THE MONEY CRUNCH

NOVEMBER 11, 2010.  This article is about where we may be fifty years from now.  Maybe you don’t care.  Maybe for you tomorrow is the only issue.  So be it.  That’s fine.

But I’m predicting something extraordinary will happen to…oh, let’s call it DEBT: A SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL. 

The word debt will undergo a revolution…    

These days—and for a long time now—you really aren’t a modern government unless you spend more than you have. 

Debt-based governments, in fact, follow a strategy that is defined by some economists as: inevitable; good; healthy.

Healthy, that is, until the chickens come home to roost. 

Even when the White House and state capitols are crammed with chickens, squawking, pecking, wandering the hallways, you can find experts comparing government debt to overall private-sector production and shrugging with practiced indifference.

That shrug seems to form the core of their PhD credentials.

“No problem.  We can handle it.”

In California, the inability to pass a debt-laden state budget was the trigger that caused the recall of Governor Gray Davis.  Arnold the Weightlifter, displaying an optimism worthy of a superhero, entered the scene—but he, too, failed to lift the debt from the state.  Now, the bald ascetic, Jerry Brown, is the new messiah.  Yet on the campaign trail, Brown asserted the state university system could gift free tuition to every youngster in California, legally or illegally residing here.

In California, Illinois, Washington DC, Greece, France, Italy, England, and numerous other places, governments are facing the same problem.  They spent more than they had, in order to deliver goodies to people who “needed them, deserved them, demanded them.”  And some of the recipients were their own public employees.

Still, the sentiment for gift giving is strong:

“People everywhere must be helped.  No one should be left behind.  Ever.  Who cares how the spending is arranged?  We don’t give a damn.  Figure it out.  This is what government is for.  Change the definition of debt.  Erase it off the books.  Print more money.  Invent money.  Invent the invention of money.  Don’t bother us with the details.  Just get it done.”

And people argue whether these governments are socialistic.  It’s rather amazing.

Governments have an answer to all this.  They’ll control the means of production and distribution of goods and services.  Not on the scale we see now—on a far larger scale.

Governments will calculate their slice of the money pie from this ownership bonanza, and they’ll take that slice.  It will be big enough to make the case that the debt burden governments carry is reasonable, because they are profiting from owning, well, almost everything.

That’s the direction.  That’s the plan.  When you think about it, it always was.  Freedom and the free market were always seen (by the experts and grand thieves) as a momentary blip on the radar screen.  An aberration.

This is the real meaning of the term “market correction.”

The mind of government, such as it is, thinks about banks and corporations and financial markets and says: “Well, we sort of own them and they sort of own us, and now we just need to cement those relationships and make them more inclusive.  The alternative is we all go down with the ship.” 

When government envisions the day it stands at the prow of the ship, it believes dangerous debt will be a thing of the past, because how can there be debt when the government owns everything and shapes the very meaning and story of money?  Who can then stand outside the structure and say there is a dangerous imbalance between what is profit and what is loss?

This is the game saver for governments.  It’s the final answer when every other strategy has failed utterly.

Government can envision this end game because, of course, the answer has to be delivered globally. 

No longer would there be a USSR crashing on the rocks and falling into a sea of red ink.  That was the old system, in which one nation could win against another, one economy could be more powerful than another, and debts had to be paid off to creditors.

No, in the new universe, all this goes away.  That’s the dream.

Enormous failure leads to complete triumph.

“We can spend and owe our way into oblivion, and that is a good idea, because after that there will have to be a reckoning that goes beyond reckoning—we will forge a different system where, by definition, such crises can never happen again.”

When you examine various experts’ mind-boggling acceptance of unpayable debt, you can, in fact, see this redefinition process has been going on for quite some time.

It’s a lead-in to a new kind of civilization.  To call it socialism is to underestimate it.  It’s a hybrid.  Corporations, governments, banks, markets—they are blended together…and at the top, there is a group of financial wizards whose job it is to constantly depict and redefine what money and debt and credit ARE, so that crisis is, a priori, eliminated.

Of course, the obfuscation will be fantastic.  It will look like science fiction.  But so do other sectors of society.  So what? 

The flow and roll-down from the top of the pyramid, however, will, in a real sense, make everybody into a functionary. 

Freedom in the marketplace will not only be severely constricted; people will have to adjust their actions and thoughts to align with the latest fabrications broadcast from the summit. 

It will resemble, this whole structure, the Medieval Roman Church, where cosmology and its detailed implications were adjusted from moment to moment, to rule out invasive realities and discoveries, where the nature of history was recast, like wet plaster, to resemble Church mythology and doctrine, where the proliferation of that doctrine rumbled like armies and smashed flat the objections of logic.

This is the vision, puerile and absurd as it sounds, that backs up every lunatic act of massive government debtors of today.  This is the future they see, dimly, or clearly.  This is their anchor.

If you want a modern comparison, I point you to the so-called science and modeling of global warming.  The airy mathematical castles built on other castles suck up selected historical observational data and resurrect them as evidence of alarming trends.  There is nothing in these models that has a mandatory relationship to the physical world.  When one castle is seen to be a fairy tale, three more are thrown up quickly to engender confidence.

If the vision of the future I’m sketching here comes to pass, the word debt will, a hundred years from now, be as incomprehensible and insignificant as a proposed piece of planetary debris floating around a sun a billion light years from Earth.

And some form of global altruism will be referenced to explain why this venal concept—debt—had to be scrubbed from human affairs and the human mind.

And you can take that to the bank.

Or:

We could preserve freedom.

“Debt?  Oh yes.  THAT.  At one time, people with criminal motives suggested that ledgers should be kept expressing what was gained and what was owed.  Those people were vicious proponents of a system they called the free market.  Finally, we reduced them to ashes.  We bludgeoned them out of existence.  Debt was a fictional piece of propaganda designed to promote inequality.  It was a dagger hanging over the heads of our people.  It was a tool of hate, before the Great Change.  Now, properly, there is only need and fulfillment of need…”   

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of a unique course for homes schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  To inquire: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE REBIRTH OF EDUCATION

By Jon Rappoport

NOVEMBER 11, 2010.  Literacy is the foundation of education, but if the student can’t think and reason about what he reads, if he can’t ask intelligent questions about what he reads, then he is at sea like a cork bobbing on the waves.

Let’s suppose you wanted to create a high-functioning android.  What would you do?

You would endow this creature with the ability to absorb information and remember it faultlessly.  He would be a remarkable rote learner.

He would never question what he reads.  To guarantee this, you would omit teaching him logic.

Then he would go through life like a sponge, soaking up data and reciting it.

Is this what we want from young minds?

Well, in some societies, the answer is a resounding yes.  Of course, those societies are managed from the top down.  The leaders demand obedience.

In America, things are different.  At least for now.  We still possess sufficient freedom to want more from students.  We want to somehow imbue students with the capacity for independent thought.

However, this goal is not achieved by waving a magic wand.  Neither is it achieved by simply reminding young people that they are free.

Let us return, for a moment, to the birthplace of liberty, ancient Greece.  Two and a half thousand years ago, something unprecedented happened in the city of Athens.  From out of the darkness of prior civilizations, a new concept was set into motion.

The INDIVIDUAL was free.  He could choose.  He could think about vital issues of the day and make decisions.

