that a particular plant, whose identity I've long since forgotten, was eaten by Varisia variegata.
It was eaten by individual females of this species of lemur as an abortifacient.
Now, I don't know if this is true.
I've never seen... I don't see it in the literature.
He assured me, and I asked another naturalist, and he said, yeah, I've heard that too, but I have no idea if that's one or two data points.
I don't know from from whence it originally comes.
But the idea that apropos nothing, we weren't talking, you know, I wasn't talking in my very poor French and his pretty middling French, neither of us in our first languages, while walking around the rainforest in Madagascar about reproductive rights.
You know, we just we ran into a troop of these guys and he mentioned that there was this this plant that the females ate as a way to terminate their pregnancies when they needed to.
Whether or not that particular thing is true, it got me thinking then and has me thinking again now.
about the fact that it shouldn't surprise us if this and other smart animals find ways to solve their own problems.
And there are a lot of reasons that a woman or a roughed lemur might feel the need to terminate a pregnancy.
This issue has never simply been as simple as it's a life, which is what we are told, which is what the tagline for the position of the extremist on the right is, It's a life.
For some people, that is the issue.
Beginning, middle, end.
That's all you have to say.
That's all there is to consider.
But for most of us, it's not.
There's just more to it.
And the fact of there being two organisms involved, a pregnant female, in this case of a Lieber, or a Pregnant adult human female in the case of women.
That and a fetus does not acknowledge... I mean, it's not responsive.
The argument that it's a life is not responsive to, actually, what about the other life you're talking about here?
And again, I don't know if actually other organisms are using plants as abortifacients.
It wouldn't surprise me.
I've been told it's true.
I can't find evidence in literature, but of course the organisms aren't going out and putting stuff into the scientific literature, are they?
So, I guess I wanted to add this and a couple of other little pieces in here about how really complex and messy categories are.
How simple some of them are.
Things like female.
Very simple.
But at the point of whether or not women should have a right to terminate a pregnancy that, if they carried it through to term, would radically alter everything that they could do with their own lives and would likely mean a much poorer quality of life for that child, to respond to that with, it's a life, we can't have this conversation, has always felt like it is missing the point.
Missing the point, and I think your allusion to the recent debate over defining what a woman is, for example, is exactly right.
This throws you and me for a loop, because the answer is, well, this is a biological question, right?
500 million year history at the very least.
And so, you know, the necessary tools to even have the discussion are not limited to this moment in history in this particular species.
They are embedded in a much bigger story that has a lot of logical rungs on the ladder.
And this one is the same way, right?
The fact is, even birth is a bit arbitrary, right?
A human baby is not independent, even if we say it's viable because it can survive at this moment.
Survive means with the intense care of adults, right?
Very few people, right, a vanishingly tiny number would be comfortable in a society that has as much abundance as we have with people terminating their already born children because their economic circumstances have changed.
So the point is we already draw a line in which the point is we say actually you have to care for this individual beyond this point or you have to, you know, at least make sure that they are cared for, right?
So So, I mean, and this is a point that we made in episode 125 as well, and that I make in the abortion essay that I wrote for Aereo a few years back, but there, you know, there are two lines which can be understood as arbitrary as the lines on which policy is made, but they're not arbitrary in one way, right?
And those two lines, which are conception and birth, are both real, and also for apparently the vast majority of Americans, at least, who are the people whose survey answers we have access to.
For the vast majority of us, we don't see either of those lines as the lines that should be the arbiter of what should be possible, right?
Conception is a real moment, and birth is a real moment.
And most Americans anyway, and I posit probably an even greater majority of other human beings worldwide, don't view either conception or birth as the line before or after which abortion should be accepted.
Right.
The lines are not arbitrary in the sense that we can define a relatively precise moment.
They are arbitrary with respect, well at least birth is arbitrary with respect to development.
But you know all of the With the exception of people who truly believe that each offspring is preordained by an intentional god.
Right?
People who believe that are at least logically consistent to treat a zygote similarly to the way they treat a baby, because the point is the intent is a baby in somebody's mind.
But for those of us who don't believe that these are all individually planned and preordained, The point is, both of these arguments fall apart as you push them to the extremes, which means that we really are naturally in this middle ground, which, you know, it's not where you want to be, because it does involve drawing an arbitrary boundary.
But, you know, this is more or less, without the political dynamic, this is where people end up.
Right?
They end up increasingly uneasy the closer you get to birth, and most people would draw a line at birth that they wouldn't contemplate crossing, except in maybe very extreme circumstances.
But, I don't know.
I mean, I guess I would... I wish we were having the conversation about what our society should look like, and, you know, what the rules of interaction Should be you know my my position is that sex is a very important thing and therefore a society that treats it in a profane way is not a healthy society because it takes something extremely precious and powerful and
You know, renders it economic or frivolous or whatever, you know.
