I haven’t had time to write a post this week as I’ve been focusing on the final edit of my upcoming book Archetypology, Volume 1: The Archetypal Study of Human Nature (note: it better be the “final” edit or I’m going to cry!) For those who are interested, this is the front cover:-
Also, I’ve decided to try X (formerly twitter) again. I haven’t had the time to post or do much of anything yet, but will be rectifying that when the book is done. For any X users, this is my account – https://x.com/SimonJSheridan
Sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction, or should I say, better than fiction, more entertaining, and more full of meaningful symbolism and crazy coincidences. What are the odds that the main mechanism for laundering money from the US government would be called USAID? It’s just asking to have an “s” added to the end, which is exactly what some wags on the internet did as the story blew up in the last couple of weeks thanks to Elon Musk and his team of computer nerds cutting off the money supply. I doubt that the jokesters know just how accurate the USAIDS moniker is. So, let’s tell a story. It’s a true one, too.
So, there’s this scientist called Kary Mullis who, I must admit, is exactly my kind of guy: an iconoclastic, fun-loving truth seeker. If I was going to write a science fiction novel with a comedic twist, I’d make somebody like Kary Mullis the hero. In between surfing, experimenting with drugs, and picking up chicks, he’d uncover the secrets of the universe.
I wouldn’t have to make that up; it’s exactly how Mullis lived. In fact, even though he got a PhD in something or other, Mullis didn’t go immediately into science but tried writing novels and running his own business, among other things.
Eventually, Mullis wound up in the biomedical industry and saw a lot of the shenanigans (read “fraud”) with his own eyes. While working at one of those companies, he invented the Polymerase Chain Procedure (PCR). He later won the Nobel Prize for his troubles. The PCR was never designed as a diagnostic tool for viral disease, but since Mullis invented the thing, he was hired in the 80s to use the PCR to research how HIV caused AIDS. At the time, Mullis was not an “AIDS denier” (or a climate denier, anti-vaxxer, transphobe, conspiracy theorist, anti-whatever-phobe-denier-theorist). No doubt he took the gig because it paid well, and who wouldn’t want to work on what was then one of the biggest issues of the day?
So, Mullis gets to work, but his employment is covered by grant money from the US government which requires some kind of regular progress reports. At the beginning of a report, Mullis writes the statement “HIV causes AIDS” but, as a good professional scientist, he knows that he needs to cite a reference for such a statement. He goes looking for the scientific paper that is the gold standard which definitely proves that HIV causes AIDS. He can’t find it. This is all happening in the days before the internet, and so Mullis takes the old-fashioned route of calling up people he knows in the virology field and asking them where to find the paper. None of them know. Eventually, Mullis personally meets with the virologists who have publicly claimed that HIV causes AIDS and asks them for the reference to the paper. Not only do they not know, but they are also clearly uncomfortable with the question. Mullis never finds the paper that proves that HIV causes AIDS, because it doesn’t exist. Apparently, he was the only “scientist” who had a problem with that.
Well, that’s not entirely true. There was at least one other scientist who also had a problem with it, and if this whole story really was a fictional comedy, he and Mullis would be a perfect odd-couple pairing. Mullis is the quintessential American scientist in the mould of Richard Feynman: iconoclastic, fun-loving, sociable, good with the ladies.
Peter Duesberg might now live in America, but he’s a German by birth and by temperament. He belongs to the stern, dour, but also sardonic German scholarly tradition, the kind of scholar who knows that most “new discoveries” are bullshit, but at least does them the courtesy of dismantling them with precision and attention to detail. Although they are very different kinds of men, what both Duesberg and Mullis have in common is a dedication to the truth.
Duesberg starts to realise that the whole HIV causes AIDS theory doesn’t make sense, and the more he digs into it, the less sense it makes. At the beginning, Duesberg’s contribution is limited to just asking some simple, straightforward questions of the theory. He gets brushed off in the same manner that Mullis did. But Duesberg is a virologist himself, and so he has many more opportunities to ask questions of the right people, including at scholarly conferences. The gentle brushing-off response starts to be replaced by something more aggressive. Duesberg doesn’t like that. He’s also noticed that a lot of these American scientists seem to be very wealthy. The ones who are speaking loudly on the subject just happen to have various copyrights and patents on the technology that is now being purchased with the government money that is being thrown at the “AIDS problem”. A lot of people and corporations are making out like bandits. What’s more, the whole thing is a boon for virology in general, which is now swimming in government grants. Even the virologists who are not actively involved don’t appreciate Duesberg threatening to kill the golden goose.
Most people at this point would have gotten the message and just dropped the whole thing. But Duesberg’s got that really annoying habit of preferring truth over money. This is back in the 80s, when the US mainstream media was not as in the pocket of monied interests as it is now. Duesberg gets himself interviewed on some pretty well-known media outlets. At that point he has crossed the line and openly challenged the virological powers-that-be. To cut a long story short, they proceed to destroy his career and reputation. Bear in mind, the very same people who were controlling the government purse strings were the ones who were pocketing a lot of the money, either directly or indirectly.