A teacher named Socrates began to teach students.  He engaged in a practice that was brand new: dialogue.  Conversation aimed at understanding, at a deep level, ideas like Justice and the Good. 

It wasn’t enough to read about such ideas or memorize second-hand conclusions.

Dialogue, as Socrates used it, contained LOGIC.

He would show that certain ideas inevitably led to absurd conclusions.  He would show that certain trains of correct reasoning led to insights. 

This was thinking at a whole new level.

It caught on.  In fact, it formed the basis for the pursuit called science.  It formed the basis for the institution called law.  And finally, in the late 18^th century, men on this soil created a Republic that operated by and through law.

Law—not decree, not force, not a monarch’s assumption of divine right to rule, not the shifting bobbing changing will of the majority.

The basis of American law was embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, two documents that were debated and drafted by men who very well understood the branch of learning called logic.  They were devoted to it.

In fact, logic was the connective tissue that held these documents together and made them operable.

Now, all these years later, the study of logic has been systemically removed from most school curricula.

In other words, the essence of what made the Republic possible has been taken away from the population.

Think about the effect of that action.

It’s as if sailors and navigators, going to sea in ships their ancestors built, no longer knew how to read the stars or use instruments to guide them to distant ports.

No deep appreciation of the Declaration or the Constitution is possible in the absence of logic.  These documents become vague mirrors of sentiments expressed centuries ago, in another world, by men whose brilliance is forgotten.

And if you are an ambitious person with an agenda that involves trampling freedom and burying it, if you are seeking to replace this form of government with another one that destroys what was built here, you will also replace logic with spurious and attractive-sounding ideas—so you can move the mob.  So you can revert to control rather than freedom.

And who is going to stop you?  The young, with their half-baked educations, who can’t follow a train of thought past the first station?  School teachers, who never learned logic when they were young? 

It’s fine to talk about “the struggle” and the need to “defend liberty.”  But if you abandon the world of ideas to those who want to undermine the Republic, the battle is lost.

The world of ideas is not some ivory tower of meaningless chatter.  It is vital.  It is alive.  It is the bloodstream of the Republic.

When Tom Paine penned Common Sense in 1776, it sold an astonishing 500,000 copies in that first year.  The eloquent prose and the logic of it literally forced the Declaration to be written. 

Such living ideas need to be articulated at length in order to take on their true meaning.  But the ideas standing alone collapse.  They need the connective tissue of logic to form a coherent whole.  Then, the power appears out of the fog.

To paraphrase the old conundrum about the tree falling in the forest, if a logical argument is made and no one can understand it, is it logic?  Is it real?

At least in pragmatic terms, we have the answer, and we can see it if we look around us.  Minds lacking real education falter, retreat, glaze over, and reach for the latest homily, the latest slogan, the latest prescription for our ills. 

Minds revert to older nostrums, which can be summarized under one label: COLLECTIVISIM.  The vague philosophy that asserts the group has all rights and the individual has none.

This is where we are heading.  This is where we have been heading for some time.  On that shore, decorated with empty promises, more and more people believe “everybody will be given everything they need.”

Of course, collectivism is always a mass puppet show, in which the leaders who hold the strings solidify their tyranny behind the curtain.

Portraying themselves as saviors, they promote a false dream.  They spin fantasies.  They issue sugar-coated directives.  They offer empty generalities.  They claim they are for the Good.  They skip and chisel their way from A to B to F to Z to R effortlessly, as if they are champions of valid deduction.

Minds that cannot distinguish deceptive idealism from correct reasoning buy the Fool’s Gold.  And then, in the absence of logic, freedom disappears.

No one remembers what it was.  No one cares.

Freedom was just another fairy tale in an old book.  Now we have a new fairy tale.  It is shinier.  It is more modern.  It is simpler.

Is this what you want?

If your answer is no, the first profound order of business is the reinstatement of logic, as a branch of learning, as an extensive discipline, as a set of fine tools for minds, in education.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

Jon has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He has published articles on politics, medical science, and health in newspapers and magazines in the US and Europe, including LA Weekly, CBS Healthwatch, Spin, and Stern.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE FREE INDIVIDUAL

VERSUS “THE INDIVIDUAL OF LICENSE”

NOVEMBER 9, 2010.  In Why Is It Called Freedom, I described the free individual, and the corruption that occurs when the license to act “as if free” is substituted on a grand scale.

I want to expand on those ideas.

THE IDEAL CALLED THE FREE INDIVIDUAL—THE FULFILLMENT OF THE UNDERLYING VISION OF THE AMERICAN REPUBLIC

The free individual is driven by his own choices.  He envisions his highest objectives and acts, with power and energy and will, to bring them about, in the world. 

The free individual is intensely creative.  He isn’t a follower.  He breaks new ground.  He doesn’t cater to the collective.  He doesn’t compromise to satisfy the wishes of the group. 

As a matter of course, what he invents does spill over and benefit others.  But he isn’t tethered and bound and lashed to the group.

The free individual rejects the notion that he is limited by his past. 

He doesn’t navigate his life by the “needs of others.”

He rejects the premise that humanity is one “melted-down” Whole that must be served.

The free individual recognizes that the Collective accumulates its catalogue of “needs” based on the desire to obtain something for nothing—and he pays no attention to this campaign.

Likewise, the free individual is aware that certain leaders, who have attained their position through clever strategies, manipulate the needs of the Collective to advance their own position.  He does not serve these leaders.

The free individual doesn’t engage in actions whose purpose is to limit the freedom of others.

Unlike the free individual, the individual of license interprets freedom to mean he has broad latitude to trample on others, to lie, cheat, connive, and steal, in order to achieve his ends.

To outward appearances, he is carrying out a program based on freedom, but he is not.  Inevitably, his actions involve repressing the liberty of others.

He calls his actions “part of the free market.”

In this way, over time, freedom of commerce accumulates more degradation.

The man of license doesn’t see beyond the end of his nose.  He is operating on the basis of how he envisions freedom.  To him, freedom IS license.  There is no distinction.  Freedom becomes his permission to roam the landscape and extract profit from “targets of opportunity.”

He rationalizes his actions away on the basis that “humanity can’t attain to anything better.”

In truth, he spends a certain amount of time convincing himself that this rationalization is accurate.  This is the extent of his “philosophy.”

In a nation where there is a preponderance of people of license, the society declines, and its memory of what freedom is deteriorates.

The idealization of freedom was distorted into license and a slanted understanding of the free market.

Although the Republic had broken away from the oppressions of Europe, there was no way it could automatically endow its citizens with an incorruptible nature. 

Except through education.  But such education would have had to delve further than a literal understanding of the founding documents of the nation.  Thomas Paine once remarked that a constitution is an explication of underlying principle.  And this is the case.

The explanation, envisioning, and unearthing of the free individual as an ideal is a legitimate and necessary purpose of education. 

How do you teach a student a higher concept than he is accustomed to imagining?  This is the challenge, and of course the teacher must be ready for such an undertaking.

It is not rote learning.  It isn’t the casual transmission of superficial ideas. 

In America, the ideal of the free individual has taken a back seat to the philosophy that large numbers of people have needs, and those needs must be satisfied through government-enforced initiatives.

The circle is closed when enough students—having never learned what the free individual really is—perceive themselves in the default position of being needy.  Then they readily accept the substitute philosophy.

