S01E36: Hu-Xclub
CL: INTRO
Tarot
Be Careful Not To Communicate With Zozo
Stories of the Ouija board demon Zozo have been circulating for just about as long as the Ouija game itself has been around. Who is Zozo? Depends on who you ask, but most people familiar with Zozo believe it to be either a demon, a Tulpa, a mischievous ghost trying to scare and impress the living, or just a product of the ideomotor effect.
Of course, Ouija is a board game, and your chances of accidentally speed-dialing a bona fide evil spirit in the middle of your Halloween party are pretty low.
Still, just in case, it can't hurt to keep an eye out for signs that Zozo is haunting your Ouija board or spirit board.
Several people claim to have been possessed by Zozo, and the experiences they describe are absolutely nightmarish.
Paranormal researcher Darren Evans recounted having a nervous breakdown when Zozo stalked and tormented his daughter until she had to be admitted to a hospital.
The Internet is also rife with spine-chilling tales of meeting Zozo and facing the aftermath of each encounter. According to one witness, Zozo first asked a series of questions about players' families through a spirit board before mysteriously extinguishing a candle and going on to cause a streak of nasty luck for the witness and her friend.
Another witness, who also claimed to have contacted Zozo through a spirit board, allegedly spent some with a friend talking to a spirit named Zozo until her friend began experiencing strange symptoms that started with a headache and culminated with her inexplicable disappearance from the house in the middle of the night.
Several people claim to have been possessed by Zozo, and the experiences they describe are absolutely nightmarish. Paranormal researcher Darren Evans recounted having a nervous breakdown when Zozo stalked and tormented his daughter until she had to be admitted to a hospital.
Most descriptions of Zozo refer to it as a demon, but the truth is that nobody knows what it is. Zozo's MO is to introduce itself to unwary spirit board users, interact with them through the board for a little while, and then slowly begin to spread its influence over their lives. Though a few connections exist between the name “Zozo” and the identity of a Mesopotamian demon, it's not entirely clear if Zozo calls itself a demon or if reports of its malicious behavior have earned it a demonic reputation.
Zozo may not be just one entity, either - after all, if ghosts exist and we can truly speak to them, there's nothing preventing them from using the name Zozo to scare us. In fact, there might not even be a Zozo - the trademark bizarre planchette movements and negative feelings associated with Zozo could easily be produced subconsciously by anyone familiar with the nasty rumors surrounding its name.
While not every Zozo story involves ongoing torment at the hands of a mysterious force, even temporary contact with Zozo can be an unsettling experience.
People who claim to have encountered Zozo often describe experiencing sudden intense feelings of anger, fear, depression, or suicidal ideation while speaking with the entity through a spirit board.
Some victims even say they've experienced physical symptoms, including headaches, sleepwalking, and in one case, an infection. Inexplicable strings of bad luck have also been attributed to Zozo. To date, there are no confirmed instances of actual deaths caused by Zozo, but the incidents recounted by alleged victims are ghoulish enough to lose sleep over.
Almost every story of an encounter with Zozo involves a spirit board, but even if you don't pick up the planchette, you might be unlucky enough to attract Zozo's attention. Some have contacted it through pendulum dowsing, a system similar to a spirit board that uses a suspended weight instead of a planchette to indicate answers. Others have reported meeting Zozo through automatic writing sessions or hypnosis.
Researchers have also captured what they claim is EVP audio footage of Zozo. Darren Evans, the most well-known researcher of the Zozo phenomenon, has even taken what he believes to be a photograph of Zozo.
Most encounters with Zozo start off as deceptively benign conversations before they start to turn sinister. However, there are several signs that can tip you off in time for you to disengage before anything truly creepy happens. Here's how you'll know it's time to put the game away:
The planchette will move in a rainbow pattern from side to side, sometimes pointing to O and Z over and over.
The planchette will move in repeated figure eight movements.
The planchette will spell out any version of Zozo's name (watch out for Zozo, Zoso, Zaza, or Mama in particular).
You might see what look like shadows moving around the area where you're playing.
You and whoever you're playing with will start to feel scared, uneasy, or upset.
If you suspect you might have made contact with Zozo, the best thing you can do is to stay calm. If Zozo really is a demonic spirit, your fear will just make it stick around. If you're using a spirit board, close the session by moving the planchette to GOODBYE. This will formally end the game, and you won't be able to make contact with Zozo anymore.
If you aren't using a spirit board, end your game or session according to its official rules as quickly and calmly as you can. Even if Zozo is nothing more than a product of the ideomotor effect and an overactive imagination, just removing the source of your fear will help you escape the feeling of being haunted
The easiest way to avoid forming an unwanted connection with Zozo is to stop communicating with it for a while. If you use a spirit board, put it away for a while or use it somewhere besides the place where you believe you've run into Zozo. Cleansing your home (or anywhere in particular where you feel like Zozo is more likely to bother you) is also a pretty reliable way of staving off negative influences and regaining some peace of mind. If you're a spiritual person, go ahead and give your place a cleanse with whatever tools work best for you, such as sage or holy water.
If you're dealing with a run of bad health or cruddy luck, your best course of action is to take care of yourself - remember that what goes down will come up again. Don't ignore your physical or mental health, whether it's creepy spirits or garden-variety health problems that have you worried. And if you're 100% convinced that what you're facing is an actual demonic spirit, you can't go wrong with a good ol' exorcism.
Zozo goes by many other names—Zoso, Zaza, Zo, Oz, and even Mama or Abacus. Some sources also associate Zozo with Pazuzu, the Mesopotamian demon king of the southwest wind and the inspiration for the villainous spirit in The Exorcist.
