Where We Are This Week 02/03/23
Djokovic, Eggs - different ones this time, and nothing but Pfun!
“Is this the beginning of the end?” a close friend of mine asked me earlier this week. It takes a lot of fortitude and rationale to not answer with a resounding ‘yes’. The military-industrial complex is purring at the prospect of another world war, multinational corporations are salivating over a potential economic collapse like the vultures they are, and the rest of us are living as if impending doom isn’t just around the corner.
But isn’t it always? Or at the very least it has been since the nuclear bomb was invented. We, humans, have the particular evolutionary traits of adaptability, and our ability to flourish beyond the wildest dreams of other planetary species. Yet, the trade-off appears to be that we also possess the power to eliminate our existence from the historical record with a few short moves on the chessboard. But we haven’t so far; that has to be encouraging.
I’ll answer her question with one of my own. The end of what? Does every generation believe they’re listening to the tolling of the death knell? While entropy seems to be a feature, not a bug, of the human experience so does negentropy. I mean, out of chaos, we’ve managed to hobble together some semblance of order. If that’s coming to a close, history tells us we’ll be able to find it again in the future. When the Roman Empire was in decline, somewhere the seeds of the Renaissance were being planted. In order for this to be an anecdote of optimism, we won’t discuss the period known as the ‘dark ages’ that interpolated the two epochs.
Where’d I come across these rose-colored glasses you ask? I don’t know, ask me next week and I might have changed my answer.
As always, I’d love it if you shared this article with a friend, leave me a comment on how you think I could do better. Tell me what stories you’ve been following.
22
In the wee hours of Sunday morning, American television showed Novak Djokovic lifting his 22nd Grand Slam title. The Serbian star won his 10th Australian Open and in doing so, tied Rafael Nadal’s Grand Slam record.
The match was, for the most part, one-sided. Djokovic beat Stefano Tsitsipas in straight sets, two of which went to tiebreakers, and on the court, victory never seemed in doubt. Politically, however, it was uncertain whether he would even be allowed to compete in this year’s Australian Open.
Last year, Djokovic was slated to play in the perennial early-season tournament while he was still tied with Nadal at 21 titles a piece. He was in Australia, training under the auspices he was eligible to participate when the deportation saga began. Djokovic was extricated from the county due to his Covid-19 vaccination status. Since then, the country’s draconian restrictions have eased and he was able to attend the tournament - one that Djokovic has dominated his entire career.
Unsurprisingly, the unvaccinated Serb breezed his way through the bracket - while wearing Lacoste I might add - ousting one contender after another, on his way to lay claim to an Open title that under common law would be legally his. What I won’t be able to wrap my head around is, however, how managed to live this long without his Covid shots and the respective litany of boosters. We shouldn’t be cheering him on for tying Nadal’s record, a record he’ll have at least a couple more chances to break this year, we should be celebrating that he’s defied all odds by merely surviving this long.
Djoker would, ideally, have three more chances to break Nadal’s record - fat chance he beats Rafa on clay in France though - but if current strictures are upheld, one major tournament won’t be up for grabs - the US Open. The United States still(!) has a mandatory requirement that all foreign travelers - with visas and without - be up to date on their Covid-19 vaccine regimen before entering our otherwise pristine nation. This is despite the fact that everyone from Pfizer to Bill Gates - who was in attendance when Djokovic lifted the trophy - to the CDC has conceded the vaccines do not stop transmission of the virus. But still, we must persist; still, we must swat away the flies of objective reality like the pests they are.
The storyline on the heels of the Australian Open won’t be how Australia and the United States irrationally deprived the world of performances of one of the greatest tennis players who ever lived. No, somehow, it will be about the war in Ukraine. The new contraband this year was not the unvaccinated but anything resembling Russia and its allies.
Russians and Belarusians were allowed to take part in the games - last year’s Wimbledon barred any Russian citizen from competing - but they were prohibited from flying their flag, or officially representing their home country. I notice the AO had no conflicts regarding letting Chinese or American players represent their nations while the Chinese government continues its persecution of Uyghur Muslims and the United States military continues to occupy Syria.
Hypocritical political point-scoring sure is a doozy, isn’t it? Yet, it’s the Russians and Belarusians who are consistently badgered about the crimes of their country like they’ve got a regular seat in the war room. It’s almost as if sports journalism has become just another outlet for narrative control.