People of license feed off the populations of people of need.

Reinstating the idea of the free individual is the highest of priorities.

Attempting to curtail, by enforcement of law, all the instances of crimes committed by people of license is futile—because there is no higher ideal to attain to.  That ideal has been scrubbed from the culture. 

I’m not so naïve that I believe every single human being can or will become a truly free individual in a given period of time.  But if the ideal were omnipresent in the society, at the very least there would be enough reflections of it to view, so that some semblance of a standard could sustain us. 

As things stand now, young people have very few references. 

The Republic has become smaller in its insight and imagination, and this condition is not curable by law.

However, each one of us has enough freedom to build, in our own minds, the vision of the free individual.  What springs from that is unpredictable, and good. 

It turns out that the most profound meaning of freedom never dies.  It can be shuttled off to a remote spot in the psyche, but it continues to have fire.

No one can hand off the responsibility to resuscitate the ideal of the free individual to another.  That is simply an act of surrender.

Freedom continues to ring its bell.  This is what drives the most morbid people of license to the brink of despair.  Every time they believe they have forced away the vestiges of the free individual, something happens.  Something reminds them that their control is faltering.  Their venal philosophy, which they forward under cover of darkness, has been exposed.

As a side effect, people who could help resuscitate the ideal of the free individual sit back and take heart, thinking that other people will always be there to provide hope. 

Ah yes.  The people of license, the people of need, and the people of hope.    

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

PARADISE ON A BUN TO GO

EXTRA MAYO

SLICE OF AMNESIA

NOVEMBER 8, 2010.  The idea of One Final Consciousness, in which every individual should participate, has swept through the world. It has become as firmly rooted in the culture as the burger.

In the film Avatar, the Na’vi species even have a “cord and a plug,” so they can enter the bio-consciousness of their forest.  Directly.

This fad began in the 1960s, when Eastern spiritual thought was simplified, twisted, and imported to the West.

If the notion of the free individual, as framed in the basic documents of the American Republic, was already on the wane, it took its biggest hit as this Eastern hodge-podge mish-mash enveloped pop culture.

There were supporting premises, promoted by Western spiritual teachers: the difference between ego and self is negligible; ego is destructive; ego is an effort to falsely separate away from larger consciousness; self is an illusion; with enlightenment, a person surrenders the illusion and gloriously joins the homogenized cosmos.

Environmentalists took on these premises for their own use.  Ego-separation fenced humans off from Nature and led to the destruction of the natural world and its “web of life.”

James Lovelock, the formulator of the Gaia Hypothesis—all life on Earth is one bio-collective organism—wrote:

“This new interrelationship of Gaia with man is by no means fully established; we are not yet a truly collective species, corralled and tamed as an integral part of the biosphere…”

One of his disciples, Al Gore, offered this, in Earth in the Balance:

“This we know: the Earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the Earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all.”

I’m pointing out the underlying philosophical idea here: the distinct and unique individual is an illusion.

The extent to which this premise and its derivative branches have taken hold is illustrated by the widely held generalization that “man is destroyer.”

That summary of the human being is so popular it is, in many circles, considered as final as, well, the science of manmade global warming. 

Whatever is left of the ideal of the free individual is being phased out, as quickly as “higher collective beings,” such as Al Gore, Maurice Strong, Mikhail Gorbachev, et al, can accomplish it, on behalf of Gaia.

Of course, as leaders of humankind-as-melted-down-butter, these men are permitted to retain their status as powerful individuals, because they are benighted, blessed with a holy mission that requires jets, large estates, personal fortunes, and teams of assistants.  These leaders suffer, for a little while, the pain of pretending they are separated egos, so that the rest of us may give up that ghost and merge into the Oneness of the All.

In case there was any doubt about why the study of the founding of the American Republic has become, in, most places, an arcane enterprise, we have the answer.

The idea of the free individual (even though it has been inexorably propagandized as universal licentiousness, crime, greed, and destruction) is still a threat.

New Education informs us that self, ego, nature, biology, and freedom are now sub-categories of an overriding material and spiritual collective, and the individual must be permitted to fall deeper and deeper into a slumber which precludes him from remembering himself.

That’s the future, as it’s being sketched in by glorious, meek, submissive, holy, altruistic, prophetic, money-making billionaires, in their castles.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of a unique course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, for home schoolers and adults.  For inquiries, qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE MAGICIAN AWAKES

— a fragment–

By Jon Rappoport

Here is a fragment of my unpublished book, The Magician Awakes.

I realize this is not for everyone.  So be it.

Become a functioning front for the apparatus.  It’s easy.

Every generation invents its own unimpeachable authority.  This generation invented “The Universe.”

A prophet appears friendly and exuberant, above the cares of the world, as if he were inexplicably hatched out of an egg.  Wear his suit.  Comb your hair the same way.  Stand next to him.  See what happens.      

If you could investigate billions of people’s minds and find those thoughts on which the majority agrees, you would be at the farthest possible distance from magic.

Millions of people thinking the same thought at the same instant might be able to affect physical reality. They could move a table across a room.  That is not magic.  It’s the sacrifice of individuality.

At the beginning of the enterprise, there was a kernel: the real road is through massive proliferation of thought and language and poetry.  Good luck with reduction.    

The ceremonies, rituals, and symbols of any Magick are all lies.  They are dead on arrival.

There is no inner anyone.  There is, however, the invention of personae, characters.

Being receptive to What Is, on any level of “Is,” is a dead end. 

‘You have your place; you need to find it.”  You end up like a bumblebee on heroin. 

All religions and spiritual movements engender the same outcome.  Their followers, regardless of what actions they take, maintain a core of knockout sleep in the center of their consciousness. 

One life isn’t enough time to get used to the scope of imagination.  You might use 100,000 lives to really work into it. 

When you live through and by imagination, you can never end anything, or you can do nothing but end things.  You can make the middle the beginning or you can forget about beginnings and endings altogether.

Eventually, you can move mountains with a wave of your hand if you want to…

If you really want to wave your hand and move a mountain, you will.  Today, tomorrow, a million years from now.  That’s what imagination yields up over the long haul, whether you like it or not.  Who cares how long the long haul is?  Are you in a hurry? 

The last Pharaoh was fed up with the ancient language.  He began speaking in giant burning apricots on staircases.  That was the end of the empire.    

At the core of every philosophy and spiritual system and teaching is an unasked question: Suppose I imagine something else? 

Every system explains What Is.

There is no church of imagination. 

A spellbinding storyteller needs to spellbind himself and cut out the nonsense.

Magic is not about the group or what the group might think as “One Mind.”

The notion that we are somehow manufactured by space and time and energy is an interesting idea for children.     

Magic is not about aligning one’s self with natural forces.  It has nothing to do with aligning.

Arshile Gorky:  “[Abstract art] is the emancipation of the mind.  It is an explosion into unknown areas.”

“Sometimes I’m working on fifteen or twenty pictures at the same time.  I do that because I want to—because I like to change my mind.  The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint, never finishing painting.”

You can make a Zen sandwich out of anything.  Most Zen teachers avoid the subject of imagination.  They have no idea what to do with it.

The Garden of Eden is perhaps a page of lines of a poem.  Freezing the page and then entombing it in a dank cathedral is the “critic’s review.”  Every critic wants to be Pope. 

The hunger for protocols always reveals a loss of desire.