It's not mine to say for anyone else, but I guess the point is I think there, even if you're just a utilitarian, there's a question about whether or not a free-for-all Is actually net better from the point of whatever it is that you value from a system that has some kinds of rules or guidance about how you interact and therefore would treat this issue quite differently.
Yeah.
Rules to which are not attached draconian measures, such as we find in some countries still to this day.
But expectations around behavior that individuals of both sexes can abide by in a way that feels fulfilling to them.
And not just the fringe, not expectations that obviously benefit one sex over the other.
and keep one subservient.
But there must be a way, and this is wholly consistent with our themes in almost every regard, and the themes in our book as well.
We can't go back, both because we can't go back We've gone too far.
There have been too many technological and other advances, nor should we want to go back, because back wasn't all that good for nearly as many people.
So we must go forward, but we must not go forward.
We should not want to go forward in many of the ways that we are now being told by the so-called left, the so-called progressives, in which you throw over reality in favor of What, giving everyone a cookie and a star?
You know, it's infantilizing, it's reality-denying, and it makes no sense.
And the two options are not infantilizing, reality-denying nonsense, or regressive, misogynistic, you know, Lifestyles.
I'm losing the last word there, but, you know, those can't be the two options.
That's not what we're actually arguing about.
And just to go, I guess, maybe full circle, those are the two options that we would, that the two major parties at this point, and it really did feel, at least to me, in the 70s, 80s, 90s, like this was mostly coming from the Republicans.
But at this point, for sure, both of the parties are interested in having us believe that those are the two options.
Pick your hell, really.
You know, each side will tell their version of what looks like hell to the vast majority of us in the middle as a sort of a paradise, as a utopia.
But the fact is that most versions of the traditionalist, misogynistic lifestyles would be hell for most people.
And most versions of the reality-denying, infantilizing nonsense that the modern left is encouraging would be hell for most people.
And for the rest of us, we We are fighting for an ability to create a world that actually makes some sense, and that recognizes reality, and that maximizes the chance that everyone can experience an ability to flourish.
Maybe this is a strange segue, and you didn't know I wanted to say this today, but I did want to tell a brief anecdote from my own family.
Because in the wake of both me publishing on abortion in Aereo, I think in 2019 it was, so I think three years ago, and in the wake of our talking about this issue in early May, about two months ago, We got a lot of very good responses, but I also got some pushback from what I view as extremists on one side.
I got called a baby killer.
I'm very clear in the Ariel piece that while I have never had to make the choice, I was never in a position.
I was some combination of skillful and lucky enough never to have been in a position to have made a choice, but I am good friends with people who have.
And what I haven't said publicly, and I have asked him if I may talk about this, and he has said yes, is that my beloved younger brother is adopted.
And when we talk to each other, we don't refer to him as my adopted brother, and I don't usually introduce him in absentia to people as my adopted brother, although sometimes it's relevant.
But he's my brother.
He was adopted, he was born to a teenage mother somewhere in the middle of the country who loved their daughter, and who loved their daughter sufficiently, and had means sufficient, and had values consistent with She had been in a relationship with a dude some years older than her.
You know, classic story, right?
Like, very good girl in a good family who got impregnated by a guy who had no business anywhere near her.
And the family didn't believe in abortion, and she carried to term, and my parents adopted my brother within a day or two of his birth, and brought him home, and he was my brother from then on.
And I have always, and my brother has always, been grateful that that family made the decision that they did, and that That I have a brother, right?
And that he has the family that he has.
He, like me, is pro-choice, and he always has been.
And this is not an inconsistency.
This doesn't say anything about him wishing that he didn't exist, him wishing that he himself had been aborted, which would have been an easier choice at some level for that young 15 or 16-year-old back in the early 70s, just, you know, slightly after Roe was even made possible.
We can be grateful for that particular choice that was made, and also grateful that it was a choice.
Grateful for the human being that exists, and is my brother, and is my children's uncle, and also grateful that that girl, as have generations of girls since then, had the option to have safe and legal abortions, should they so choose.
This is not an inconsistency.
And I guess that's it at this point.
We'll just keep repeating the same thing, but it's not...
I think people want to trot out examples like Beethoven would have been aborted, right?
Right, but you can't do this.
We have to have an adult conversation and the adult conversation does not involve us breaking down into a puddle of sorrow for all of the sperm that might have met an egg that would have been someone great that would have changed the world.
That's not how it works, right?
The fact is People come into being, circumstances affect them, they become what they are, and looking back at an individual life and saying, well, what if a different choice had been made?
It's slight of hand, right?
I think it is.
I'm not sure I could defend that, though.
I think you're right.
I think you're right.
It feels like sleight of hand.
It feels like there's no obligation to say any of this, which is part of why I haven't said it before.
It's sleight of hand because the number of people who might have been but for all sorts of things, right?
