JOHN PRINE, SELF HEALTHCARE AND VAXX PROPAGANDISTS WHO TURN SHIT INTO GOLD

Shortly before 9/11/2001, I attended an all-day conference at NYC’s Hunter College, during which about thirty scholars/authors discussed the problems presented by accelerating globalization. None of the speakers predicted that Saudi expats would soon fly jets into American buildings and kill thousands of people and that, in reaction, America would invade and occupy two distant nations for decades.

While one of the speakers did observe that diseases would spread more broadly in a globalized economy, none forecasted that, twenty years later, a greatly over-hyped transnational infection would shut down and permanently damage many societies.

It’s still hard to believe what has happened over the past twenty months.

Though many conference speakers used their twenty-minute slots well, the speech I recall most clearly was delivered by the media/public relations analyst, John Stauber. Stauber has written five books, including the trenchant, albeit goofily entitled, Toxic Sludge is Good for You. Stauber observed, both onstage and in that book, that the American public relations/advertising industries have been studying and plying their trade for a century. Housed largely in Washington, DC and New York City, PR and ad firms are paid handsomely to shape public opinion. They’re good at what they do. By using misleading statistics, graphs, images, slogans and euphemisms, they can literally take shit and spin it into gold, as they did in Stauber’s eponymous case study about the profitable relocation of euphemistically labeled “biosolids.”

While Stauber’s style was more amusing than that of other speakers—who spoke about distinctly uncheery topics like weaponizing outer space and catastrophic water and soil degradation—Stauber’s message was perhaps the most discouraging: those who control the media can suppress and override truth, and control public perception. If propagandists get on TV and say “Shit is gold,” most Americans will believe them.

As with 9/11, who—perhaps other than Stauber and his ilk—would have believed that the government/media could have sold the public on nightmarish, ineffective lockdowns and mask crusades? The vaxxes increasingly feel like latter day PR alchemy, with Pharma turning shit injections into 60 billion dollars of gold.

The media has barraged Americans with vaxx propaganda. Most Americans have bought the lie that the vaxxes are needed to, and will, save humanity. Do pro-Vaxxers know any science? Specifically, concerning Coronavirus, how do they not know that this infection does not seriously threaten healthy people under 70, and scarcely threatens people older than that?  This has been obvious for 20 months. Yet somehow, most people have bought the fear narrative, believe that everyone is imperiled and that mass scale injections will make a virus crawl into a corner and die. Don’t they know the shots are failing?    

The central problem is that, even before the government, media and PR firms orchestrated the lockdown, mask and Vaxx fear campaigns, so many Americans saw the Medical Industry as God-like. Americans think they can't survive without medical intervention and that all medical interventions work well and are worth doing.

Using the euphemistic term, "vaccine," is a more specific form of medical propaganda. Most Americans see vaccines as sophisticated and effective; medical manna from Heaven. But the Covid "vaxxes" aren't even vaxxes; they don’t stop viral infection or spread. Nevertheless, because they're called "vaxxes," they enjoy a halo effect. With scant information or analysis, most people assume the vaxxes are great. They stridently demand that everyone share their enthusiasm and jab up, repeatedly. 

Overall, one might reasonably take nearly the opposite view, namely that Medicine is not heroic. Rather, it’s a mega industry--the biggest and most profitable in history--that turns every human ailment into a target to shoot some drug or surgery at, no matter what one's age. Often, Medicine is shooting in the dark. Not only does Medicine miss the target, it metaphorically hits things/people it didn't intend to hit. Many medical treatments, including the vaxxes, are linked to severe negative side effects, including many deaths.   

We’re all born with some level of vitality, which varies somewhat on an individual basis. Instead of relying on the Medical Industrial Complex to keep us healthy, we would should learn how to bolster our own health, and implement that knowledge. To protect ourselves against Covid, we should be active, eat and rest sensibly, go outdoors, take a few vitamins and eat some yogurt. But there's little money to be made promoting basic self-care. So the media sells Pharma and hospital ads instead.

Those who take basic care of themselves will likely live a long time. None of us will be on this Earth forever. Old age can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. I didn't develop this idea on my own; many old people have told me so. 

Let’s look at the ostensible, but badly overstated, Covid death tolls.

To begin with, sociologists have found that the average person directly knows about 130 people at any one time. (While this number seems low, it reportedly approximates the average number of Facebook friends). Assuming this figure is close to accurate, and that each of the 130 people we know also knows about 130 people, the average person knows, first or second hand, about 17,000 people. Even allowing for some overlap— e.g., everyone in your extended family knows every other family member—our indirect social networks, i.e., family and friends of family and friends, comprise many thousands of people. If your Aunt Jane’s pastor died of Covid, your Mom would tell you.

Of the thousands in my network, no one I know directly, and only four people whom I know indirectly, were said to have died with the virus. Each of these four was old and very sick with non-Covid conditions; none of their deaths was at all surprising.

I suspect that your direct and indirect social network data resemble mine.

In contrast, I directly know four people who have been have been hospitalized after vaxxing. In addition, a close friend died under mysterious circumstances after vaxxing. Additionally, people I know have told me of those they knew who have been hospitalized or died post-vaxx.

Based on such real-life social network data, I believe the vaxxes are causing far more harm than good, and more death and injury harm than VAERS shows or the media will report. Thus, I won't inject. I'm confident that, even if infected, I'll live many more years. So should you be. Almost no reasonably healthy, non-old person will die from this extremely over-hyped virus.  Nearly all of the old and sick survive infection.

During his speech, John Stauber made an important subsidiary point: even in the Internet Age, TV holds tremendous sway over American culture. He quickly recited a list of then-famous names, including O.J. Simpson, Jennifer Anniston, Tom Brokaw and about a dozen others, including Ronald McDonald. Then, Stauber posited that most Americans—even his presumably pop culture averse audience—knew what each of the named people looked and sounded like, and had an impression of whether they liked them or not, based solely on having seen them on TV. Though I seldom watch TV, Stauber was right: I had superficial, TV-derived impressions of those he listed.

Aside from TV’s propaganda value—exploited to the max during Coronamania—celebrities have a disproportionate impact on American media. Even their traffic stops become national news. We feel like we almost know celebrities; they are, in some manner, part of our social networks. Celebrities are a statistical sample that seems more reliable than what the Covid CARES Act-financially incentivized hospitals have been reporting.

Of the legion of celebrities, including thousands of athletes, past and present whose deeds/misdeeds become news, who, beyond the very old and frail Larry King or Colin Powell, has died with Covid in the past 20 months? If Covid were so lethal, more celebrities would have died with it. Headlines would have trumpeted this news.

John Prine was a folk singer and C-List celebrity. Of the thousands of people who might be called celebrities, he was one of very few who reportedly died, at 73, from Covid. Prine sang a catchy 1970s song about how to live one’s life, with this chorus:

"Blow up your TV, Throw Away your paper, Go to the Country, Build you a Home; 

Plant a little garden, Eat a lot of peaches, Try to find Jesus, on your own."

Song advice, like talk, is easier to dispense than to live by. Prine smoked heavily for decades until he needed lung cancer surgery, was very overweight, drank a lot, and looks very unwell in videos five-plus years before he died, "from"--- but really with-- Covid, in 2020.  He’s a clear example of the Covid death toll scam: a fundamentally ill person unlikely to live much longer, dying with, not from, a ubiquitous virus.

RIP, John Prine. But no reasonably healthy person—and especially no student— should ever have stayed home, masked or vaxxed to ostensibly—but not actually—protect him, or others like him.