Caterpillar in cocoon, but no rebirth.  Another myth sold, the seller moves on. 

You could create a blue square on a table.  You could paint it there.  And then you could paint a blue square over that blue square, and you could do it again and again.  You could do it for ten years.  Do you want to do it for ten years?  If you do, you will.  At some point, though, you could decide you want to paint something else.  And then you would.  What’s important, though, is that you’re painting.  What happens while you paint, whether you keep painting the blue square—all that is up to you.  What’s important is that you keep painting. 

There is no such thing as the space-time continuum.  It’s a myth.  If you find that in no way comforting, you need hip boots and a shovel.  You’re in too deep.   

“The universe is running down.  Energy is dissipating, it’s consigned to an inactive bullpen.”  This is a fabrication.  Entropy appeals to a certain kind of mind that wants grand failure.

Every audience wants to buy protection.  It’s a soft spiritual mafia operation.

IS, in physical or metaphysical terms, is the most overrated idea in the world. 

The notion of Final Scripted Reality sitting behind ordinary reality is about as important as a parking garage under the street at two in the morning. 

Read the entire canon of philosophy from any region of the planet, starting from the earliest texts, and count the number of times you find any reference to imagination. 

The history of Earth is the history of a spiritual shakedown. 

Andre Breton: “To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery…is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself.”

Harmony, symmetry, balance, perfection—these qualities have been worked out over and over, for centuries.  You can do it in your sleep.

The universe is willing to wait around until imagination revolutionizes it down to its core.  Imagination has less patience.

You are forever, whether you like it or not.  Occasionally, the Hindus stated this succinctly.  But there is no wheel of life, and no mandatory echelon of incarnations.  That is another fairy tale.  Believing it may provide interesting motivation, but so would believing you are made out of a substance that is attracted to one of 7000 magnets located in various parts of the galaxy.

Which is more unlikely?  An artist named Jackson Pollock does a painting, “No.5, 1948,” and 58 years later it sells for $140 million, or Jackson Pollock, now living under a different name, on a distant planet, occasionally indulging in a sherry before dinner, driving carefully, continues to paint, as he has for several thousand years, and discovers he can move a mountain with a wave of his hand?  I would say the odds are about the same.  Give him another few million years, and he’ll be able to make a horse gallop across a tomato. 

The artisan wants to produce a fine, finished chest of drawers.  The singer wants to imitate Billie Holiday. The juggler wants to climb a rope while tossing five balls in the air.  The Chinese artist wants to travel to the Dun Huang caves on the edge of the Gobi desert and execute a mural on one of the interior walls that will take a year to complete.  It doesn’t matter.  The artisan will change his mind and turn into a mime, the mime will change his mind and become a gymnast, the gymnast will turn into a prodigy who can knock off a Bach fugue at the age of three, the prodigy will turn into a stage director, the stage director will turn into an architect who designs asteroids, and so on and so forth, over the course of a few thousand years and a number of lives.  How it begins and where it goes is none of our business.  The artist lives on.  He keeps creating.  We see only a snapshot of him in mid-stride.  We think we know all about him.  He drinks, he doesn’t drink, he’s difficult, he’s buttoned down, he’s a marvelous fellow, he’s a nasty son of a bitch.  We know very, very little about him.

e.e. cummings: “Knowledge is a polite word for dead but not buried imagination.”

Looking for magic without imagination is like eating an empty plastic plate for dinner.  Of course, you can become famous by doing that. 

An old man with a long beard wearing an oversized elf’s hat sitting at a table next to a lit candle by a dusty volume inside a dark room with shadows dancing on the walls is a politician.

Somebody once said: religion is what happens when space slows down.

William Burroughs: “In the magical universe there are no coincidences and there are no accidents.  Nothing happens unless someone wills it to happen.”

Nature and the planet aren’t praying.

There is now a whole professional class of people who see an apple and say it’s holy.

The ancient Roman Empire was dying.  Expansionism hadn’t worked out.  Bread and circuses were a momentary diversion.  So they doubled back and tried conquest by other means.  Religion.  The Roman Church.  It was a brighter idea.

When a person decides being an artist won’t pan out, he goes into religion.

Colin Wilson:  “Our misconceptions involve the passive fallacy and notion that consciousness is a plane mirror that cannot lie about the world it reflects.”

Vladimir Nabokov:  “A genius is an African who dreams up snow.”

Paper, paint, and brushes are more powerful than trembling gods walking out of clouds.

Reductionism is the practice of shrinking down reality in the hope that you’ll be able to control it.  It always works.  That’s the problem. 

Whether the universe is a giant clock or an explosive dynamic event or a complex of quantum entanglement has no bearing on magic. 

If 50 tribal members sitting in a forest can change the direction in which birds are flying; if a billion people can change the pattern of a random number generator; if 400 church members can pray and cure an ill parishioner; this is gold.  Fool’s gold.  “This is what we have been searching for.  This is what science has been studiously ignoring.  This is the hidden secret of history.”  The appeal will be enormous, because these phenomena are emanating from groups.  “We always knew it was the group.”  The magician ignores all this.  He lets it pass by like stale wind from a factory. 

Some day, a billion people will focus as One on a polished gold ball sitting in the Gobi desert, and the ball will rise three feet in the air.  The event will be heralded as the start of a new millennium.  Eventually, a Great Boredom will set in.

Prehistoric artists who painted animals on cave walls were probably threatened with death, at which point they claimed the paintings referred to the tribe’s religion. 

The worship of a statue is an improvement over adoration for an invisible god.  And Melville discovered that the people of the South Pacific broke and abandoned their statues if their prayers did not come true.

Limited government had a brief moment in the sun.  The silence was too hard for the populace to take.  If all the necessary noise could have been produced by a remote machine, things might have been different.

“What everybody wants” is a distraction in a card game.  The player with a busted hand lifts the corner of his mouth and makes the rubes think he is holding aces.

Mondrian snapped his fingers and became Jackson Pollock. 

Eric Satie sat in his living room with a shawl on his knees and dozed for a few seconds, during which he composed Rite of Spring.

Lies are not preposterous enough.  When they are, you have theater replacing society. 

Aristotle explained local theater as catharsis.  He had no idea what he was doing.  He was hoping to give a public face to a private story.  Freud came along and tried to describe the private story.  He also failed.  A dream is an adventure.  This fact seems to disturb many people.

In the territory of art, there are no initiations. 

Norman O Brown: “The view only changes for the lead dog.”

If principles could be laid down for the production of magic, magicians would be somewhere else doing something that has no name.

Go to the Sistine Chapel, sit on one of the benches along a wall and look up at the ceiling.  Michelangelo performed an episodic series of paintings on spaces defined and sliced up by the ugly framework of wooden partitions.  In a few places, he gave it his all.  In many, he produced cartoons and moved on.  The whole commission was ill-conceived.  The ceiling would have been better suited to a candy man like Tiepolo.  The great churches of Italy have surprisingly little to offer in the way of painting.  Making ads for the Roman Church fairy tale is a grinding occupation.  There are no magicians in the Vatican.

Someone writes the word imagination and other people read it and understand it in the context of a Pekinese determined to find a superior eyeliner.