Including just sperm barely having missed egg or, you know, having been a fraction of a second later to an egg than some other sperm.
The point is, do you want to do all those calculations about what might have been?
You know, your brain will hang up at the sheer complexity of the calculation.
It does not result in a coherent understanding of an alternative world.
Or do you want to be selective and say, oh, would you have that person not exist?
Right?
It's one or the other.
Either you want to understand everything that might have been, in which case you're going to be reduced to ignoring this by virtue of the fact that what you take to be important will be lost in a sea of other things that might be equally important or more so, right?
Or you want to say those who are here are a different matter than the thing that resulted in them being here, right?
You know, if somebody missed the bus and didn't get to a date that would have resulted in an important person having been born who we will never even know of because the date didn't occur, right?
Like, that's not a tragedy.
It may in fact be a major loss to humanity that a person didn't come into being as a result of a missed bus, but there's no way to calculate it honorably, right?
Yeah.
Well, and I think this is actually another example of the rise of the import of calculation and quantitative analysis of human experience over actually recognizing how diverse and complex we are.
Right?
Like, okay, you know, can you calculate that?
Well then, let's.
And let's ignore all of the things that we can't calculate.
Let's ignore the the qualifiable and focus only on the quantifiable.
And yeah, probably also put our biases in there, because once we, you know, fill the quantifiable with enough black boxes, it looks, it becomes hard for anyone else to come in and figure out what's been done.
And once there are, once there is a thing to be counted, It's easier to point to that and say that thing is precious than to say, oh, there was never a thing.
Therefore, of course, there was no preciousness there to begin with.
Yeah.
I mean, it's another version of owning the downsides of your own arguments, right?
If we're going to look at somebody who does exist and say they might not have, the point is that same calculation results in all sorts of people who didn't exist but for a thousand things.
It's cheating at one level to drag that in.
I would also say this is a question about which kinds of calculations you want to do, right?
A simple calculation about, you know, you do or you don't have this right and it's absolute or it isn't is absurd.
The fact is trying to maximize anything is devastating in any complex system, and so trying to maximize or minimize this right is a problem, and there's a reason that other parts of the world don't typically do that.
There are some that do, but, you know, Europe, for example, has, you know, they've found a balance point in general.
And it's widely variable.
I mean, you know, the different nation-states in Europe have different numbers, different numbers of weeks, usually, before and after which abortion is legal.
After which sometimes it might be legal in the case of saving the mother's life, for instance.
But some of the countries that we in America, who are pro-choice, have historically liked to trot out as evidence of having full reproductive rights, actually have fairly restrictive numbers.
Some of these are at the end of the first trimester or earlier, which is well before large genetic testing can happen.
That would be a restrictive step back for the majority of Americans who live in states where the state law is still protecting abortion at more or less the same level as it did a few days ago.
Yeah, and I do think it belongs somewhere in this conversation.
There is certainly talk in states that are eager to obliterate this right.
There is talk about preventing people from, for example, crossing a state boundary to seek an abortion.
Which I would be shocked if such provisions stood up to a challenge in the court because of course you have a constitutional right to move between states and so in any case I do think we are headed towards a world in which there will be differential access in different states, which is one reason that a federal policy might find itself on More solid legal ground, right?
Equal protection might involve people in all states having equal rights to procedures like this.
I don't know, but that is at least discussed as one possible basis for replacement for Roe.
But where we are headed, short of something like a federal provision that did protect this as a matter of equal protection under the law, We are headed for a world in which it is vastly more inconvenient for people living in some states than others, which, you know, does seem unfair to me.
It does seem unfair.
And there's also been wildly unequal access for a while now, even with Rose standing.
That's true.
On the ground.
That doesn't make it okay.
That does not make it okay.
We will see what happens next, obviously.
It's not heartening.
It felt like a very sad day.
We all knew it was coming.
And, as we said in episode 125, there are legal scholars on both sides of this issue who really feel very strongly, for instance, that women ought to have the right to choose, who feel that Roe is bad law.
Yeah.
Well, it'll be very interesting to see where we go.
I do hope that one thing that comes out of it is that we have a more nuanced conversation about, you know, what sex ought to be with respect to how we understand each other.
And I hope that we move in the direction of taking it much more seriously and honoring it rather than trivializing it.
I guess I would also, this is more at home, a while back in the conversation, but I also think that in that discussion, we really increasingly need to draw a distinction between collaborative sex and antagonistic sex and realize that what we are doing, that the free for all has actually we really increasingly need to draw a distinction between collaborative sex and antagonistic sex and realize that what we are doing, that the free for
Men have no intent to invest at all in the people with whom they are having sex, that that cannot help but echo what in the past would have been an antagonistic version of sex.
The idea of impregnating somebody and walking away is not a kind thing, right?
It's not something a decent person should want to do.