Egg Plants
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I’m no conspiracy theorist - although that term has begun to lose all meaning; because if you’re not careful, everything starts to look conspiratorial. There’s enough information - and misinformation - out there that you can shoehorn any series of events into a clandestine operation. That’s not to say there aren’t any real conspiracies happening as we speak, it’s just hard to identify what patterns are coincidental, and which ones are coordinated.
All this being said, I think - I think - we can file this next story in the non-conspiracy folder.
Over the past couple of years, there appears to have been an apparent rise in fires or disasters involving food production plants all across America. Almost 100 of these types of events, events that could have serious impacts on food supply chains, have happened in the last two years. Most recently, a massive fire broke out in Connecticut at a major provider’s chicken farm. The event killed up to 100,000 chickens as the 50-foot by 600-foot facility went up in flames.
Now, latching on to a perceived pattern, some are claiming that this - in congruence with extortionate egg prices - is in line with a grand conspiracy to throttle the American food supply. I had heard about the food plant fires for the year or so and had made notes to look into it, but the story seemed to subside in the second half of last year - at its peak, the series of fires made the rounds from Tucker Carlson Tonight to the AP and Reuters.
Although it should be said, organizations like the latter two sought merely to debunk the claims of orchestration while Carlson’s program seemed a little more interested in investigation. The Fox News show ultimately concluded that they “found no evidence that these incidents are either intentional or connected.”
At a glance, the growing tally of similar seems like a deeply concerning trend. But, when you contextualize the most recent event, even your wildest theories might be tempered. If all 90 or so fires were as destructive as the Connecticut one, killing 100,000 birds each time, that amounts to about 9,000,000 avian deaths - and clearly, we’re overestimating here. That feels like a staggering amount of loss, but there may be other intervening factors.
The United States poultry farms are currently in the midst of a bird flu epidemic; one that has led to the death of nearly 60 million fowl - mostly egg-laying hens and turkeys. This, seemingly, is the cause for the mountainous surge in egg costs at the supermarket, not a dastardly scheme to weaken the supply chain or dissuade consumers from buying eggs. 100,000 birds in comparison to 60 million truly pale in comparison relative to market demand and price fluctuation. Unless that is, bad actors were seeking to exacerbate an already fragile distribution channel.
The difficulty in being certain of any determination regarding the matter is that data is by no means comprehensive. In an article published by the National Fire Protection Association entitled ‘Nothing to See Here’ - against their better judgement, surely - the agency noted they do not specifically keep track of fires that take place at food production or storage facilities. Not only does this omission seem like a glaring oversight, but it also prevents any observer from drawing a conclusion supported by the knowledge of an average baseline of these types of events.
If we can’t know for sure the origins of the apparent uptick in fire outbreaks, one thing can be certain. Corporate and political leaders galavanting at Davos for the World Economic Forum deriding the ‘Great Reset’ as a conspiracy theory then introducing the Great Reset Initiative, producing content reassuring you that by 2030, you’ll own nothing, and eat much less meat aren’t helping the situation. Neither is the concerted effort by legacy media outlets convincing you that eating bugs is not just the unavoidable (oops) future, it’s fun, too!
If we’re keeping score, I’ll grant one additional point to the arson camp. Still, I’m not convinced.
But, if we’re to learn anything from this, it’s that possibly we do take our cheap and convenient food sources for granted, and it’s worth reassessing how your food actually gets to you here in the West. A cursory examination at a commercial bird farm should make you more than a little sick to your stomach; cramped ‘living’ spaces, animals inhabiting and ingesting their own filth, force fed until they reach their optimal weight - these aren’t the conditions you’d select for the thing you’ll eventually put into your own body. Of the near 60 million birds that died due to the avian flu, only a small percentage of them actually perished as a result of the disease. The rest were culled from the flock in an effort to keep the virus from spreading further.
If I could recall where I misplaced my tinfoil hat, I might be a little more bullish on this one but I think - again, think - there’s no Soviet-style Holomodor in the near future, but I’ll keep you posted for any smoke on the horizon.
Pfired
My condolences to Jordon Walker’s professional career in the pharmaceutical industry. Never has someone so publicly, accidentally revealed their cartel’s trade secrets.