If you watch large schools of small fish, you see the perfect blooming of collective action.  They balloon to the left, they all strike ahead to the right, the whole school suddenly contracts when an outsider attacks.  It’s hypnotic to observe.  Their communications system is blindingly fast.  It’s a good example of the All as a longed-for spiritual goal.  Scintillating absurdity. 

Odilon Redon:  “Artists who approach perfection do not have many ideas.”

The ultimate sideshow the universe provides: if you can position yourself and your mind and your eyes in certain ways, you can connect with magnetic circuits and hubs, and then you can do tricks.  You can make a cloud change shape.  You can tell a leaf to fall from a branch and it will.  You can make rain.  You can be in two locations at once.  But these tricks are then the bloodless imitation of magic. 

There is a School of Religion of Love of Nature.  Across the street is a school dedicated to the religion of Love of Technology.  Both schools hold chapel services every night, after which the students and parishioners pray for one another’s souls.  Then from both sides of the street, they stride and climb into a huge vat of butter on a grill.

Shrugging off the harmony of the living dead.

Educated people want to read about failure.

All Western philosophy tried to explicate the universe or cosmos as a setting of the greatest importance.  Then, in the 18^th century, there was the onrush of the individual.  But no one accorded him the size of the discredited cosmos.  He was somehow still living in a giant tin can.

“The human condition” is a myth invented by addicts.

The cosmos is a forgery of the individual.

How would ridiculous evolutionists rate the survival chances of an ant colony in which the queen gives birth to a dog who plays the violin? 

Sixty years ago, when I was 11, I argued with my mother and father and convinced them to let me take a walk alone in a hurricane.  Today, a boy who did that might be tied down and given a shot of Thorazine.

There is another universe in which James Joyce wrote the Bible.  In that place, a self-appointed God has been trying to undo the damage ever since.  You think we live by slogans here?  You should see the pressure there.  All futile, of course.   

People are worried by artists’ purported ideas.  They are reading the work from the outside in.  There’s a reason for that.  It’s really the atmosphere and the flesh that disturb them. They don’t want to get near it.  The flesh of Cocteau, the flesh of Walt Whitman, the flesh of Dostoevski.

To be struck dumb by a painting is not a bad thing.  Better to run out on the street, to an empty theater, move up on the stage and begin telling the story of your life as it never was.  The audience will trickle in, and then who knows how far it will go?

The windows are closing on civilization.  Soon, everything will take place in a giant room.  After that, it may require 5000 years to make the room into a genuine theater and establish dialogue among invented characters.

All dust is gold when filtered between the curving fingers of a man who has taken off his suit and put on a heavy robe.  He lives, he dies, he comes back.  He speaks to his lost son who is shipping out to the asteroid belt.  It happens in the twinkling of an eye.  The moon shuts down its motor; then turns it back on.

In the long run, non-structures are more important than structures.

Thinking and existing in small spaces, yearning for larger goals, people devised adventures that carried them into inflation of the same lives they were living.  An arm that was three feet long grew to 3.2 feet. 

One trip to paradise gives you new ideas.  Five trips to the same paradise give you syphilis.

Piet Mondrian: “In art, the search for content which is collectively understandable is false; the content will always be individual.”

Renaissance art was based on the pretense that the artist was working for the Church or God.  It was the ticket to the table; it wasn’t anything else; it wasn’t anything more.  The painters and the sculptors were actually the gods.  The Church was a fat man smoking a cigar.  Goya eventually came along and painted him.

You spontaneously invent what you need, and then you supply that need.

They had left the springs on in the Wadlen Gardens by the 101.  I walked through the cascades and wiped the red-rock dust away with my gloves.  It was a fine April morning.  The pines were threading the river.  No one was there.  I was alone.  Then I saw a few people praying near the fountain.  A goat was standing on a tether looking at them.   His bell rang.  I saw Sam sitting on a bench reading the Times.  He folded up the paper and left it next to him.  The day was cool.  Off to the east, I watched a light rain falling out of purple clouds over Pasadena.  It was wetting down the immense deck of white stone in the Hayward complex.  The windows reflected copper.  Showers to the north, too.  They bathed the filaments out of the air and weighed them down on the soil of the corn fields.  I heard a truck snorting its way up the delivery road.  I drifted back down to the path and walked toward Sam.  He was holding a plastic cup of coffee in his hand.  The V-line of traffic on the 101 was thinning out.  Police were removing the road blocks.  A man outfitted with fake wings was taking a ride on the wires through the Mt. Washington lift.  I peered all the way through Los Angeles to the orange groves of San Berdoo and smelled the blossoms coming into their own.  A news kid on a bike tossed his papers on to the old porches.  Bang.  Bang.  It was the morning I had dreamed of.  It was here, all around me.  Hello from the inside of the outside.

As we approached the city, we heard mumbling and smelled flesh.  Support our men.  Live for tomorrow.  The mail has come.  Brush your hair.  The drones believed they were time.  One entry wound after another.  Slow and solid, cows in the field staring at the breeze.  Put out to pasture without food or water.  Bland brown eyes.  Measured response.  Think it all through.  Check the books again. 

I reached into the soft manual of one of them and took out stillborn pink cases.  The drone dried before he could utter the word colonization.  In the presence of the drones, anything could happen.  Best to turn the flamethrowers on them.  They had been sent as serial sequences of numbers from somewhere. 

One of them on the side of the road went crazy.  He stood up from his blanket and started spitting.  He waved his arms, as if he was signaling to a car.  A jeep stopped and a soldier got out.  He said to me, “That man is my father.”  “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s who you’re fighting for.”

A is the sonar fish.  Born out of the Milky Way.

B is the running building.  The stone building is running down the street.  People are chasing it.  C is several reddish brown partially flattened cylinders of stone held in the hand.  D is the letter of portal.  You find imperfections in it.  Cracks, discolorations.  F is a hundred thousand people making sounds of their own choosing, without direction or plan, at the same time in the same place.  N is a bolt of lightning striking a pond toward which a herd of zebra is fleeing.  O is a gold phantom passing through solid objects at will on his way to the last gasp of the universe.  P is a large barge slowly moving out from the dock.  Q is the mixed smells of food brought out to a long wooden table from a kitchen.  These translations would become credible science.

No one survives Matisse.  You live in his Saturdays and Sundays for a long time.  Then you change your name and start a new life.

You don’t need to call something a divine miracle to escape calling it a machine. 

The American Republic took five minutes to reject decentralization. 

You’re a diplomat from Andromeda and you don’t speak the language.  You drift, you gesture, you comply, you grimace, you assure, you consider, you deflect.  You vaguely imply auto-fellatio.  You finally sweep out of the room and write up a report which recounts events that never happened. 

To the public, magicians are large pieces of exceptional cheese coming out of a vacuum.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

AN EMAIL EXCHANGE WITH DR. JUDITH CURRY

THE PROLIFERATON OF MODELS IN CLIMATE SCIENCE

NOVEMBER 5, 2010.  You don’t go to a spot in Tennessee, drill down into the ground, extract a core sample, analyze it and publish a graph that reports the evolution of the planet’s temperature for the last 1000 years.

There are measuring stations, on land, all over the globe—some stations far less reliable than others.  There are satellites overhead that have been recording radiance since 1978.  There are ocean measurements as well. There are tree cores that reveal information about temperature.

How all these records are interpreted and then coordinated is a matter of controversy.  Models are used.  These models are competitive with one another.  And they are strings of complex mathematical inferences which give more weight to certain data and less weight to other data.