And the fact that we are now pretending that this is a commonplace behavior and that we should all want this.
Men and women should want to be having sex and not thinking about commitment.
You know, A, it's not clear that that makes anybody happier or more satisfied, and B, it's not clear that we should want a society in which that's the way people behave.
Well, it is, as we have said elsewhere, including in our book at some length, it is upholding men at their worst as the ideal to which we should all aspire.
As if men at their worst should be the ideal to which any of us should aspire.
You know, women at their worst, similarly.
It's just, this happens to be a men at their worst thing.
And women and, you know, good men or men who would only very occasionally consider going to their worst mode are all like, okay, well, it's, It's a free-for-all, so I guess let's do this.
And it doesn't leave people joyous, satisfied sexually or otherwise, or in good shape with regard to the rest of their lives.
I wanted to talk about bacteria.
Really?
I'm not sure that it really fits in here anymore.
Let me just, let me just very, very briefly, I can't, I can't, I had it all sort of worked in and I think we kind of, kind of flew by wherever I thought it was going to go.
But before we, before we segue into Twitter sanctioned violence.
I guess the point here is, I guess why I thought it belonged here, is life is weird.
And as biologists well know, but many people outside of biology, including other scientists, often don't recognize, the categories often have fuzzy boundaries.
And again, some categories don't.
Female and male, not fuzzy.
Intersex, fine.
That refers to the binary of female versus male.
But many categories do have fuzzy boundaries.
And evolution often finds a way, and simple rubrics are often too simplistic rather than sophisticated.
So as it turns out, I can't show my screen here, so I will link in the show notes this article published this week in Science.
The largest bacterium ever found, which is surprisingly complex.
It's bigger than Drosophila.
It's bigger than the fruit fly that is the model organism that's used in so much genetics research and other developmental biology research as well.
So, from the lay summary rather than the actual, like, the slightly more theoretical... Wait, wait, wait.
Can I raise one issue?
Yeah.
Okay.
As a biologist, hearing that there is a bacterium bigger than a Drosophila... Did you say that?
Yeah.
So, I'm not going to be able to show it, but actually... But here's the problem.
So, there's got to be some biological answer to this.
You're going to... It's good.
All right.
So, here, I'm just going to tell the audience what it is that has to be addressed by whatever it is you're about to tell me.
The problem is that cells have a limit on their size.
Now, bacteria are much smaller than eukaryotic cells, so I guess their limit in size is presumably not governed by this, unless the point is that the transport mechanism for oxygen into the cell is less effective and therefore The ability of oxygen to make it into the cell is greater.
So the question is, how does a very large bacterium get enough oxygen into the interior of its cell, given that its surface area per unit of volume drops the bigger the cell is?
How can it possibly exist?
So I've sent you a relevant picture, Zach, which is just a screenshot from one of the tables in the paper.
That's great.
That's actually not even the main intriguing thing, I think, about this research.
But as you will see, once hopefully this comes through, this image from the paper that was just published this week in Science reveals that while this bacterium is indeed longer than a fruit fly, in fact longer than a centimeter, Oh, it's like a pine needle.
It's super long, I think.
Wow.
Well, see?
There you go.
Biology works.
You can see that it would have to be something like that.
Yeah.
So Zag is still working on the visual for that.
When that comes up, it'll come up.
It'll be clear what we were just talking about.
But here from the Lay Summary, quote, we usually think of bacteria as microscopic isolated cells or colonies.
Sampling a mangrove swamp Voland et al.
found an unusually large sulfur-oxidizing bacterium with a complex membrane organization and predicted life cycle.
Using a range of microscopy techniques, the authors observed highly polyploid cells with DNA and ribosomes compartmentalized within membranes.
Single cells of the bacterium, dubbed Candidatus Theomargarita magnifica, although thin and tubular, stretched more than a centimeter in length.
Ah.
So that's all fine and interesting, and I love that you just did that live.
You're like, how is it possibly going to work?
You're going to need to have the oxygen get in.
So just to make it clear how this solves that problem.
The center of this long hair-like bacterium is never far from the surface, so the diffusion problem is solved by the proximity of all of the cytoplasm to the surface of the bacterium.
And I am reminded, of course, as all of our listeners and viewers will recognize immediately, of plethodontids.
Of course!
Plethodontids are a clade of salamanders, actually the largest clade of salamanders, and they are lungless, all of them, in the clade.
And being lungless, they need to get their oxygen into their bodies some other ways.
They're also fully terrestrial as adults, so they haven't retained gills as some of the the pedomorphic species of salamanders have.
But what they have is, like all amphibians, cutaneous respiration, which is to say they can breathe through their skin.
And as such, what you would predict for all plethidonids, for all of this clade of lungless salamanders, is that they are, wait for it, long and thin, that they're going to have a high surface area to volume ratio, just like this new giant bacterium does.
