An Interesting Documentary

by Robert Heid

.     I find the following documentary interesting.  I expect it will provoke reactions along a spectrum from “I thought so,” or “I’ve been wondering about this”  all the way to “This is totally fabricated,” or “This is just a conspiracy-theory.”  So I’ve titled it inconspicuously, so that only folks who are really interested in things, and naturally curious, will get here.

 

 

 

Bill Gates, Vaccines, and Robert Kennedy Jr.

by Robert Heid

Here is a current item on the vaccine issue in particular and medical totalitarianism in general:

Posted by Bill Sardi on LewRockwell.Com, it quotes an instagram post by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.   Here is the link:

From Robert F Kennedy Jr’s Instagram post today:

Draw your own considerations.

__________

Here is Robert Kennedy’s Instagram site:

https://www.instagram.com/robertfkennedyjr/

and his website, which at the moment contains his post, but might be replaced later

Gates’ Globalist Vaccine Agenda: A Win-Win for Pharma and Mandatory Vaccination

__________

 

— rh 9-Apr-2020

Something to Be Said for Alternate Treatments?

by Robert Heid

 

.     Three items here.

1.     The writer does not claim to be a physician.  Think for yourself and draw your own considerations.

https://www.avianflutalk.com/covid19-had-us-all-fooled_topic42434_post296389.html

2.  This one is anecdotal.

https://www.avianflutalk.com/i-have-good-news-for-chloroquine_topic41516.html

3,  This one is personal.  I have an acquaintance ( in a distant state) who, as a healthy thirty-something,  was hospitalized with serious symptoms of Covid-19.  He was treated with hydroxychloroquine and recovered in less than 12 hours.

4.  OH, AND ALSO THIS

Dr. Brownstein and How Patient Christopher Was Saved From Coronavirus – YouTube

 

 

 

View at Medium.com

 

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

Corona Virus and Guinea Worm

by Robert Heid

.     I am no medical expert, and nothing that I say here, or in the embedded post, should be taken as recommending any course of action.  I am simply reporting from what I have read.  I am not an authority on anything.  So why am I posting?  The answer will come at the end of this post.

.     I have just posted an article about the work that has been going on, for more than a generation, to eradicate the guinea-worm pestilence that scourged Africa and parts of the Middle East for a long time.  I began researching this a while back, before the the covid-19 virus ever appeared, and so this second (really the first) article does not deal with it at all.

.     There is quite a difference between these diseases.  One is very, very old; the other has only appeared quite recently– at least in its present form or mutation.  One, the guinea worm, is a reproducing parasite that grows only inside human beings, where it lives undetected for months, and can only infect a person who drinks larvae from previously contaminated water. It is rarely fatal, but it is always extremely debilitating and agonizingly painful,  It affects young and old.  Since it is a parasite, rather than a bacterium or virus, the human body develops no immunity to it — it can recur whenever tainted water is drunk.  And there is absolutely no vaccine.

.     The other disease, the Covid-19 virus, is different.  It can be spread more readily.  Insofar as it attacks the lower respiratory tract, it appears to spread from the lungs, primarily from coughing and sneezing, and likely from close breath-exchange, and from contaminated hands, hard surfaces, etc. As with other viruses, it appears that a healthy body can develop more or less immunity to it.  But before that happens, or while it is happening,  it appears to spread very easily and rapidly.

.     Once again, I am no expert.  The reason I am posting this, and its companion post, is to shed some light on the difficulty that public-health professionals and workers, (and the rest of us), have in facing and addressing this threat, and the reasons for the varied responses that are being tried (by them and the rest of us).

.     The companion article focuses on the very successful thirty-five-year battle against the guinea worm.  I believe it will not only encourage you, but will also give you a new appreciation for what the public-health people, and the governments who helped them, and the people they were helping, were up against.  You will draw your own inferences.   But history can teach us, if we let it.

.     Okay, the other article has now been posted:  Donald Hopkins, Jimmy Carter, and the Guinea Worm.   Please read it.

.     Now back to the covid-19 virus.  It’s here.  So:  Take your best responsibility for your own self, and the people you live and work with, and the larger world with whom you must — and yes, you must — come in contact, now and in the future.

.     We will want to talk about our different or similar situations, our different localities, our different political views, our medical circumstances, our religious convictions.  I’m quite certain we will.  It’s important.

.     But the time is now — and yesterday — for wise personal thinking and purposeful individual action on the part of each one of us and all of us, whatever that is.