After a year or so of sifting through scientific and (to me) arcane debate about the flaws in various models, I began to wonder whether all the models were so abstracted from plain observation that they were useless. 

On October 27, I emailed Dr. Judith Curry at the Georgia Institute of Technology.  Dr. Curry is a well-known climate researcher who, unlike many of her colleagues, has shown an interest in skeptics who reject the notion that manmade warming is a serious and imminent threat.

Here is that email:

veteran medical reporter query on climate science

InboxX

jon rappoport to curryja

show details 9:36 AM (3 hours ago)

Dr. Curry,

Jon Rappoport here.  I’ve worked as an investigative medical reporter for 30 years.

In uncovering various kinds of medical-research fraud, I’ve educated myself about how the use of sophisticated models can obscure and distort simple data and cover over the basic uncertainty of the research conclusions.

I’ve tried to apply the same understanding to debates about competing climate-science models. 

I fully realize that most scientists think models are absolutely necessary, and the proposal that important knowledge might be acquired without them appears ludicrous.

Nevertheless, I’ve tried to approach the warming question with an idiot’s eyes and, perhaps, a useful swipe or two of Occam’s Razor. 

So please remember—in the field of climate science, I AM a complete idiot.  I’m navigating by my own version of common sense, and I’m seeing problems with every step I take.  The only question is, are these problems less troublesome than those caused by building models that spawn other models?

Suppose, as regards land measurement of warming, we did the following:

Select the hundred most reliable land stations in the world—those that have a clear, continuous, daily record of temperature going back at least 75 years.

The environments around the stations haven’t changed so radically in 75 years that obvious warming factors were introduced (highways, factories, shopping malls, etc.).

The daily temp measurements, as far as we can tell, were carried out with integrity and accuracy.

We then perform one, and only one, slightly abstract arithmetical calculation: We take each day at each station, and average the temp measurements recorded at six in the morning, noon, and six in the evening—or as close as we can get to those times.

Now, for each of the 100 stations, we have a daily average temp.

We then graph that daily average for each station across those 75 years.

We then have 100 graphs in front of us.

For each graph, we do…nothing.  We just look at each graph.  We keep looking.  What are we seeing?  An obvious overall story of dramatic warming increase?  Decline?  Stability and sameness?  A mixed bag of uncertainty?

Then we draw a trend line for each graph. 

Then we ask, “How many degrees of warming for any given graph, across 75 years, would constitute a red flag?”

I would leave the answer to that question to you.

Let’s call the answer X.

Then we ask, “For how many of the 100 graphs do we see a trend of X or greater?”

Suppose the answer is 42. 

Well, is the geo-distribution of those stations clustered in one area?  Are the stations far apart?

What are the other 58 stations telling us?

In other words, we begin to construct a narrative.  A story told by what we see.  Others can examine our story and comment on it—without invoking complex models.

It seems to me this is a reasonable starting point.  And for those who want to jump off from it into the aether with their models, well, it should be apparent how valid or invalid their suppositions and reasoning are, right from the start. 

Does all this seem completely insane?

When I read comments on blogs in which people argue the flaws vs. merits of some extremely complex model, I get the uneasy sense they’re debating angels on the heads of pins—and they’ve wandered so far from what temperature is and means they’ve lost the thread. 

At the risk of losing you (if you’ve come this far), I can offer an analogy in the field of disease diagnosis and testing.  One can read papers in which the subtleties of antibody-test interpretation are argued: layers, bands, false-positives in non-risk populations, etc.  But one glaring fact, which is being ignored, stands out: Until 1985, the presence of antibodies specific to a particular germ was considered a good sign for the patient.  It meant his body had fought off and disposed of the invader.  Antibodies were certainly not a clue that the patient was ill or was going to get ill.  Then, without the slightest justification (except some clever circular reasoning), the whole business was turned on its head.  Antibodies were indicative of illness. 

I point this out to a number of well-known researchers, and they simply stare at me as if I’m mad.

So then I say, “You know, when you vaccinate a person, you’re producing antibodies.  And you’re saying the antibodies confer protection against illness.  But when those same antibodies are produced naturally, by the body, you say they’re a bad sign.”

Then they throw me out. 

Hope to hear from you.

Regards, Jon

Here is Dr. Curry’s brief reply.  I have deleted a sentence or two that contained private information Dr. Curry didn’t want published.    

Curry, Judith …10:29 AM (2 hours ago)

 Reply |Curry, Judith A to me

show details 10:29 AM (2 hours ago)

hi jon thanks for your message.  not at all insane, in fact a number of people are doing similar things…I will get to this general topic in december (at least according to my current plans).  Judy

I take Dr. Curry’s reply in a positive light.  Maybe there is another way. 

Skeptics have already shown the massive unreliability of many data that are widely accepted as useful.  So perhaps it’s time to say all the models are a sign of a bad habit; a useless and harmful addiction.

Throughout science, there are types of models that should never have been built in the first place.  They were interesting to the builders in the same way that advanced chess is interesting to those who can play at that level.  But by their very nature, they’re rubbish science.

They were doomed from the start to chart a flight path that was, a priori, in a universe vastly different from the observational data.  

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport is the author of LOGIC AND ANALYSIS, a unique course for home schools and adults.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

WHY DON’T MOVIE STARS ADOPT AMERICAN BABIES?

NOVEMBER 2, 2010.  Well, maybe they do, but we don’t hear about it in the press.  Apparently, movie-star adoptions are part of the feel-good wave-front of globalism.

Certainly, there are places in the US where grinding poverty and orphaned babies go hand in hand.

Perhaps it just doesn’t sound heroic enough, finding a baby in America.  Anyone can do that.  Only a few people can fly thousands of miles and pull it off.

I suspect movie stars want to make a point about “all of us” being one planetary family. 

Of course, flying a few thousand miles has other advantages.  If you’re the Clintons, for example, you can escape the fallout from the elections and distance yourself from Obama.  But I digress.

I don’t think we are all one planetary family.  No.  I’m quite sure we’re not.  You have your family and I have mine. 

Let’s take a mythical Third World country called X.  For a thousand years, internal conflicts and wars have ripped the country apart.  And then neighboring governments, eager to expand their holdings, have invaded and disrupted X as well.  Then you had your colonizers, who came in from Europe and turned the people of X into subjects.  Corporations, from America, Europe, and Asia made inroads, leasing swathes of land for mining and drilling and agri-business, dispossessing citizens and buying off local kings and presidents and tribal leaders, staging coups, and using death squads for the hard cases.

Business as usual. 

If all these meddling corrupt outsiders had stayed out, maybe X would have worked out its own problems.  Maybe not.  But it would have been their mess.  It would have been their country, their future, their choices.

Globalism, when you strip away the veneer, really does mean business as usual, you see, without the trade tariffs.  And mega-corporations can roam the world, move money in and move it out of countries at the drop of a hat, and outsource whatever they want to, wherever they want to.  All in all, it means cutting costs for these companies. 

Then, on top of that, you have your layer of propaganda.  We’re all one global village, hands across the water, love thy neighbor, give away (highly toxic) pharmaceutical drugs to starving people for whom the drugs are useless and destructive—and above all (shh), don’t clean up the water, don’t spend a few millions decontaminating water supplies to promote health.