And anytime you don't have some additional way to basically pump oxygen into the body or do gas exchange via an active mechanism, such as most vertebrates have with lungs, you expect to have either a different solution, gills in water you expect to have either a different solution, gills in water where the oxygen is being pulled out of water,
Or a solution that has been happened upon a number of times, increase the surface area to volume ratio by making yourself long and thin.
The reason this came up for me here in particular, we may be just deep down a rabbit hole here, but one of the ways that this bacterium pulls it off is that it has Let's see, I don't have the paper pulled up because I can't show it, but if memory serves... Yes, there are, and this is just the last phrase in the actual abstract of the paper.
Compartmentalization of genomic material and ribosomes in translationally active organelles bound by bioenergetic membranes indicate gain of complexity in the Theomargarita lineage and challenge traditional concept of bacterial cells.
So to translate that, bacteria are what are called prokaryotes.
They don't have their genetic material encased within a nuclear membrane.
They don't have a cell nucleus.
And so what you have, boy, I can't remember.
One to two billion years ago, a long time ago, is the evolution of eukaryotes, which is to say the origin of a cell nucleus and the encasing of the genomic material of the DNA within that nucleus.
And so bacteria, they're simple.
They're understood to be simple, and there's no compartmentalization.
And so the organelles and the DNA are all just kind of free-floating.
Well, not so this bacteria.
So this is not a eukaryote.
This is a different evolution of compartmentalization of genetic material, but within what is clearly a bacterium and not within a eukaryotic lineage.
And this may well hold no interest at all for many people, but for me, this reminds me precisely of how our categories can be real and accurate and we can say, okay, we know what prokaryotes are and we know what eukaryotes are.
And what those things are actually describing is lineages.
And we've got eukaryotes with compartmentalization of DNA, and that starts to be what we think of when we think of eukaryotes.
Well, bacteria are still around!
It's like crocodiles.
Crocodiles evolved a long time ago and they haven't changed much.
It must be working for them, right?
There's a lot going on with a lot of bacteria.
It's a good design that it can compete with more modern designs.
Exactly.
They're sticking with what they've got, unlike humans who've been changing rapidly for a very long time.
Well, bacteria is a giant clade.
It's an ancient clade.
It's more ancient than anything that's eukaryotic.
Again, that has its DNA sequestered within a nucleus in its cells.
And yet, even so, there are some bacteria that have solved the solution of how to segregate, how to compartmentalize its working parts via a different but very similar method.
Yeah, so another way to say that is that the stories that we tell ourselves when we do a good job of synthesis, the stories that we tell ourselves are true and we can tell because when a lineage violates what we think to be a rule, it violates it in ways that are familiar because it's solving the same problem that its ancestor, which became a eukaryote, also solved.
So that's fascinating.
Okay, so I hope you learned more about this.
It's still brand new.
There's a lot not known, and of course it raises the question of why this bacteria in these mangroves is doing this compartmentalization of a bunch of important stuff when most bacteria aren't.
Yeah, that is a fascinating question, and why some eukaryote that had this trick on board by virtue of being a eukaryote isn't in that niche.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Right.
Okay, obviously it's time to talk about Twitter.
Yeah, of course.
Alright, so let me set this up.
A friend of ours, Dr. Rollergator, who had an extremely popular, ironic account in which he often said very important things, but did so in a highly stylized fashion that often involved him shouting in all caps.
And he is a real person.
Yes, he is.
Well, sure, he's not a bot or a crocodile or crocodilian.
He was suspended four months ago for advocating violence on Twitter.
What he had in fact said, I'm not sure if Zach is in a position to show Dr. Rollergator's tweet.
If not, I can just describe it.
Well, don't worry about it, I'll describe it.
What Dr. Rollergator said, I believe he was talking to Jordan Peterson and Justin Trudeau, who Peterson had taken Trudeau to task, and Dr. Rollergator suggested that, I believe this is right, that they purchase white leather gloves with which to slap each other across the face signaling the desire for a duel.
And this is odd because Twitter suspended Dr. Relegator and for four months has what presumably is just simply ignored appeals that this was not in fact inciting violence.
And it's obviously, you know, if you think about it, On the one hand, while it may technically be true that slapping somebody across the face with a white leather glove is violence by some legal definition... No.
No.
I don't think so.
I'm not a legal scholar.
It sounds like it would plausibly be assault, but violence?
Seriously?
Right, but here's the point.
One, a slap is Obviously symbolic at one level, right?
An open hand distributes the force over a large surface area.
So while a slap may not feel good, the point is it is not inherently designed to do damage.
But a slap with a glove is yet one more step removed.
from violence.
It is symbolic.
And then Dr. Roller-Gator's tweet is yet a third step removed in the sense that he was speaking ironically and was clearly not advocating that anybody actually slap anybody else.