Darren Evans, a paranormal researcher whose reports brought Zozo into the public eye, described encountering Zozo through a Ouija board with a symbol etched into it that could be read as the name “Zozo.” Curiously, this symbol is almost identical to the “Zoso” symbol used to represent Jimmy Page on the inner sleeve of the fourth Led Zeppelin album. While it's not impossible that Page took graphic design advice from a demon, it's more likely that he adapted the symbol from Le Dictionnaire Infernal, an encyclopedia of demons written in 1818.
However, this book lists the symbol as a protective sigil, not a demonic one. This means that Evans, a Zeppelin fan, probably took Zozo's name from the symbol he saw in the album and gave it a demonic origin story—or Zozo just happens to be really into Zeppelin.
There's no guarantee that any given spirit board session will bring you face to face with Zozo - but why leave it up to chance? Before you pick up the planchette, take a minute to set some ground rules for whoever - or whatever - you're hoping to contact. If Zozo does indeed exist, it might think twice before trying to intimidate you if you've shown that you're willing to take control of the encounter. Just dedicate a minute or two before your session to state firmly that you're not interested in talking to anyone who wants to scare or control you, and that if they try, you're going to tell them GOODBYE.
This might not sound like it would do much to deter a demon, but it definitely won't hurt to introduce yourself as someone willing to fight back against any unruly spirits looking for someone to haunt.
Science is facing a "reproducibility crisis" where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, research suggests. University of Virginia's Centre for Open Science, immunologist Dr Tim Errington runs The Reproducibility Project, which attempted to repeat the findings reported in five landmark cancer studies.
According to a survey published in the journal Nature last summer, more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments. The reproducibility difficulties are not about fraud, according to Dame Ottoline Leyser, director of the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.That would be relatively easy to stamp out. Instead, she says: "It's about a culture that promotes impact over substance, flashy findings over the dull, confirmatory work that most of science is about."She says it's about the funding bodies that want to secure the biggest bang for their bucks, the peer review journals that vie to publish the most exciting breakthroughs, the institutes and universities that measure success in grants won and papers published and the ambition of the researchers themselves."Everyone has to take a share of the blame," she argues. "The way the system is set up encourages less than optimal outcomes."
Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey had tunneled down through the ice in order to scoop up seafloor sediment. But through a stroke of either fantastic or terrible luck, they happened to bore their tunnel right over a boulder on the seafloor. That made it impossible to gather sediment, but the dangling instrument’s camera discovered an entire ecosystem of still-inexplicable life that Wired characterized as “strange creatures.”
Published Monday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science. During the expedition, the scientists were able to spot what appeared to be a film of bacteria, peculiar sponges, and various stalked organisms all stuck to the rock. All those critters need to eat, though, and that’s when the already-surprising discovery became downright confusing. There was no apparent source of food — which isn’t a surprise given the utter inhospitality of the area. Scientists still don’t know how the rock’s residents are surviving, according to Wired, but their best guess is that underwater currents wash in tiny bits of detritus and other organic matter from other ecosystems — which exist between 390 and 930 miles away.
In 1967 The CIA released a dispatch that coined the label "conspiracy theory" and "conspiracy theorists" to attack anyone who challenged the official narrative from the Warren Commission. It's interesting to note that the document is labelled "psych", for psychological operations or disinformation. It's also marked "CS copy" at the bottom, meaning "Clandestine Services" Unit.
This document was requested and released to The New York Times in 1976.
After the 1960's the word "conspiracy theory", "conspiracy theorist", and "conspiracy" started having a negative connotation and is enough to silence anyone who questions the official narrative. To this day we still view conspiracy theorists as crazy tinfoil hatters.
CL: A CIA-Issued Rectal Tool Kit For Spies
Japan has asked China to stop taking anal swab tests for Covid-19 on its citizens when they enter the country.Some have complained that the procedure caused them "psychological distress", officials say.China, which has largely brought the virus under control, started carrying out anal swabs in January. "Some Japanese reported to our embassy in China that they received anal swab tests, which caused great psychological pain," Chief Cabinet Secretary Katsunobu Kato said.
It was not known how many Japanese citizens received such tests, he added. Some Chinese cities have introduced anal swabs, with local experts claiming they can "increase the detection rate of infected people. At the time of their launch, state media reported those tests had been "controversial among experts", and that they were far less efficient than tests in the upper respiratory tracts. The existing tests were preferred, as they believe most people contract the virus orally, they said. The tests involve inserting a cotton swab 3-5cm (1.2-2.0 inches) into the anus and gently rotating it.
Rock concerts and COVID vaccine clinics aren’t all that different, if you ask Terry Sapp. The man running the show at Baltimore County’s vaccine sites has spent decades training and coordinating emergency preparedness at the state and local levels. But he credits much of his skill to his years on tour with Twisted Sister across 20 countries from 2004 to 2016, working his way from blogger to production assistant, and as a stage manager for local 1980s cover band The Reagan Years.“Running something like this, running a large-scale music event or even a concert — the similarities are all there,” says Sapp, who is the public health emergency coordinator for Baltimore County’s health department. Instead of road cases full of instruments, now the cases are filled with medical supplies. Gaff tape, it turns out, marks out traffic cone locations as well as it secures amp cables — guiding patients to vaccinators within the Cow Palace at the Maryland state fairgrounds in Timonium. And it’s important to know how to get the crowd moving. It’s more logistical than clinical, he says.
