Faith in the Wrong Hands
From lab coats to priest robes
The last 5 years have been especially tough on me. There are so many people I know who took the mRNA shots and months or years later were suffering from serious illnesses. To make things worse, the same people I tried to warn absolutely resented me for it. I was a conspiracy theorist, anti-vaxxer asshole to them. And my friends/family are incredibly educated, having gone through nearby university systems and working high-powered jobs. Okay, fine, it is what it is. Merry Christmas, we all parted ways. What I didn’t expect was something incredibly similar would happen with my religious family in Georgia. Instead of men in lab coats, this time it was people in priest robes.
What very few people know about me is I’m a war vet. I served in Afghanistan in 2005–2006. Nothing serious, I did my duty as a Humvee driver. I was called up after I finished active duty out of high school, and my job was to help make sure that supplies coming out of Bagram Air Base were delivered safely to whatever destination those supplies/personnel needed to go.
What I didn’t know at the time, serving in my mid-twenties, was that the Taliban had banned opium production in 2000. By the mid-2000s, Afghanistan would go on to produce the overwhelming majority of the world’s opium, something that would eventually intersect with the lives of millions of Americans as the opioid crisis exploded and companies like Purdue Pharma, owned by the Sackler family, wreaked havoc through aggressive opioid marketing. A good book for understanding how Afghanistan’s economy was deeply shaped by opium production is Funding the Enemy by Douglas A. Wissing. My larger point is that, in my youth, I was tricked into believing I was doing something good for my country, but ultimately I was a cog in an insane policy that killed so many.
What really bothers me is watching good people be taken advantage of. I don’t blame my friends for shunning me. As far as they knew, I was indeed causing harm, that vaccine hesitancy would kill grandma, that people like me were creating a collective action problem. Similarly, I feel the same way with my relatives in Georgia. They see what is happening in the Middle East, whether it is Gaza, Lebanon, or Iran, and to them it’s all part of a greater plan. And just like with my friends, I am once again part of the problem. It sucks feeling helpless, watching people you care about place their trust so fully in systems or institutions that may not deserve it, while every attempt to warn them only pushes them further away.
The odd thing is how similar these experiences feel. In both cases—whether it was mRNA or the broader propaganda surrounding Zionism—you have highly educated, intelligent people placing enormous faith in an authority structure they believe is fundamentally moral or credible. In one case, faith in scientific institutions; in the other, faith in religious or ideological frameworks. To question either is often treated not merely as disagreement, but as heresy. And that, to me, is the deeper pattern: how difficult it is for good people to imagine that those in lab coats or priest robes could be wrong, deceived, compromised, or serving something far different than the public believes.
We have "cartesian blinders being put on us so that we are trying to make sense out of scraps of information and hints." - @bretweinstein
WEINSTEIN: I mean, even if you have your villains who are engaged in the behavior that motivated this war in Iran, even if that's the story, presumably most of the people in the path of these ferocious bombings that he is describing are not deserving of going back to the Stone Age.
In fact, I distinctly remember him telling us that part of what we were up to was liberating the people of Iran from their tyrannical regime.
So if it's the tyrannical regime that justifies the ferocious bombing, then it's a tragedy that other people are going to be sent back to the Stone Ages with them. Right?
HEYING: It's it's not a narrative. It's an incoherent set of talking points.
WEINSTEIN: Yeah, it's a kind of cheerleading that is completely inappropriate from the perspective of the president.
Bret Weinstein discusses the Trump administrations "back to the stone age" recent remarks in the latest episode of The Evolutionary Lens, Episode 320 "Are we back in the stone age?" on DarkHorse.
Bret Weinstein explains, "If you stop businesses from starting here, and if you drive people so that they move elsewhere—even though it's difficult to do—then the point is the tax base dries up, which then forces you to become even more predatory for the people who stayed.
And that's really the thing, right? They're setting themselves up so that they have to go after more and more people, because the people who are starting new businesses are not going to do it here."
We're running out of fertilizer!
Didn't I read somewhere that Bill Gate's new corn doesn't need fertilizer? Wouldn't it be funny if he already has trucks standing by filled and ready to go?
I say, "Here comes the emergency that pushes the need". Don't forget to say thanks when you're spitting out fish gills while eating your government corn ration.
First the food, then comes the CBDC's, all while the world screams NOoooooooo!!!
This. So much THIS. He's searched the same places I have my whole adult life. I used to be quite a proficient lucid dreamer... and would tell ppl that waking up in this waking life is very similar. They are fleeting moments, but they've stunned me to my bones - and filled me with true awe. Our brains are filters. Useful ones, indeed... but only that.