So the idea of being suspended for tweeting such a thing, which was...
While still believing, presumably, that some people might deserve it.
Deserve it or not.
The point is, do we really want Twitter policing the question of violence if it views this as sufficiently violent that it is justification to suspend an account indefinitely?
Well, this takes a whole new turn with the overturning of Roe v. Wade, in which many people, including quite a number of blue check marks, have advocated outright violence on Twitter and not suffered the same fate as Dr. Rollergator.
I've seen tweets that advocate burning down churches, the building of pipe bombs, all sorts of things, right?
Now, that's actual violence being advocated by people on Twitter, and Twitter is doing nothing about it.
So there's an obvious conflict here.
There's a question about the application of the rule.
So Twitter ostensibly has a rule against advocating violence, but what could possibly explain Dr. Rolligater's account being suspended for advocating that someone buy leather gloves with which to slap someone else across the face when people who are advocating the burning down of churches or the building of pipe bombs are allowed to continue on with this behavior.
So I wanted to give you a chance to jump in if you had anything.
No, I mean this is, I mean I think as when we were talking about this earlier, as you said, this is one for me and two for you territory.
Right.
And as I've said a number of times, it's Twitter-sanctioned violence.
Right, and so this is really the key point.
On the one hand, what we have is selective enforcement.
We have a circumstance in which certain people, because Twitter views them as politically hostile, have such a low bar set that you can't even make an ironic tweet about a white leather glove and not be suspended.
But for other people, apparently there's no level of violence that you could advocate that would get you in similar trouble.
The point I wanted to make is...
This is not Twitter being against violence, right?
This is actually characteristic of something else entirely.
When somebody wants their opponent restrained so that they cannot engage in violence, but they want full liberty to engage in violence, that's not an anti-violence position.
That's actually a pro-violence position and a violent asymmetry that is being advocated.
And so I think increasingly we need to look at what Twitter is doing Twitter is, of course, not alone.
We've seen this on all of the social media platforms.
The idea that there is some set of rules in the terms of service that is understood to apply to everybody, but the differential application of those rules is actually nakedly political or It's political, but for a thin veneer, you know, a pretense of fair application.
And at what point do we watch these things being unfairly applied?
At what point do we just simply get to say, I'm sorry, a terms of service that applies to some users and not others is not the terms of service, right?
It's a weapon of some kind.
I think that's just simply where we are with Twitter.
We are watching them wield weapons against people who hold perspectives different than their own.
And who needs a social media platform that is willing to let you say whatever you want so long as you agree with them?
Not I. Yeah.
But it's what we've got.
But it's what we've got.
It's what we've got.
And anyway, it is ironically exactly the thing that leads to violence, right?
If you want a less violent world, the world, you know, I think actually Sam Harris has made this point, right?
We have two choices.
We can either learn how to talk Or we can resort to violence because we're left with nothing else.
So we better figure out how to talk.
And if the places on which we would talk or the paper on which we would write to each other are going to take a position that certain things can't be discussed, well, you know, they are setting the stage for a violent future that all of us will regret.
That is absolutely true.
You suggested at the top of the hour that all of our three main topics linked together.
In the transition between them, it's not obviously apparent to me.
So we talked about Roe and various issues around abortion rights.
We now talked about Twitter-sanctioned violence.
And next up, we have the CDC admitting something about what they've actually been doing, or rather failing to do, which they said they had been doing all along, with regard to tracking adverse events associated with COVID vaccines.
Yeah, so what we have here is a rather shocking revelation.
The result of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Children's Health Defense with the CDC.
And what they asked, unfortunately we can't show it to you because of our technical issues here.
You want to show the top page?
Go for it.
I don't know what you've got there.
You've got the CDC PDF from January or February of 2021?
Ah, so, okay.
What we have here, I believe, if I'm seeing it correctly, is a document From the CDC in which they discuss in early 2021 how they are going to analyze evidence of adverse events in order to discover whether or not the new COVID-19 vaccines are creating health problems that are worthy of some sort of regulatory change.
And what they describe is a regime.
I believe it is section 2.3 of this document.
three of this document, they outline a mechanism, I would argue, and our good friend Matthew Crawford has also argued that it is a very flawed mechanism for analyzing the data in the VAERS system.
But what they advocate as a system, the acronym is PRR, and effectively it involves looking at the ratio of different adverse events between vaccines.
So you take a new vaccine like the COVID vaccine, the COVID mRNA vaccine, and you compare it to a long-standing vaccine, and you see whether the ratio of adverse events that are reported differs from the prior vaccine.
And if it does differ, that might suggest if there's an elevated level of one particular kind of adverse event, it might suggest that something is amiss.
Let me just quote from that document that Zach just had up, the relevant portion, which you've just done a very good job of summarizing, but let's just have it in the CDC's words.