On Wednesday morning, police security driving golf carts ferried older patients from the parking lot to the Cow Palace. Nurses, Maryland National Guard members and county employees checked them in on iPads. Finally, workers pointed patients to one of nine short queues to await their shots.The preparation seems to be paying off. Maryland’s third-most populousjurisdiction has outpaced the rest of the state getting shots into arms, with more than 66,500 people having gotten their second dose in Baltimore County as of Thursday. The Timonium site is inoculating around 2,800 people daily, with “close to zero waste,” Sapp said. Any leftover doses go to those helping run the site. There are parallels between propping up a makeshift clinic and setting the stage for Dee Snider to sing about fighting “the powers that be,” Sapp points out.
As he circles the 158,400-square-foot Cow Palace, a tattoo of a “Mad Max”-style Armadillo — his nickname as a roadie — peeks out from beneath his left arm sleeve. The geometric Twisted Sister logo, inked on his left arm, is generally hidden. Whether organizing a clinic or a concert, everyone fills a niche. Backstage, the guitar tech is focused on tuning the string instruments. The light tech chooses which gels to filter the most suitable onstage lighting.
Like roadies, Sapp says, county clinic staff members each have just one job, facilitating a more streamlined process.
It’s a departure from some other mass vaccination sites Shortly after Sapp joined the county health department in 2008, he had a different virus outbreak to contend with as the H1N1 flu began spreading rapidly. The county’s H1N1 vaccine operation — among the largest clinics in the state — was essentially expanded and tweaked to suit the coronavirus response. Since then, Sapp has helped coordinate seven vaccination sites during the county’s Super Saturday flu vaccine events.”It allowed us to build that muscle memory,” he said. Girl Scout cookies also played a part. Looking for low-cost ways to test the efficiency of the county’s system to dispense mass medical countermeasures — often antibiotics, spurred by widespread anthrax attacks in 2001 just after Sept. 11 — Sapp struck a partnership between the county and the Girl Scouts of Central Maryland. The cookie boxes are identical to the weight and dimensions of a case of antibiotics from the federal cache, Sapp said. Girl Scout troops — simulating local organizations that would dispense the antibiotics — lined up in cars to receive the cookie boxes in a drive-thru. That training, which began in 2009, provided a template for the county to deliver personal protective equipment to around 300 county nursing homes at the outset of the pandemic.
“We’ll keep going until we don’t have to,” he said.
TOKYO (Reuters) - The lights dim, as at the start of any theatre performance, and the audience leans forward to look through a letter-box slot or peephole in the door in front of them as the performers break out into dance. Japanese dance company Moonlight Mobile Theater has come up with a novel way of bringing people back to their avant-garde performances while maintaining social distancing. Audience members sit on stools in separated cubicles surrounding the stage, each with its own door and letter-drop slots through which they can watch the dancers. “We intentionally created small holes and slots resembling mailbox slots,” said Nobuyoshi Asai, the theatre’s artistic director and choreographer, explaining how limiting the scope of viewing allows the audience to become more absorbed in the performance. The theatre company began this peephole viewing in December after cancelling most of its shows last year because of the pandemic. Since December, all 12 of the peephole performances have sold out.Though this response has been encouraging, only 30 people are allowed in the audience at each show. This does not cover the cost of the performance, including additional safety measures such as disinfecting the venue. Government subsidies barely help the company make ends meet. “If we don’t do it, artists will lose opportunities to dance and act,” he said. “We want to propose this as a model to bring audiences back to theatres.”
CL: Work From Home
Fisher-Price Has Turned Our Remote Work Hell Into a Toy
”My Home Office” for kids lands somewhere between dark satire and a meme looks like a parody, and a rather dark one at that The obvious takeaway: Once upon a time, children might pretend to be an astronaut or a superhero before the educational system disabused them of all their dreams. Now, apparently, a toy inspired by the Covid-19 remote-work boom, which has converted so many homes into offices and schools, will teach them to just skip ahead and start fantasizing about a soul-draining life of Slack banter and Zoom meetings. This flew so close to satire that truth-on-the-internet arbiter Snopes.com weighed in on the matter, confirming that the eight-piece play set is perfectly real and carries a suggested price of $24.99. In fact, according to its Amazon listing, it’s been available since August. But it’s only in the past week that the kit seems to have made a splash on social media, where it was described as “bleak” and evidence that “we’re all living in hell now.”As Snopes pointed out, fake play set parodies are actually a meme-world trope: “In recent years, Fisher-Price toys have formed the basis of popular online parodies and pastiches, such as ‘Tiny Toker,’ which included toy marijuana paraphernalia, ‘My First Vape,’ and a ‘Happy Hour Playset,’ complete with toy stools, tiny beer bottles, and a kid-sized bar.”Another example: the (fake) “Fisher-Price Work From Home Playset,” which appears to have made the rounds in July. Allegedly aimed at kids ages three and up, it promised a pretend laptop, crying baby, an uncomfortable-looking kitchen table and chair, and a couple bottles of wine. “The perfect toy for 2020 doesn’t exist,” announced a meme-spreader site. That was not true for long. The Toy Insider noted the popularity of the fake-product meme in mid-August and observed: “It’s funny because it reflects the strange limbo we’re living in right now — a pandemic-fueled era where home is work, home is school, and there really isn’t an ‘off switch’ anywhere to be found.” But then the publication revealed the plot twist: Life appeared to be imitating a rejected Black Mirror episode, and a real version of the same basic idea was now available for purchase. Sadly, it seems impossible, given the timing, that Fisher-Price literally got the idea from a meme. And it’s not clear how the design and specific components of the actual play set were directly shaped by and meant to respond to work-from-home pandemic culture. (Parent company Mattel did not respond to my inquiries.) Presumably the point is not, in reality, to train kids to join the boundaryless, claustrophobic delirium of the work-from-home, teach-from-home workforce. But what is the point? It turns out that, Twitter wits notwithstanding, a toy that seems like a set of grim training gear for a world without work/life boundaries does have its defenders. Kids love to pretend and enjoy imitating the adults in their lives, Motherly pointed out, and there are plenty of work-related play sets and toys already, so why not have one that normalizes the home office? Several commenters on the economics-focused Marginal Revolution blog made similar points: “Children process complex ideas through play,” one said. Indeed, several reviews on Amazon — where the product has 3.9 out of five stars, based on about 600 ratings — note examples of kids already imitating remote-working parents, often wanting to poke at their actual laptops. (Most of the negative reviews are focused on the physical quality of the objects, not their sociological implications; also, the top positive review involves using the set to distract a cat.) In other words, maybe this toy merely responds to and formalizes, or just tries to cash in on, behavior that’s already happening anyway.