Sound familiar? It should. AIDS was very much the template for USAIDS, a heady mix of corrupt science and greedy capitalism. But most importantly, the whole thing was government-funded, squillions of dollars just waiting to be released like water out of a dam spillway. All you needed to do was convince the politicians and bureaucrats to open the gate. How do you do that? By creating public hysteria. Convince the public that they’re literally going to die and allow the politicians and scientists to become the heroes who are going to save the day.
Trust me, I’m a doctor.
No doubt plenty of enterprising people watched the AIDS dynamic closely and realised they could try the same trick with “climate science”, “gender science”, “renewable energy”, “Chinese bat soup” etc. All you needed was somebody in a white lab coat to take to the pulpit and preach doom and gloom.
In one respect, Mullis and Duesberg were wrong. (US)AIDS is a disease. It’s also not inaccurate to call it a viral disease. It’s not a disease of the body, however, but of the body politic. One of its main symptoms is when real scientists get their careers and reputations destroyed for speaking the truth.
It occurred to me during the week that it’s pretty much exactly five years since the Covid madness took hold. That in turn was about five years after Trump announced what would eventually become his successful presidential campaign. And now, of course, he’s back. It’s a fascinating collection of five-year blocks:-
Star Wars: A New Hope The Empire Strikes Back Return of the Jedi
This time around, Trump has actually assembled a team that seems to be a threat to the empire. What’s more, they seem to know what they are doing. Maybe they really can find and destroy the Death Star’s main reactor.
What has particularly interested me about Trump Mark 2 is the implications for the collection of societal forces that I have labelled the Devouring Mother. At the head of the list would be the effect on the Munchausen-by-Proxy-as-a-Service “health industry”. Trump has once again withdrawn US funding for the WHO and seems to be intent on cutting off a lot of other money streams to the various “NGOs”. If he follows through with that, that’ll be a hell of a lot less money for interests aligned to the “health industry”. Extra bad news for Big Pharma would be if RFK Junior gets his position at the head of the Department of Health. Some readers might remember that RFK was one of the few mainstream voices that spoke out against the Covid debacle from the start. That’s poetic justice in my book.
There was an even more telling exchange just yesterday that might seem trivial and yet goes right to the heart of the Devouring Mother phenomenon. Some journalist dug up a couple of inappropriate social media posts by one of the young men who is working with DOGE to find all the dodgy payments that have been getting made by various government departments, including this one to fund a Fauci exhibit at the NIH museum. More poetic justice!
Anyway, the DOGE employee was fired but then promptly rehired, which prompted this tweet exchange between JD Vance and a member of Congress:
What’s crucial about Vance’s post is that it’s as close to a direct repudiation as you can get to what has been the main tactic the Devouring Mother used for years, if not decades, to not just shut down public debate but destroy political opposition. Won’t somebody think of the children? If Appeal to Authority is a logical fallacy, then Appeal to the Children is the Devouring Mother’s raison d’etre.
Vance’s reply calls out the behaviour exactly as it is. “Emotional blackmail pretending to be concern” is the perfect description of the Devouring Mother’s modus operandi. When applied to her actual children, the point of this blackmail is to win compliance. The emotional blackmail angle works because it paints the Devouring Mother herself as the precious petal who will wilt and die if the children don’t do exactly what she wants. It’s the same deal in the political realm. Weaponised empathy is used to get others to give you what you want just so they can appear to be good people by not being cruel to a less powerful person (which is why everybody wants to be a victim nowadays. Nobody wants to be seen to hurt somebody who’s already a victim).
If that was all there was, Vance’s tweet would already have been a watershed. But he backed it up with a further point about the idea of children making mistakes and growing as a result. That also goes to the heart of the issue because the Devouring Mother does not want her children to grow. She wants to keep them dependent. Turning petty incidents into a matter for shame and punishment is one of the main ways to do that. It prevents the child from taking risks and thereby learning and growing. This is especially poignant because right now a lot of Americans are learning just how corrupt their government is.
It’s hard to imagine a more concise repudiation of the Devouring Mother tactics than Vance’s post. Given the amount of discussion it generated, it may turn out to be just another little sign that the zeitgeist really is changing fast. Could this be the end of the Devouring Mother?
On a related note, I’ve been pondering the idea that was pushed way back at the start of Covid that natural immunity didn’t apply to the “new” virus. Again, this is a classic Munchausen-by-Proxy tactic since it makes you think that you’ll always be sick and always in need of mummy to help you. Of course, it was never explained why all of a sudden natural immunity didn’t exist. But then again, nothing was ever explained satisfactorily with Covid. It was just asserted by hysterical people trying to shut down debate.