This is from the briefing document posted on the CDC website in January 2021, updated in February 2022 with minor changes.
This was stated in February 2022 with minor changes.
Section 2.3.1: Proportional Reporting Ratio .
CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.
PRRs compare the proportion of a specific AE, that is, adverse event, following a specific vaccine versus the proportion of the same AE following receipt of another vaccine.
A safety signal is defined as a PRR of at least two chi-squared statistics of at least four in three or more cases of the AE following receipt of the specific vaccine of interest.
I sped up because none of the particulars matters here.
It's the first sentence.
CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.
And then the next, the final little paragraph here.
CDC will apply appropriate comparative vaccines, e.g.
adjuvanted vaccines like Shringrix and or Fluad for adjuvanted COVID-19 vaccines and adjust for severity and age distributions where applicable.
And the first punchline here, which I have in front of me, I don't know, maybe you want to do it or I can just arrive at it, is that I'm reading right now from a piece written by Josh Gutskow, PhD, on the Defender blog on children's health defense, who says, you know, I was concerned about what we're going to find with adverse events, but at least the CDC said repeatedly we're going to be doing this PRR.
Yeah, for example, if you have two vaccines that have a high rate of adverse events but the same ratio of harms, it will be not detectable by this method.
Right?
So if a particular adjuvant, for example, created a given ratio of harms, and the ratio was therefore the same between two different vaccines that used that same adjuvant, you wouldn't see it by this mechanism.
So the mechanism leaves many routes by which it would fail to detect adverse events that matter.
But it turns out that's not even the problem here.
The problem here is worse than that.
We got a dog on the move, sorry guys.
A dog trapped by equipment.
There are more obvious and better ways to assess whether or not you've got an adverse event associated with a vaccine.
The advantage of PRR apparently is that it's simple.
There's a rubric already in process.
It takes basically a push of a button.
It really takes almost nothing to do it.
And what I just read from the document that was first put up by the CDC in January 21, updated with minor changes in February 22, said, quote, CDC will perform PRR data mining on a weekly basis or as needed.
And yet, when the Children's Health Defense put in a FOIA request, a Freedom of Information Act request, to see the results of the PRR, again, the analysis the CDC has said it would be doing on the mRNA COVID vaccines. the analysis the CDC has said it would be doing The agency wrote, quote, no PRRs were conducted by CDC, Furthermore, data mining is outside of the agency's purview.
The agency then suggests contacting the US Food and Drug Administration, which was supposed to perform a different type of data mining.
So this is jaw-dropping.
I mean, it can't really be a shock to any of us who've been paying attention to the absolutely unprecedented adverse event signal in the VAERS system and have been saying, all right, we are told that this system, which was set up to detect adverse events, is not reliable.
But then, if that's true, if they're not paying attention to this system, are they paying attention to no system?
Because it would certainly seem that you would need to have something monitoring adverse events in order to know whether these highly novel vaccines were doing some new major kind of damage.
What we have in this case is we've got the CDC telling us exactly what analysis they were going to perform.
When we in the public perform that analysis, we get a very alarming answer for these vaccines.
And then when a Freedom of Information Act request is directed at the CDC, who has told us that they intended to perform these analyses, the result is they tell us, well, they didn't do it.
Which means that apparently the CDC was not addressing the question of the unprecedented adverse events signal from these vaccines and was simply proceeding as if it didn't exist.
This is While going into public with the talking heads, the people who may have the right credentials but don't seem to know anything about how to do science or what it would mean to do so, making claims like, on April 27, 2021, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky stating that the CDC does not see any signals relating to heart inflammation.
Well, on what basis can that claim be made if they're doing no analysis at all?
Right.
I mean, you know, did you look in the couch cushions for... Yeah, I've seen no heart inflammation.
Right, there's no evidence of heart inflammation in these couch cushions, right?
So the point is, okay, you've got people who are charged with protecting us from adverse events.
You've got a system that was set up, which frankly is set up in such a way that it is very difficult even for damaging vaccines to trigger enough of a signal to get anyone's attention.
And in this case, you have an outscaled signal which does show up in this system.
It does not appear to be anomalous to the extent it's been looked at.
Who filed these reports?
It's overwhelmingly medical professionals and people involved in pharmaceutical production themselves who have filed these reports.
It is a match for what we see in the British yellow card system.
There's all kinds of evidence that suggests that there's a very serious adverse event problem and those who are charged with balancing the risks of a vaccine with the benefits of that vaccine are apparently blinding themselves to the very signal that they would need to analyze in order to decide whether or not the cost was worth enduring in order to get the benefit.
Well, go ahead.
Well, an image just came to my mind.
We hear terms that are used somewhat metaphorically, like rudderless.
The system seems rudderless.
Perhaps it's leaderless, where there's just a figurehead there.
And I think rudderless is wrong.