— rh 2 April 2020

 

Donald Hopkins, Jimmy Carter, and the Guinea Worm

by Robert Heid

.     This is a story having three main characters: Dr. Donald Hopkins, an epidemiologist;  Jimmy Carter, a former President;  and the guinea worm. Let us begin this story by introducing the oldest character first.

The Guinea Worm

.     I’ll begin with a quote from five years ago from a website called PRI.  (I’ll be giving fuller, linkable attribution in the list of links at the end of this article, so you can see the fuller contexts, and I can give credit where credit is due.)  Now here comes the quote:

According to David Baron, Guinea worm starts with a burning blister, usually on your arm or leg. “Soon what emerges is a worm, that eventually, when it comes out, could be three feet long. It looks like a long strand of angel hair pasta and it’s excruciatingly painful as it comes out.”
“When the worm comes out, you’ve got that burning blister. Your instinct is to want to immerse the skin in water,” says Baron. But that’s how the problem spreads. “When you do that, the worm puts out thousands and thousands of larvae that infect the drinking water. If anyone drinks the water, it gets into their system and, a year later, they develop a blister and out comes another worm.”

.     The guinea worm has been around since the beginning of recorded human history; it has, for example, been found in Egyptian mummies, and was described by a Greek writer in the second century BC as existing in East African communities along the Red Sea. More recently, in the eighteen century the biologist-physician Carl Linnaeus noted its existence in reports from merchants who visited West Africa.
.     In modern times, it has been known to be a parasite that is present in contaminated drinking water. It has a life cycle of a little over a year: the cycle passes from human to water, then to water fleas, then to re-ingestion by humans, followed by an increasingly painful debilitation. Since it is a parasite and neither a bacterium nor a virus, there is no medication or vaccine that will cure it or prevent its continual return. The only known treatment is to break the cycle by complete eradication of the guinea worm in a locality.
.     In the 1980s, the guinea worm infestation was spread through about 20 countries all across Africa and into the Middle East. There were an estimated 3.5 million active cases yearly.

external-content.duckduckgo.jpg

.     Guinea worm, then, is a very old and very widespread enemy that is targeted specifically at human beings.  And many health workers have been mobilized to fight for its eradication.

.     Now to mention two leaders in this fight.

Dr. Donald Hopkins

.     In the early 1980’s, while in his late thirties, Dr. Donald Hopkins, an MD working with CDC, got involved in the battle against the guinea worm. He was motivated and already highly qualified.

.     About 13 years earlier, in 1967, at the age of twenty-six, he was appointed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control to go to Sierra Leone with the World Health Organization where there was an outbreak of smallpox, a disease that had been nearly eradicated in the U.S. in the 1940s, but was still present in several isolated places on the globe. Using a strategy of targeted vaccination rather than the mass-vaccination approach that was common among public-health experts at the time, he was to see the complete eradication of smallpox in Sierra Leone in 1969.
.     In a 1980 planning meeting of the WHO, Dr. Hopkins was surprised to see that there was no plan to attack the Guinea worm disease. Dealing with some apparent bureaucratic inertia, he was fighting a more-or-less one-man battle to get the project in motion. Five years would pass. But in 1985 the Nigerian government committed to eradicating the disease in that country. Things now began to move forward for Dr. Hopkins on a broader front.

Here is a video that contains the core message of this article. (It lasts about six minutes.)

 

.     So it turns out that eradicating the Guinea worm comes down to something very simple: filtering water.  But it’s not quite that simple.

 

Jimmy Carter

.     After leaving the office of President of the United States, in 1982 Jimmy Carter established The Carter Center, a non-governmental, non-profit institution to to advance human rights and alleviate human suffering.

.       For several decades now, the Carter Center has been distributing millions of water filters to people in affected areas.
.     In 1986, when President Carter and Dr. Hopkins began working together, there were about 3.5 million cases of guinea worm in 20 countries acrosss Africa and the Middle East.

.     With the participation of American manufacturers, effective water filters were designed and manufactured and sent to the affected countries by the millions. But at that point, they had to persuade the individual village leaders (village by village across the continent) that the method was worth following, because it would take the complete cooperation of a given village not only to faithfully practice water filtration, every day for a year, but also to quarantine the suffering not to go near the cooling waters to ease their pains, which could last weeks or months. And these were people who were (rightly) distrustful of their governments (who had track records of false promises and mistreatment of their citizens).

.     Now fast forward about thirty years.  The news today ( March 2020 ) is good. The eradication of the guinea worm is almost complete.  As long ago as 2015, President Carter could say with real hope that “I would like the last guinea worm to die before I do,” because in 2014, there were just 126 cases for the entire year affecting just four countries: Chad, Ethiopia, Mali and South Sudan. At least 16 countries had experienced complete eradication.