If you haven’t seen it - or you’ve been living under a rock for a week - Project Veritas released a video of Walker, who they assert is a Pfizer executive, admitting to an undercover journalist that the pharmaceutical giant is currently undergoing experiments on the Covid-19 virus that sound an awful lot like ‘gain of function’ research.
The video shows Walker, who, unfortunately, thinks he’s on a date, uninhibitedly divulging the practices of the corporation that include - but aren’t limited to - what he called ‘directed evolution’ in regards to the virus that kept half the world in their houses for the better part of two years.
Ever the loquacious type, Walker went on to detail the revolving door between government officials and the pharmaceutical industry, rejoicing at the ‘cash cow’ of covid, and expressing concern regarding the side-effects of their vaccine. Walker insisted that the experiments they were undertaken weren’t ‘gain of function’ but that they certainly wouldn’t want the public to learn about them, as according to him, that’s likely how the virus originated in Wuhan in the first place.
After the video went viral, Pfizer released a statement on their website where they took a page from the CIA’s playbook and neither confirmed nor denied that what Walker described was accurate. However, the experiments they’re conducting that statement illustrated appear to be the third iteration of what we’ve come to know as ‘gain of function’ research.
This is the company and their cohort that Uncle Sam gave the keys to daddy’s Ferrari in the middle of the pandemic when they granted them emergency use authorization on what amounted to a glorified experimental treatment. Pfizer, Johnson and Johnson, and Moderna went on to post the most obscene levels of record profits one could imagine - and all during the deadly crisis of a pandemic no less! J&J and Moderna received over $1 billion each from Trump’s Operation Warp Speed in order to expedite the research and facilitation of a novel covid vaccine.
Pfizer, along with their German partner BioNTech, received $445 million from the German government to produce a vaccine before the US government placed a $2 billion preorder for their first round of production. Pfizer’s revenue from 2022 exceeded $100 billion while their profits were a modest $31 billion.
"2022 was a record-breaking year for Pfizer, not only in terms of revenue and earnings per share, which were the highest in our long history, but more importantly, in terms of the percentage of patients who have a positive perception of Pfizer and the work we do," said the Pfizer CEO, Albert Bourla.
It’d be a shame if those ‘positive perceptions’ were on shaky ground, wouldn’t it? Big Pharma exorbitantly profited off of the pandemic and have no plans of stopping, struck a deal with the US government that absolved them of all liability from any possible side-effects of their vaccines, and according to Project Veritas, continue to circumnavigate the best interests of the public.
Depending upon your political bent, you may immediately dismiss the findings of the video based on the dubious ethics Project Veritas routinely employs in order to uncover a story; conversely, you may have ignored any possibility of confirmation bias and accepted the contents of their reporting as unmitigated truth. Well, as the week has gone by, the veracity of Project Veritas’s claims haven’t suffered any major blows - which, of course, is subject to change if new information comes to light.
Regarding the former concern, I’m personally uncomfortable with the notion of a journalist masquerading as a romantic interest in order to secure a source. But is it entirely reprehensible if the ends justify the means? In the late ‘70s, the Chicago Sun-Times, a small rival of the Chicago Tribune, founded and operated a bar called The Mirage Tavern. The endeavor was intended to investigate the pervasive corruption of city officials at the time, and by allowing their patrons to speak freely - and with hidden cameras - the paper revealed the routine extortion and shakedowns of small business performed by Chicagoan lawmakers. The reporting, while its means were questionable, led to widespread reforms in the city. Was it worth it? Pfood for thought.
It’s astounding that Big Pharma was granted reprieve from its role as adversary of the American people for the last couple of years. They’re not saviors, they’re bandits. These are the people who gave us the opioid epidemic and Vioxx. Pfizer, specifically, has been ordered by the US government to pay penalties worth over $10 billion since 2000. If the Project Veritas video is legitimate, then two things are true. 1. Jordon Walker will be hitting the job market in the very immediate future, and 2. they are who we thought they were.
See you next week.
Cheers,
~FDA
Did you see where now Facebook and Instagram threatening to permanently ban Project Veritas?
Is there a wider conspiracy for the menstrual cycle disruption? Population control? Nothing would surprise me anymore.