By accident or intent, maybe Fisher-Price’s seemingly weird and dark toy also cues up some of the subversiveness that makes play valuable. If you’ve never learned how to spend some part of your work day on the moon, I recommend you give it a try. Ask a toddler for advice.
High in the Indian Himalayas, a remote lake nestled in a snowy valley is strewn with hundreds of human skeletons.
Roopkund Lake is located 5,029 metres (16,500ft) above sea level at the bottom of a steep slope on Trisul, one of India's highest mountains, in the state of Uttarakhand.
The remains are strewn around and beneath the ice at the "lake of skeletons", discovered by a patrolling British forest ranger in 1942.
Depending on the season and weather, the lake, which remains frozen for most of the year, expands and shrinks. Only when the snow melts are the skeletons visible, sometimes with flesh attached and well preserved. To date, the skeletal remains of an estimated 600-800 people have been found here. In tourism promotions, the local government describes it as a "mystery lake".
Who were these people? When did they die? How did they die? Where did they come from?
One old theory associates the remains to an Indian king, his wife and their attendants, all of whom perished in a blizzard some 870 years ago.
Another suggests that some of the remains are of Indian soldiers who tried to invade Tibet in 1841, and were beaten back. More than 70 of them were then forced to find their way home over the Himalayas and died on the way.
Yet another assumes that this could have been a "cemetery" where victims of an epidemic were buried. In villages in the area, there's a popular folk song that talks about how Goddess Nanda Devi created a hail storm "as hard as iron" which killed people winding their way past the lake. India's second-highest mountain, Nanda Devi, is revered as a goddess.
Earlier studies of skeletons have found that most of the people who died were tall - "more than average stature". Most of them were middle-aged adults, aged between 35 and 40. There were no babies or children. Some of them were elderly women. All were of reasonably good health.
Also, it was generally assumed that the skeletons were of a single group of people who died all at once in a single catastrophic incident during the 9th Century.
The latest five-year-long study, involving 28 co-authors from 16 institutions based in India, US and Germany, found all these assumptions may not be true.
Scientists genetically analysed and carbon-dated the remains of 38 bodies, including 15 women, found at the lake - some of them date back to around 1,200 years.
They found that the dead were both genetically diverse and their deaths were separated in time by as much as 1,000 years.
"It upends any explanations that involved a single catastrophic event that lead to their deaths," Eadaoin Harney, the lead author of the study, and a doctoral student at Harvard University, told me. "It is still not clear what happened at Roopkund Lake, but we can now be certain that the deaths of these individuals cannot be explained by a single event."
But more interestingly, the genetics study found the dead comprised a diverse people: one group of people had genetics similar to present-day people who live in South Asia, while the other "closely related" to people living in present-day Europe, particularly those living in the Greek island of Crete.
Also, the people who came from South Asia "do not appear to come from the same population".
"Some of them have ancestry that would be more common in groups from the north of the subcontinent, while others have ancestry that would be more common from more southern groups," says Ms Harney.
No arms or weapons or trade goods were found at the site - the lake is not located on a trade route. Genetic studies found no evidence of the presence of any ancient bacterial pathogen that could provide disease as an explanation for the cause of deaths.
A pilgrimage that passes by the lake might explain why people were travelling in the area. Studies reveal that credible accounts of pilgrimage in the area do not appear until the late 19th Century, but inscriptions in local temples date between 8th and 10th Centuries, "suggesting potential earlier origins".
So scientists believe that some of the bodies found at the site happened because of a "mass death during a pilgrimage event".
It seems unlikely that people from Europe would have travelled all the way from Roopkund to participate in a Hindu pilgrimage.
Or was it a genetically isolated population of people from distant eastern Mediterranean ancestry that had been living in the region for many generations?
"We are still searching for answers," says Ms Harney.
A medieval Italian village which has been submerged for decades under a lake is set to emerge again. The earth is continually undergoing significant changes, some of which are wrought by Mother Nature, and some of which are wrought by humans. One of the changes wrought is the construction of dams, intended to bring water and power to districts where populations, and the industry they bring, need it but have no access to it.
Building dams was once a particularly popular solution for those who had to have energy and water, when governments and politicians were less aware of the ecological consequences of the enforced rearrangement of landscapes and water routes. Today, we are less eager to dam up rivers, or construct lakes as sources of energy or recreation.
But after the second world war, especially, power companies were determined to bring energy to as many regions as possible right across Europe and North America, and both continents experienced a boom in dam construction that in hindsight often seems risky, particularly in an environmental context.
In 1953, just such a dam was constructed in Italy that created Lake Vagli and brought power and tourism to the area. However it had the perhaps unintended consequence of covering a spectacular medieval village, called Fabbriche di Careggine, and it became “invisible” to anyone visiting the area. But dams, like all large construction projects, need maintenance, and so too does Lake Vagli, which is set to be drained this year and next, much to the delight of Italians and other visitors who come from far and wide to visit the village when the lake is emptied.
