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"Never ruin an apology with an excuse." -Benjamin Franklin
Tonight I brought my chicken noodle soup to my desk and played a video that Steve Kirsch encouraged everyone to watch, "before it just disappears."
The image of this talk is a powerful one, with scores of doctors and scientists on screens ready to speak or willing to lend their weight to the message. It amused me to recognize a scientist I know whose home I was in last week sharing data work.
I was half paying attention to the video while trying to "clean" my 11 browser windows (not kidding) with 200ish open tabs back down to a more reasonable and manageable number (that's like a 2022 challenge goal). But my ears perked up when one of the speakers, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, made an exceptional apology to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration for thinking that they were crazy and wrong when he now understands that they were right all along.
He didn't ruin it with an excuse either. He sounded embarrassed.
I'd never heard of Dr. Fraiman, but looked him up to find out that he is an emergency medicine physician, so I presume that he works for a hospital. That means that not only did he deliver one of the better apologies I've heard in years, but that he might have risked his job in doing so.
In other news, police in New Zealand are starting to share tears with protesters (via Tessa who fights robots).
Is It Over, Yet?
Ugly combat wages in Ukraine, shifting much of the world's attention. Historically, Russia throws troops into war the same way that billionaires throw money at problems, but perhaps modern life has changed the ability to wrangle up so many soldiers to run forward away from the machine gun fire? As a result, Russia is said to have lost 12,000 troops and a hefty pile of war machinery from a military force of 230,000.
Meanwhile, the internet has been shut off in much of Russia. Though just as Russia dumped U.S. Treasury bonds in 2018, they started architecting their own independent internet infrastructure in 2019. And China's UnionPay, started in 2013 as what I would call a "countermeasure" in the unacknowledged currency war, picked up the slack.
I sometimes ponder the notion that the world leaders might all have gotten together, shared their ugly war simulations, agreed about the utter chaos and destruction the next conflict would entail, and then scripted a series of dramas as their Noble Lie, complete with sacrificing some of their own citizens (mostly the "useless eaters" and inconvenient pre-robots). All because the Kunlangeta don't understand how to manage society without miseducating it, and then destroying it.
Along that thread, I wonder if those of us willing to track the details and speak out are primarily guilty in their eyes of messing up the ordering of the scenes.
I'm not saying that's the only hypothesis worth thinking through, of course, but it's one of them.
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Dear Mathew
I am happy you appreciated the apology.
You didn’t need to look me up on google to find out who I am, you could’ve just emailed me directly as my email is on your subscriber log.
Sincerely,
Joseph Fraiman
I can't say for sure if I'm just traumatized by the actions of my (Canadian) government, but I don't believe this is the end of covid. Nobody has been held accountable and in fact they have successfully implanted the idea to the public that these were "acceptable measures in difficult times". I fully expect more mandates and more impositions as the public has showed that they don't really care about liberty or even having rights.
As someone with a huge passion for tools and technology it has really made me face the stark realty that the culture matters, and it much harder to change than simply adopting a brand new solution. I am still trying to learn what that means in terms of what I should do about what is going on.