To the degree that adopting a baby from a faraway land is a political statement that promotes the general notion of international friendship, it’s a ruse.  It’s a misdirection.  It’s a con.

Well, I can go a lot further than that.  Almost all foreign policy of all governments is a con, because it’s either about war alliances, economic loans (which often turn out to be bait and switch propositions that drive the recipient nation into bankruptcy), or some other scheme that enriches a government opposed to freedom (those governments are very easy to find).

But…minding one’s own national business is a dead duck these days.  To enlightened “progressives,” it’s a passé notion supported by Neanderthals. 

No, we must meddle.  We must deal.  We must intercede.  We must make ourselves part of the problem and then pretend to solve the problem.

That’s why, in his Farewell Address to the nation, George Washington warned against adopting foreign babies.  He said, “Don’t give me that.  I know what this is.  It’s a feint.  You’re doing a head fake.  You’re starting a move to the right and then you’re going left.  Hey, I was at Valley Forge.  You think a hustle like this is going to take me off my spot?”

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANLYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

THE BUSINESS OF THE STATE

NOVEMBER 3, 2010.  As liberals are getting up off the floor this morning, their faces bleeding, and as they add up their losses in yesterday’s election and wonder what it means for their future, it’s worth reflecting on what government does, what it does as a matter of course and habit, what it gives and what it takes away.

First, government survives.  Don’t forget that one.  Like any group or organism, it wants to live.  To accomplish that, it needs to grow.  This, of course, isn’t a matter of constitutional function, it’s visceral.

Like any mafia, it develops partnerships toward that end.  Unions, businessmen, special interests, professional victims, doctors, trade organizations.  It seeks out common interests with these and other partners.  And then we have pork.  Tons of pork.  The folks back home in the states need contracts and money.

Let’s focus on “professional victims,” in the abstract.  Government has the very important job of seeking out and creating more and more victims, in perpetuity, because then it can help these victims, and in the process, grow larger.

If you represent left-handed gray-eyed partially bald therapy patients, and you can make a case, somehow, that this group is being put upon by society, you can go belly to belly with politicians.  They will listen to you.  They will do mental calculations and think about what your votes might mean.  They will try to figure out a way to give you money. 

In the best of all possible worlds for government, the whole population would be composed of victims. 

At some point in the last century, government intellectuals began to realize their partnership with the AMA and other medical groups could pay off in unexpected ways.  If researchers continued to invent categories and sub-categories of illnesses and diseases and mental disorders, and if more and more people placed themselves under the banner of PATIENT, from cradle to grave, this could work out very well for government. 

Look at ObamaCare in that light. 

On another front, if government could convince the public that open borders and endless immigration were policies flowing from humane intent, it could gather millions of new victims (and voters).  The public has always been willing to support “charity” and overlook the cynicism behind the mask.

If teachers’ unions could be expanded and take over the education system, government could support these unions and place low-paid teachers on its list of “people who need help.” 

Government is a fungus.  Its job is to grow and expand.

And of course, the burgeoning tax system itself is a way to take money from people who earn it and give it to people who earn less.  It’s a way to aid the extension of the fungus, if the people whose money is being taken can be convinced they’re doing a good thing.

Now, the last thing the government wants to be seen doing is LESS.

That would be a signal that government isn’t so important.

“We’re doing less this year.  Isn’t that wonderful?  Don’t you like us more for doing less?”

Are you kidding?  That’s a step on the road to fungal suicide.

“Hell, why did we vote for you and put you there if you’re going to be doing less?  We put you there to get something done.  So do it.  We don’t know what ‘it’ is, but do it.  Show us you’re active.  Get off your asses and make something happen.”

And this is where freedom comes in.  With a little thought, we can figure out that if the government does less, the individual is freer. 

Only one problem.  Who is ready for more freedom?  Who remembers what it means?  Who is going to react to more freedom by applauding the government?

“Yeah, I’m going to help re-elect those guys because they did less and helped me get some more of that freedom.”

The citizen has his palms up.  He’s weighing the alternatives.  He’s got his scales.  He’s testing and weighing.

“I can be free over here.  Or I can be a victim over there.  Which one is better?”

For many, many years, the horror movie called government has been:

FUNGUS MEETS VICTIM.

FUNGUS INVENTS VICTIM.

Did something change last night?

That depends on how many of the winners understand these issues and are willing to risk their careers and honor and reputation by burning the fungus.

JON RAPPOPORT

www.nomorefaknews.com

Jon Rappoport has worked as an investigative reporter for 30 years.  He is the author of a unique course for home schools and adults, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  To make inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com

MEDICALLY CAUSED DEATH IN AMERICA:

AN EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH

DR. BARBARA STARFIELD

By Jon Rappoport

Inquiries: qjrpress@gmail.com

www.nomorefakenews.com

For Jon’s radio show every Wednesday at 4PM Pacific Time:

www.ProgressiveRadioNetwork.com

I’ve had many requests for a reprint of this piece.  Here it is.

As the national healthcare bill winds its way through the legislative process (now passed), one explosive factor is being ignored: the American health system, like clockwork, causes a mind-boggling number of deaths every year.

The figures have been known for ten years.  The story was covered briefly when a landmark study surfaced, and then it sank like a stone.

The truth was inconvenient for many interests.  That has not changed.  “Medical coverage for all” is a banner that conceals ugly facts.

On July 26, 2000, the US medical community received a titanic shock to the system, when one of its most respected public-health experts, Dr. Barbara Starfield, revealed her findings on healthcare in America. Starfield was, and still is, associated with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health.

The Starfield study, “Is US health really the best in the world?”, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, came to the following conclusions:

Every year in the US there are:

12,000 deaths from unnecessary surgeries; 

7,000 deaths from medication errors in hospitals; 

20,000 deaths from other errors in hospitals; 

80,000 deaths from infections acquired in hospitals; 

106,000 deaths from FDA-approved correctly prescribed medicines.

The total of medically-caused deaths in the US every year is 225,000.

This makes the medical system the third leading cause of death in the US, behind heart disease and cancer.

The Starfield study is the most disturbing revelation about modern healthcare in America ever published.  The credentials of its author and the journal in which it appeared are, within the highest medical circles, impeccable.     

On the heels of Starfield’s astonishing findings, media reporting was extensive, but it soon dwindled.  No major newspaper or television network mounted an ongoing “Medicalgate” investigation.  Neither the US Department of Justice nor federal health agencies undertook prolonged remedial action.

All in all, it seemed that those parties who could have taken effective steps to correct this situation preferred to ignore it.         

On December 6-7, 2009, I interviewed Dr. Starfield by email. 

What has been the level and tenor of the response to your findings, since 2000? 

My papers on the benefits of primary care have been widely used, including in Congressional testimony and reports. However, the findings on the relatively poor health in the US have received almost no attention. The American public appears to have been hoodwinked into believing that more interventions lead to better health, and most people that I meet are completely unaware that the US does not have the ‘best health in the world’.

In the medical research community, have your medically-caused mortality statistics been debated, or have these figures been accepted, albeit with some degree of shame? 

The findings have been accepted by those who study them. There has been only one detractor, a former medical school dean, who has received a lot of attention for claiming that the US health system is the best there is and we need more of it.  He has a vested interest in medical schools and teaching hospitals (they are his constituency).  They, of course, would like an even greater share of the pie than they now have, for training more specialists.  (Of course, the problem is that we train specialists—at great public cost—who then do not practice up to their training—they spend half of their time doing work that should be done in primary care and don’t do it as well.)