It was last drained in 1994; sources say it drew approximately one million visitors, all of them anxious to see these archaeological ruins that experts date back to the 12th or 13th century. The village was used, historians say, as living quarters for iron workers who plied their trade in the area. A prominent local, the daughter of a former mayor, Lorenza Giorgi, posted on her social media feed that she had it on good authority that Lake Vagli is to be drained in 2020.
A spokesman for the company that manages the lake, Enel Power, told Fox News recently that in fact the early discussions are underway, and that the process may begin later this year. However, the village is not likely to be visible, at least not fully, until 2021. When the lake is drained it is as if ancient buildings suddenly come into view in a rather startling and eerie fashion — almost mirage like. But people can take boats out to the ruins and easily get a closer look at was once a thriving set of buildings for men in a common, popular trade.
What, exactly is cancel culture?
Is it someone getting fired for harassment or problematic views? No, that's a workplace doing its job.
Is it a popular figure losing fans or affiliations because of their past actions? No, that's the power of public opinion.
Is it a company choosing not to publish a book, or a group of people boycotting a brand? No, that's just the free market at work.
Cancel culture, as it's understood today, isn't real. Not only do people and things allegedly "canceled" by this imaginary movement often prevail in the end, the whole concept is a smoke screen to distract from actual systemic forces of suppression.
Cancel culture is nothing new. Its philosophy -- that anyone can be excoriated for speaking their mind, that people are too sensitive, that the slightest offense can be fatal -- is just a repackaged extension of the decades-long culture wars and the "political correctness" dialogue popular in the 1990s.
It's also a remix of common First Amendment and censorship arguments, which often vastly misinterpret the constitutional and legal bounds of both terms. For instance, conservatives have long alleged "censorship" of like-minded voices on Twitter and Facebook, when data analysis shows the volume and reach of conservative content is quite strong and often outperforms other content.
However, proponents of this imaginary force want you to believe its victims prevail not because cancel culture doesn't exist, but because it can be thwarted. That argument breaks down when those very proponents have to apply the same logic to people within their fold.
It's no secret cancel culture has been adopted as a cause du jour among conservative celebrities.
Ohio Representative Jim Jordan recently called for a House Judiciary hearing on cancel culture, saying it was causing a wave of censorship across the country.
Women afraid to speak up for fear of being blacklisted, LGBTQ people hiding their identities to protect their careers or lives, people shunned for their culture or their views:
These are the real problems that exist. It's not cancel culture.
To know the difference, look at the people who actually suffer when these culture wars play out.
In 2016, Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem at an NFL game. After that season, he hasn't played football since.
Where are the anti-cancel culture warriors in Kaepernick jerseys? Where are the anti-cancel culture warriors fighting for men and women who allege wrongdoing at great risk to their own career?
It's very convenient that the same people who want to convince you that cancel culture is real also seem to be the ones determining who is worthy of being saved from such a fate, and who is not.
That's because cancel culture isn't real.
There is accountability. There are legal repercussions. There are tides of public opinion and the pull of the free market. There are also longstanding institutional structures that serve to suppress and threaten those who act against the interests of those with power.
None of this is cancel culture.
And by pretending otherwise, we're distracting ourselves from seeing the patterns of who really benefits from this rhetoric, and who really loses.
The conservative outrage aboupast week reached a fevered pitch. Right-wing The conservative outrage about cancel culture this past week reached a fevered pitch. Right-wing politicians have used their CPAC speeches and social media accounts to decry people being forced to change what they say in the name of mob sentiments. Culture war commentators in newspapers and online outlets have written lengthy broadsides against this current form of political correctness. Fox News has seemingly spent more time on the issue than the pandemic that still grips the country.
This rightwing focus has been couched in the honorable defense of free speech and free thought. Those are fundamental principles of this country, no doubt, but don’t be fooled — American conservatives have no interest in these abstract principles. Instead, all they care about is defending a time when racism, sexism, and anti-LGBT sentiments were commonplace and acceptable.
Two years ago, a fourth grader teacher in a South Carolina public school asked students to write an “essay to society” on any topic that the principal was then going to collect into a booklet for the entire class and their families. One of the students in the class submitted a paragraph for this assignment on a topic that she cared deeply about. But when the principal went to compile the essays into the class booklet, the principal decided that the essay topic was not “appropriate,” “would be disagreeable,” and “would make other parents upset.”
Ultimately, the principal and the teacher forced the student to write her essay about a different topic entirely. Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that the principal and school district were well within their rights to refuse to publish this student’s essay.
The commentators who are filling screens and newspapers with screeds about cancel culture have said nothing, instead focusing on sharing memes and stoking outrage about Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and the Muppets.
Here’s what the student wrote (with all of the cute misspellings that come from quoting a fourth grader):
“I don’t know if you know this but peoples view on Tran’s genders is an issue. People think that men should not dress like a women, and saying mean things. They think that they are choosing the wrong thing in life. In the world people can choose who they want to be not being told that THEIR diction is wrong. I hope people understand that people can hurt themselves from others hurting their feelings. People need to think before they speak because one word can hurt someone’s feelings. We need to fix this because this is getting out of hand!”
A school censoring a fourth grader writing about transgender people deserving to be treated with respect and equality? A student who cares about the deep wounds that words can leave and the problem of self-harm in vulnerable communities? To no one’s surprise, the rightwing outrage machine that has been railing against cancel culture recently, perhaps even making it the primary part of the Republican platform right now, has said absolutely nothing about this school or this court ruling endorsing this school’s censorship. And the reason is obvious — the right doesn’t care about trans rights, so they don’t care about this student, to use their words, being canceled.