It’s occurred to me that maybe the people who pushed that line really do believe their own bullshit. There’s good reasons why they should. Denying natural immunity is equivalent to denying that life evolves, which is a comforting thought if, deep down, you’re really worried that the cookie jar is going to get taken away.
If you’re a Big Pharma marketing guru trying to convince parents that their children really do need 437 vaccine shots before their first birthday, then you want it to be true that natural immunity doesn’t exist. More metaphorically, if you’re a propagandist with the MSM whose job is to control the minds of the populace according to whatever the government wants this week, you really hope that there’s no such thing as immunity to propaganda.
But I suspect these kinds of people do know that natural immunity is a real thing and that people’s immune systems do eventually catch up with the mind viruses that have been used against them. Could it be that we are approaching herd immunity to the Devouring Mother? It’s early days, but it certainly feels a lot like convalescence to me.
A couple of months ago I wrote a post about how the government here in Australia is addicted to inflation since it is using something called “value capture” to finance infrastructure projects. That, of course, is just one example of the trickery that’s going on. We’ve been in a period of hidden inflation for several decades now, which finally spilled over into official inflation as a result of the covid debacle. The government’s response here has been to use public money to artificially reduce the official inflation statistics.
If I’m understanding the strategy correctly, we’re going into debt to reduce official inflation so that interest rates will go down so the interest on the increased debt will go down. This doesn’t sound like a winning strategy. In fact, it sounds like the strategy of the drug addict. It occurred to me that the analogy with drug addiction is actually more precise than I thought, and it’s worth sketching out the full cycle of addiction to know how we ended up where we are.
Now, obviously, different drugs have different effects. But the general principle that applies is that drugs increase dopamine in the body. Most people know dopamine is the feel-good neurotransmitter. It is a messenger molecule, and we can think of the exchange of dopamine as a transaction just like an economic transaction that involves the exchange of money.
Taking a drug causes a spike in the level of dopamine, which is why it feels good. In essence, though, you didn’t deserve that dopamine. The pleasant feelings didn’t come from activities that are beneficial, like finding and eating food, having sex, or achieving something. You just took a chemical. One of the problems with drugs is that they replace a positive sequence of events Do Something Good –> Feel Good with what is at best a neutral sequence Take Chemical –> Feel Good.
But the main problem with drugs is that they almost never remain neutral because the drug itself causes the entire system to change. The dopamine receptors in the brain are calibrated to the “natural” settings, meaning that they expect normal amounts of dopamine. The high from any drug comes from the extra amount of dopamine introduced into the system as a function of time. It’s the sudden spike that causes the problem.
Natural systems are incredibly adaptive, and the human body is a prime example. If the human body was not adaptive, you could just keep taking the drug and receiving the same high every time. You’d still get into trouble, however, because the cells of the body cannot handle the amounts of dopamine you’re throwing at them, and so they’ll just cease to function at some point. That’s why the system recalibrates to protect itself. It adapts to expect sudden spikes of dopamine.
This has two main effects. Firstly, the high that comes from the drug is reduced. Secondly, and more importantly, because the system has recalibrated itself to be less receptive to dopamine, everyday dopamine levels no longer do their job of mood regulation, meaning that the drug user’s general mood worsens. This combination can set off a positive feedback loop that leads to addiction if the user tries to make up for feeling bad by taking the drug to feel better. The system keeps recalibrating to desensitise itself, meaning you need more of the drug to get less of the high.
When we look at how money works in the economy, its function is incredibly similar to dopamine, and the same dynamic holds as with drug use. Let’s say you have an economy that’s in good shape and the money supply is 100 million. Out of nowhere, you pump in 10 million. Traditionally, this was done through discoveries of gold, such as the Spanish in South America. Nowadays, it’s done through a variety of measures that all amount to an increase in fiat currency. Part of the problem with that is that it happens invisibly like the junkie hiding away in the darkened room to get their fix.
The result of the extra 10 million is the same as the dopamine hit you get from a drug. It’s great the first time because the system is still calibrated to the natural state of the economy with its 100 million unit money supply. Whoever has possession of the extra 10 million can go out and buy lots of stuff, and they feel good. After they’ve spent the 10 million, however, the system recalibrates since there are now 110 million units of currency sloshing around but no extra supply of goods and services. Just like the dopamine receptors of the drug user’s body become less sensitive to the same amount of dopamine, the monetary receptors in the economy become less sensitive to the same amount of currency.
Once the initial high has worn off, the overall economic mood is depressed since the same amount of money now buys less. In response to that general depression, the leaders of society may be tempted to do what the drug user does and go back for a second hit of free money to solve the problem. If that becomes a habit, you get an economic downward spiral that’s almost identical to a drug addict.
And it’s that downward spiral that most western nations are nearing the end of right now. The actions of the Australian government are not really any different than most other countries. They are the final desperate scramblings of the drug addict who will do anything for one more fix. Which is why, to say it again, we are governed by junkies/zombies.