Have health agencies of the federal government consulted with you on ways to mitigate the effects of the US medical system?

NO.

Since the FDA approves every medical drug given to the American people, and certifies it as safe and effective, how can that agency remain calm about the fact that these medicines are causing 106,000 deaths per year?

Even though there will always be adverse events that cannot be anticipated, the fact is that more and more unsafe drugs are being approved for use. Many people attribute that to the fact that the pharmaceutical industry is (for the past ten years or so) required to pay the FDA for reviews—which puts the FDA into an untenable position of working for the industry it is regulating. There is a large literature on this. 

Aren’t your 2000 findings a severe indictment of the FDA and its standard practices?

They are an indictment of the US health care industry: insurance companies, specialty and disease-oriented medical academia, the pharmaceutical and device manufacturing industries, all of which contribute heavily to re-election campaigns of members of Congress. The problem is that we do not have a government that is free of influence of vested interests. Alas, [it] is a general problem of our society—which clearly unbalances democracy. 

Can you offer an opinion about how the FDA can be so mortally wrong about so many drugs?

Yes, it cannot divest itself from vested interests. (Again, [there is] a large literature about this, mostly unrecognized by the people because the industry-supported media give it no attention.

Would it be correct to say that, when your JAMA study was published in 2000, it caused a momentary stir and was thereafter ignored by the medical community and by pharmaceutical companies?

Are you sure it was a momentary stir?  I still get at least one email a day asking for a reprint—ten years later!  The problem is that its message is obscured by those that do not want any change in the US health care system.

Do medical schools in the US, and intern/residency programs in hospitals, offer significant “primary care” physician training and education?

NO. Some of the most prestigious medical teaching institutions do not even have family physician training programs [or] family medicine departments. The federal support for teaching institutions greatly favors specialist residencies, because it is calculated on the basis of hospital beds. [Dr. Starfield has done extensive research showing that family doctors, who deliver primary care—as opposed to armies of specialists—produce better outcomes for patients.] 

Are you aware of any systematic efforts, since your 2000 JAMA study was published, to remedy the main categories of medically caused deaths in the US?

No systematic efforts; however, there have been a lot of studies.  Most of them indicate higher rates [of death] than I calculated.

What was your personal reaction when you reached the conclusion that the US medical system was the third leading cause of death in the US?

I had previously done studies on international comparisons and knew that there were serious deficits in the US health care system, most notably in lack of universal coverage and a very poor primary care infrastructure. So I wasn’t surprised.

Has anyone from the FDA, since 2000, contacted you about the statistical findings in your JAMA paper?

NO. Please remember that the problem is not only that some drugs are dangerous but that many drugs are overused or inappropriately used.  The US public does not seem to recognize that inappropriate care is dangerous—more does not mean better.  The problem is NOT mainly with the FDA but with population expectations.

… Some drugs are downright dangerous; they may be prescribed according to regulations but they are dangerous.

Concerning the national health plan before Congress—if the bill is passed, and it is business as usual after that, and medical care continues to be delivered in the same fashion, isn’t it logical to assume that the 225,000 deaths per year will rise?

Probably—but the balance is not clear. Certainly, those who are not insured now and will get help with financing will probably be marginally better off overall.

Did your 2000 JAMA study sail through peer review, or was there some opposition to publishing it?

It was rejected by the first journal that I sent it to, on the grounds that ‘it would not be interesting to readers’!

Do the 106,000 deaths from medical drugs only involve drugs prescribed to patients in hospitals, or does this statistic also cover people prescribed drugs who are not in-patients in hospitals?

I tried to include everything in my estimates.  Since the commentary was written, many more dangerous drugs have been added to the marketplace.

106,000 people die as a result of CORRECTLY prescribed medicines.  I believe that was your point in your 2000 study.  Overuse of a drug or inappropriate use of a drug would not fall under the category of “correctly prescribed.”  Therefore, people who die after “overuse” or “inappropriate use” would be IN ADDITION TO the 106,000 and would fall into another or other categories.    

‘Appropriate’ means that it is not counter to regulations.  That does not mean that the drugs do not have adverse effects.

INTERVIEWER COMMENTS:

This interview with Dr. Starfield reveals that, even when an author has unassailable credentials within the medical-research establishment, the findings can result in no changes made to the system.

Yes, many persons and organizations within the medical system contribute to the annual death totals of patients, and media silence and public ignorance are certainly major factors, but the FDA is the assigned gatekeeper, when it comes to the safety of medical drugs.  The buck stops there.  If those drugs the FDA is certifying as safe are killing, like clockwork, 106,000 people a year, the Agency must be held accountable.  The American people must understand that.

As for the other 119,000 people killed every year as a result of hospital treatment, this horror has to be laid at the doors of those institutions.  Further, to the degree that hospitals are regulated and financed by state and federal governments, the relevant health agencies assume culpability.

It is astounding, as well, that the US Department of Justice has failed to weigh in on Starfield’s findings.  If 225,000 medically caused deaths per year is not a crime by the Dept. of Justice’s standards, then what is?

To my knowledge, not one person in America has been fired from a job or even censured as result of these medically caused deaths. 

Dr. Starfield’s findings have been available for nine years.  She has changed the perception of the medical landscape forever.  In a half-sane nation, she would be accorded a degree of recognition that would, by comparison, make the considerable list of her awards pale.  And significant and swift action would have been taken to punish the perpetrators of these crimes and reform the system from its foundations.

In these times, medical schools continue turning out a preponderance of specialists who then devote themselves to promoting the complexities of human illness and massive drug treatment.  Whatever the shortcomings of family doctors, their tradition speaks to less treatment, more common sense, and a proper reliance on the immune systems of patients.

The pharmaceutical giants stand back and carve up the populace into “promising markets.”  They seek new disease labels and new profits from more and more toxic drugs.  They do whatever they can—legally or illegally—to influence doctors in their prescribing habits.  Some drug studies which show negative results are buried.  FDA panels are filled with doctors who have drug-company ties.  Legislators are incessantly lobbied and supported with pharma campaign monies. 

Nutrition, the cornerstone of good health, is ignored or devalued by most physicians.  Meanwhile, the FDA continues to attack nutritional supplements, even though the overall safety record of these nutrients is good, whereas, once again, the medical drugs the FDA certifies as safe are killing 106,000 Americans per year.

Physicians are trained to pay exclusive homage to peer-reviewed published drug studies.  These doctors unfailingly ignore the fact that, if medical drugs are killing a million Americans per decade, the studies on which those drugs are based must be fraudulent or, at the very least, massively incompetent.  In other words, the whole literature is suspect, unreliable, and impenetrable.

Jon Rappoport has worked as an independent investigative reporter since 1982.  The LA Weekly nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize, for a interview he did with the president of El Salvador University, where the military had taken over the campus and was disappearing students and burning books.  He has written for In These Tines, Village Voice, LA Weekly, Spin Magazine, CBS Healthwatch, Stern.  His work can be found at www.insolutions.info and www.nomorefakenews.com

Jon is the author of a new course, LOGIC AND ANALYSIS.  For inquiries: qjrconsulting@gmail.com