This difference is everything. When a private business makes a business decision about the best way to market and sell their products, that’s the essence of capitalism and something companies do every minute of every day. That has nothing to do with censorship or free speech. But, when a government stops an individual from speaking — that’s exactly what censorship is.
CL: Iggy Pop hates 'punk rock' (1977)
CL: mmmmmmRNA... IT'S GONNA CHANGE YOUR DNAAAAAAA!
CL: Neon Oedipus Evangelion
CL: Mark Zuckerberg Says He Is Not a Lizard Person
CL: Video by kyledunnigan1
CL: Charles Manson's Epic Question
Tommy HuX-Club's Nature
In philosophy, naturalism is the "idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists) assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws.[2]
X Club (act. 1864–1892), was a private dining club made up of nine eminent London men of science. It met monthly in the social ‘season’ from October to June. The club had no declared objective but early records reveal shared aims and values: the friends who met on 3 November 1864 were described as devoted to 'science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas' (Hirst, journal, 6 Nov 1864). They varied in class, religion, and scientific discipline, but all—whether mathematicians or naturalists, ardent agnostics or undogmatic Anglicans, salary-dependent professionals or wealthy London gentlemen—were united in advocating a science unconstrained by either commercial objectives or theological dogma. In 1864 their vision of science and society was threatened by attempts to impose theological constraints on scientific enquiry and by divisive, politically charged arguments over anthropology. Blastodermic Club was initially proposed as a name, because the blastoderm is 'that part of the ovum in which the rudiments of future organisation first appear' (Spencer, 2.115). This name suggests that the club intended to guide the development of the body scientific. They chose the less revealing name X Club.
T. H. Huxley (thirty-nine), a brilliant comparative anatomist, was lecturer in natural history at the Government School of Mines and naturalist in the Geological Survey. In the sixties he was adding to his scientific reputation a public reputation as an entertaining speaker and controversial defender of Darwin.
The club was a formalization of friendship and lobbying networks formed over the previous twenty years. Tyndall, Hirst, and Frankland had met through their common employments in the mid-forties and became friends as they discovered common ambitions. Hooker, Huxley, and Busk met in London in the early fifties as they sought to pursue science—rather than the medicine in which they had been trained. In London's intensely networked scientific and journalistic circles Huxley established friendships with Spencer and Tyndall. Hooker began the lobbying networks, calling on his friends for assistance in using the examination system to reform botany teaching through pressure on the medical curriculum, and seeking their support in making the meetings and journals of the Linnean Society more useful to serious researchers. Friends, and friends of friends, were drawn into the network. Tyndall and Frankland joined Hooker and Huxley in journalistic schemes to spread 'scientific attitudes' (against such popular 'unscientific' enthusiasms as spiritualism) and to raise public appreciation of science in the late 1850s. Wives and families became important to the social cohesion of the group as the friends dined and holidayed together.
With the publication of Charles Darwin's Origin of Species in 1859 the network of reformers around Hooker entered a new phase. Lubbock joined Huxley, Hooker, and Busk in defending Darwin in the lobbies of the Royal Society, on the platforms of the British Association, and through the pages of the Natural History Review. Equally important to the growth of the group were the controversies over popular works of biblical interpretation
They linked free enquiry in biology with liberal issues more generally, such as broadening the formularies of the Church of England and associating science with melioristic social programmes, rather than the illiberal racism of the Anthropological Society of London. Through Spencer's journalistic friends they became allied (although only briefly in 1864–5) with the Christian Socialists and the liberals around J. S. Mill in publishing a weekly paper, The Reader: a Review of Literature, Science, and Art.
Through mutual support and hard work the X Club became a powerful force in mid-Victorian science. Its members became a revolving directorship in the Royal Society (Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley held the presidency in turn between 1873 and 1885) and the British Association (c.1865–1874) and exercised considerable power in the Linnean Society, the Royal Institution, and many lesser societies. They promoted the expansion of science education—as examiners for the Department of Science and Art, as advocates before royal commissions, and in numerous other ways. Huxley, Lubbock, Spencer, and Tyndall achieved fame as popular writers and lecturers on science. Hooker, Huxley, and Spottiswoode became eminent science administrators. Busk, Frankland, and Hirst avoided the limelight but their support and advice variously encouraged and restrained the more vocal and hot-headed of their friends.
The members used their power to open up science to expertise. When they nominated Hooker for the presidency of the Royal Society many other members of the society wanted to maintain the tradition of having a titled president. The X Club members rejected the implication that science needed legitimation from any other authority. In their view science carried its own authority. Under Hooker's presidency the entrance fees to the Royal Society were removed, making the society more accessible to men of modest means. They promoted science as useful and men of science as workers for the public good, hence, science deserved support and men of science respect. But even as they campaigned for increased government support for science, most notably in the royal commission on scientific instruction and the advancement of science (the Devonshire commission, appointed 1870), they confronted the problem that governments wanted to control science in ways that undermined the freedom of science and even impugned the honesty of scientific men. When Acton Ayrton, first commissioner of works, tried to exert greater control over the expenditure and priorities of Kew Gardens they lobbied indignantly for Kew's autonomy. Science was useful, but it was not to be constrained within the bounds of utility.
The members used their power to open up science to expertise. When they nominated Hooker for the presidency of the Royal Society many other members of the society wanted to maintain the tradition of having a titled president. The X Club members rejected the implication that science needed legitimation from any other authority. In their view science carried its own authority. Under Hooker's presidency the entrance fees to the Royal Society were removed, making the society more accessible to men of modest means. They promoted science as useful and men of science as workers for the public good, hence, science deserved support and men of science respect. But even as they campaigned for increased government support for science, most notably in the royal commission on scientific instruction and the advancement of science (the Devonshire commission, appointed 1870), they confronted the problem that governments wanted to control science in ways that undermined the freedom of science and even impugned the honesty of scientific men. When Acton Ayrton, first commissioner of works, tried to exert greater control over the expenditure and priorities of Kew Gardens they lobbied indignantly for Kew's autonomy. Science was useful, but it was not to be constrained within the bounds of utility.