.     In 2016 the three countries that still harbored Guinea worm disease—which has no vaccine and no modern medical treatment—reported just 25 cases.

.    .Now, in 2019, only 54 cases were reported worldwide; 48 of them were in Chad. None in Ethiopia or Mali.  Health officials believe that, with vigilance, the disease will soon be eradicated globally.  (None have been reported in early 2020.)

____________________

— rh 2 Apr 2020 .   Don’t take my word for it.  Do your own research, your own thinking.

____________________

Links that were used in the creation of this article:

.     See also the companion post, Coronavirus and Guinea Worm, above.

— rh 2-Apr-2020.

 

A Friendly FaceBook Advisory

by Robert Heid

For those of us who appreciate FaceBook and use it frequently . . .

.     a) for staying in touch with old friends, and for making new ones

.     b) for sharing laughter, stories, and family experiences

.     c) for expressing religious and political opinions

I encourage that we continue to do so :

.     I know Facebook has helped me reconnect with long-ago remembered friends, and I’ve made dozens of new ones.  I like the pictures of the kids and the vacations and I like to laugh at the crazy jokes and memes.  Even the outrageous ones

But also:

.     If you like to have serious (or funny) conversations on controversial religious and political topics, seriously consider the idea of also having a personal blog, in addition to Facebook, such as I have (right here), where you can post with a much less likely threat of being hacked, interfered with, or censored (although there may be some restrictions imposed by your host).

.     Blogging allows more variety and length in your postings, and allows your commentors the same — and you have prior control in moderating comments.

.     And as soon as you’ve finished your post, post it right back to Facebook, as I am just about to.

— rh 29 Mar 2020

Maybe Socialism Isn’t Working Out Well (Again)

by Robert Heid

.     At least, not in California.  Or at least, not if San Francisco’s experience is an indicator.

.     Here is a link to an article from one who has lived there:

.     https://fabiusmaximus.com/2018/07/01/why-leave-san-francisco/

.     Your comments are most welcome.  It has been 40 years since I lived in the Bay Area, and 40 years is a long time, so I have no certain personal knowledge.  And the writer of the article could be very mistaken (though I doubt it).  I’d like to hear from readers, especially those who are closer to the situation than I am.

–rh 17 Aug 2018

The Trollery of Trump

by Robert Heid

.    ( I’ll probably get in trouble for posting this, particularly in the minds of some of my Facebook friends / acquaintances /  audience.  But that’s okay.  As I was coming up with the title of this post — which took me about ten seconds after watching a video — I thought about changing the wording to something more ordinary.  But when I saw that the word ‘Trollery’ was viewed by my spell-checker with a jaundiced eye, I went with it.  It’ll help to bring out the grammar-nazis, which will be fine. )

.

.     I’ve been pretty quiet about the Trump vs. NeverTrump war-hysteria, although I made my own views known shortly before The Election.  But today, when I saw this (admittedly old) you-tube video,  I had to laugh.  Again.  Which broke my silence; and I decided to post it.  So here goes — be further outraged!  Or enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=673&v=fzkBfTfiXS0

.     Why did I like it — just because?

.     No.  Because:  The Left has always, everywhere lacked at least three things:  a real knowledge of human nature, a real knowledge of history, and any sense of humor.

.     Above all, they lack any sense of humor.  They are the Serious Ones.  They alone Deeply Understand What Must Be Done.  They know what must be done for (or rather, to) the Masses, or the People, or the Deplorables.   It has always been the same call:  Arise, O Ye  Agents of Change! Fight, My Comrades! Shriek, Dear Sisters!  And they’ve been doing this for years, for generations, but few have bothered to notice.

.     What I think we needed here was a court jester — or perhaps better yet, a stand-up comic — to wake people up, to contradict the Standard Left-Establishment Narrative, and to ridicule the sleepy, ignorant, silly crowd that swallows it and follows it.  They are believing nonsense and acting stupid.  One way to expose them is to troll them.  And I think the necessary Troll has arrived.  He seems to be working out well so far.

.    Oh, I know: It’s Serious.  It Always Is.  But if you can manage to do three things, I think you’ll see things better:  relax, say your prayers, and laugh again.  And if you can do that, you’ll know that you have left the Left behind, because they do none of those three things.  Seriously.

.     And it is seriously funny,  when you think about it.  Donald Trump knew what he was doing all along.  He knew, among other things, that the Troll who dares to personally Drain The Swamp is going to be up to his ass in alligators.

.     And so it is.