I feel like, to the extent that a boat with a rudder metaphor is apt here, there is a rudder, and there's someone in charge, and they've been told, just crank it all the way one way.
No matter what, the rudder's intact, and we're just going to steer the ship that way, that way, that way, always the same way.
And it's not random, right?
The bad information and bad public health policy and just bad all the way down, almost, with regard to responses to COVID at the public policy and public health level have been not chaotic.
They have been not random.
They have been not arbitrary.
They always err in the same directions.
And that is what suggests that we are not rudderless and we are not leaderless, but we are definitely being driven.
We are being driven, and we are being driven in a way that puts us in peril.
In other words, when they said safe and effective, those were effectively going to be the conclusions irrespective of what the evidence suggested.
Right?
Here we now find out what safe means, which is It means that they wrote that into the brochure that was, at best, their hope of what would be true, and then they steadfastly avoided the evidence that would tell them if they had been incorrect about it.
Safe as far as we could tell before we had any data, and then we stopped checking.
Yeah, it's unconscionable.
If even, like that even may be a generous interpretation from what we are now seeing about early results out of the Pfizer trials.
Right.
The other thing, and the reason that this connects to the prior two topics, is that we are in a polarized environment where those of us who have attempted to
Divine what is actually true about the costs and benefits of these vaccines, about the hazards of this disease, about the way in which you might risk stratify people and protect many people who don't need the vaccines because they're protected by virtue of being young and healthy, right?
We have been demonized.
We have been demonized on the basis that we misunderstood the evidence, when in fact what we are now finding out is that there was an effort not to see the evidence.
That, you know, of course it should shock no one that demonizing us was part of preventing that evidence from being scrutinized by anyone.
And the question is, what do we now do about it?
If this is what the CDC does, then what even is it?
What even is it?
What even is it?
From which agencies and on what basis were legions, really almost all of the doctors, being given their marching orders?
Which then, even normally free-thinking, often heterodox, very qualified to think scientifically, scientists and researchers themselves said, wow, this is a complex landscape.
I'm going to listen to my doctor.
Well, if the doctors themselves have been given information that was incomplete, that was dogmatic, that would not change in the face of evidence, then those scientists who are trusting their doctors are not acting scientifically.
They're acting as if the authorities would not lie to them and could not be wrong.
And so that is where we find ourselves now.
Those few of us who are many more than mainstream media would have you believe, but those few of us who stuck our necks out and said publicly over and over and over again, actually, this doesn't add up.
These policies don't seem to be a match for what we can see.
And science doesn't work that way.
And there's no way that consensus could have been arrived at so quickly and have it be a legitimate scientific consensus.
Those of us who did that and were thrown under the bus and demonetized and told that we were killing people and all of this, as more and more evidence suggests that actually the analysis either hasn't been being done or when it is being done, it suggests exactly the things that those of us who have been as more and more evidence suggests that actually the analysis either hasn't been being done What now?
Like, fast forward in five years, the next one of these happens.
Where are the people who are actually doing the science and can understand the science well enough to communicate it to people who are going to be making public policies?
Because if it's the same people with the same systems in place, we are in exactly as much trouble as we were before, and even more actually.
Because now it's really clear what proportion of the population is willing to say, okay, whatever you say, I'll accept, I'll accept your thing.
I trust you.
Well, there's that for the next pandemic.
There's also the question.
I mean, what I don't yet hear is a mutiny.
Right?
The doctors who were effectively dragged into gaslighting people who were injured on the pretense that Adverse events were actually very rare, and therefore most of the people who walked through the doors of their doctor's office and said, I'm suffering from this vaccine, were effectively turned away, told that it was a coincidence, told that it was in their heads, right?
Where are the doctors who should be rising up and demanding that the CDC be replaced by an actual CDC, right?
That absence, I mean, you know, who knows?
This is a new result.
But I am not really expecting to see the doctors stand up, because the doctors have been dragged into something unholy.
And, you know, the question is which thing will now drive them?
Will they be driven?
By the Hippocratic Oath and the fact that they have been forced or induced to violate it by a CDC that was only pretending to be interested in adverse events.
Will they be driven by their conscience now or will they be driven by covering their asses and not admitting to all the patients that they turned away and shouldn't have?
That in fact they screwed up and there are adverse events.
There are lots of them and these people need to be treated.
We need to have You know, effectively a rapid bootstrapping of the medicine of treating the adverse events that come from these highly novel vaccines.
So I guess time will tell.
But I'm concerned that everybody has gotten so used to parroting the official narrative That this is, even though it is obviously jaw-dropping that the CDC apparently violated its own plan for monitoring adverse events and didn't monitor them at all, I'm concerned that that will be treated as just another minor anomaly here when in fact it is an indication of exactly what's gone wrong.
Indeed.
I think that may wrap it up.
All right.
I think that we are there.
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