Because the club was informal and the traces of its actions fragmentary, there has been room for considerable scholarly disagreement over the original intentions of the members and the extent of their later power. There have been three areas of difference in X Club scholarship: the relative importance of the various members; whether or not their intentions were conspiratorial; and, most importantly, what their motives and objectives were. The historiography of the X Club has been shaped by Huxley's reminiscences that they were merely a group of friends whom he and Hooker brought together; and that any influence was an unintended consequence of the positions the individuals attained. Thus, it was widely accepted, the club had no 'formal purpose' (MacLeod, X-Club, 310). But, at the same time, informal objectives were attributed to the members—to 'further the cause of science' (Jensen, X Club, 64)—and the later power of the group was emphasized. Some scholars have been more sceptical about Huxley's claims to innocence and over time more examples of division in the scientific community and more traces of X Club collusion have been uncovered. In addition to the well-known antagonism of the Darwinians to Richard Owen, the X men were supporters of the Ethnological Society of London against the Anthropological Society of London; they were often in conflict with the North British circle of physicists and engineers about Sir William Thomson; and they kept advocates of spontaneous generation out of the Transactions of the Royal Society. Common commitments implying shared objectives have been identified by many scholars. The goals of making science naturalistic and the scientific community professional have been widely considered to explain their collaborative actions but, twenty years on, the interpretation of professionalization has been questioned and the important role of the amateurs inside the club emphasized. One of the more outspoken assertions of conspiracy attributes both specific Darwinian motives and grand cultural ambitions to the group. They were 'a Darwinian clique' plotting 'an aggressive campaign to reclaim nature from theology and to place scientists at the head of English culture' (Moore, Deconstructing Darwinism, 373, 375–6).
By the mid-1880s, when ill health, personal tensions, and death diminished their zeal, cohesiveness, and numbers, the X Club had become a group of friends, their power reduced to individual influence. When the first Lady Lubbock died in 1879 one of the chief social centres of the group was lost; and with Spottiswoode's death in 1883 another was gone. Busk died in 1886. The ills of old age prevented some members from attending on cold nights; Lubbock had other priorities, which his old friends interpreted as lack of loyalty; and the stubborn, ageing individuals found each other's dogmas and idiosyncrasies increasingly trying. Huxley and Lubbock were still public figures; Hooker, Huxley, and Lubbock were still consulted by governments; but the club's monthly dinners were ill attended. When Hirst died in 1892 the club ceased to meet.
Just what difference the X Club made is an unanswered question. Its members were powerful in many scientific institutions and respected advisers to government—the 'most powerful coterie in late-Victorian science' (Moore, Theodicy and society, 172). Huxley, Tyndall, and Lubbock became the public face of science in the 1870s and 1880s and have featured almost as conspicuously in modern historiography. But would their apparent achievements have occurred without them? Their secularizing and educational goals were shared with the dissenting industrialists who wanted scientifically trained workmen and a less Anglican, more secular society. And is our vision blurred by the grand narrative of progress to a more secular, Darwinian world? Against the X Club were the North British physicists who represented a science compatible with free will, miracles, and commercial exploitation. When the X Club members were declining into old age, Stokes and Thomson remained energetic—and became presidents of the Royal Society. Any account of X Club achievements must acknowledge the significance of the opposition.
united by a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas."[2]
After Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, the men began working together to aid the cause for naturalism and natural history. They backed the liberal Anglican movement that emerged in the early 1860s, and both privately and publicly supported the leaders of the movement.
A key aim was to reform the Royal Society, with a view to making the practice of science professional. In the 1870s and 1880s, the members of the group became prominent in the scientific community and some accused the club of having too much power in shaping the scientific landscape of London. The club was terminated in 1893, after depletion by death, and as old age made regular meetings of the surviving members impossible.
The X Club came together during a period of turbulent conflict in both science and religion in Victorian England. The publication in 1859 of Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species through Natural Selection brought a storm of argument, with the scientific establishment of wealthy amateurs and clerical naturalists as well as the Church of England attacking this new development. Since the start of the 19th century they had seen evolutionism as an assault on the divinely ordained aristocratic social order. On the other side, Darwin's ideas on evolution were welcomed by liberal theologians and by a new generation of salaried professional scientists; the men who would later come to form the X Club supported Darwin, and saw his work as a great stride in the struggle for freedom from clerical interference in science. The members of the X social network played a significant part in nominating Darwin for the Copley Medal in 1864.
In 1860, Essays and Reviews, a collection of essays on Christianity written by a group of liberal Anglicans, was published. The collection represented a summation of a nearly century-long challenge to the history and prehistory of the Bible by higher critics as well as geologists and biologists.[8] In short, the writers of Essays and Reviews sought to analyse the Bible like any other work of literature. At the time, Essays created more of a stir than Darwin's book. The members of the X network backed the collection, and Lubbock even sought to form an alliance between liberal Anglicans and scientists. Two liberal Anglican theologians were convicted of heresy, and when the government overturned the judgement on appeal, Samuel Wilberforce, the High Church and the evangelicals organised petitions and a mass backlash against evolution. At the Anglican convocation, the evangelicals presented a declaration reaffirming their faith in the harmony of God's word and his works and tried to make this a compulsory "Fortieth Article" of faith. They took their campaign to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, aiming to overthrow Huxley's "dangerous clique" of Darwin's allies
In 1862, Bishop John William Colenso of Natal published The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined, an analysis of the first five books of the Old Testament. In his analysis Colenso used mathematics and concepts of population dynamics, including examinations of food supply and transportation, to show that the first five books of the Bible were faulty and unreliable. Outrage broke out within the Church of England, and the X network not only gave their support to Colenso, but at times even dined with him to discuss his ideas.[10]
Later, in 1863, a new rift began to emerge within the scientific community over race theory. Debate was stirred up when the Anthropological Society of London, which rejected Darwinian theory, claimed that slavery was defensible based on the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin. The members of what would become the X Club sided with the Ethnological Society of London, which denounced slavery and embraced academic liberalism. The men of the X Club, especially Lubbock, Huxley, and Busk, felt that dissension and the "jealousies of theological sects" within learned societies were damaging, and they attempted to limit the contributions the Anthropological Society made to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a society of which they were all members.[11]
Thus, by 1864, the members of the X Club were joined in a fight, both public and private, to unite the London scientific community with the objective of furthering the ideas of academic liberalism.[12]
In 1864, Huxley wrote to Hooker and explained that he feared he and his group of friends, the other men of the social network, would drift apart and lose contact. He proposed the creation of a club that would serve to maintain social ties among the members of the network, and Hooker readily agreed. Huxley always insisted that sociability was the only purpose of the club, but others in the club, most notably Hirst, claimed that the founding members had other intentions. In his description of the first meeting, Hirst wrote that what brought the men together was actually a "devotion to science, pure and free, untrammelled by religious dogmas," and he predicted that situations would arise when their concerted efforts would be of great use.[15][16]
On the night of the first meeting, Huxley jokingly proposed that the club be named "Blastodermic Club", in reference to blastoderm, a layer of cells in the ovum of birds that acts as the center of development for the entire bird. Some historians, such as Ruth Barton, feel that Huxley wanted the newly formed club to act as a guide to the development of science. The name "Thorough Club", which referred to the movements that existed at the time for the "freedom to express unorthodox opinion", was also rejected as a possible name.[17] As Spencer would later explain, "X Club" was chosen in May 1865 because "it committed [the group] to nothing."[18] The name itself, according to Hirst, was proposed by Mrs. Busk
According to Spencer, the only rule the club had was to have no rules. When a resolution was proposed in November 1885 to keep formal notes of the meetings, the motion was defeated because it violated the rule. Nevertheless, the club kept both a secretary and a treasurer, and both positions were held in turn by each member of the club. These offices were in charge of account collecting and sending notices of upcoming meetings. Members, including Hirst, Huxley, Hooker, and Tyndall, also took informal notes of the meetings.[19]
Between 1870 and 1878, Hooker, Spottiswoode, and Huxley held office in the Royal Society simultaneously, and between 1873 and 1885, they consecutively held the presidency of the Royal Society. Spottiswoode was treasurer of the Society between 1870 and 1878 and Huxley was elected Senior Secretary in 1872.
Outside the Royal Society, the men of the X Club continued to gain influential positions. Five members of the Club held the presidency of the British Association for the Advancement of Science between 1868 and 1881. Hirst was elected president of the London Mathematical Society between 1872 and 1874 while Busk served as Examiner and eventually President of the Royal College of Surgeons. Frankland also served as President of the Chemical Society between 1871 and 1873.[22][24]
During this time, the members of the X-Club began to gain renown and win awards within the scientific community in London. Among the nine, three received the Copley Medal, five received the Royal Medal, two received Darwin Medals, one received the Rumford Medal, one received the Lyell Medal, and one received the Wollaston Medal. Eighteen honorary degrees were handed out among the nine members, as well as one Prussian 'Pour le Mérite' and one Order of Merit. Two of the members were knighted, one served as Privy Councillor, one as Justice of the Peace, three as Corresponding Members, and one was a Foreign Associate of the French Academy of Sciences.[24]
As the members of the club continued to gain prominence within the scientific community, the private club became well known. Many people at the time viewed the club as a scientific caucus, and some, such as Richard Owen, accused the group of having too much influence in shaping the scientific landscape of late-Victorian England.[25] Huxley recounted that he once overheard a conversation about the club between two men of the Athenaeum Club, and when one asked what the X-Club did, the other explained "Well they govern scientific affairs, and really, on the whole, they don't do it badly."[26][27] Informal notes of early meetings seem to confirm some of the concerns. Discussion often surrounded the nomination of members to offices of major societies, as well as the negotiation of pension and medal claims. In 1876, the club even voted to collectively support Lubbock’s candidacy for the Parliament of the United Kingdom.[28]
Huxley, however, always stated that the simple purpose of the club was to bring friends together who may have drifted apart otherwise. According to Huxley, the fact that all the members of the club gained distinction within science was merely coincidental.[29]
By 1880, the members of the X Club had prominent positions within the scientific community, and the club was highly regarded, but it was beginning to fall apart. In 1883, Spottiswoode died of typhoid and at the same time, according to Spencer, only two of the remaining eight members of the X club were in good health. Attendance at meetings began to dwindle and by 1885, Frankland and Lubbock urged for the election of new members. There was a difference of opinion on the matter and it was eventually dropped. In 1889, a rift emerged in the group when Huxley and Spencer had an argument over land nationalisation policies and refused to talk with one another.[30]
The members of the club were growing old and during the late 1880s and early 1890s, a few of the members moved out of London. When attendance began to severely dwindle, talks of ending the club emerged. The last meeting was held unceremoniously in March 1893, and only Frankland and Hooker attended.[31]
Amidst the storm of controversy raised by the lab-origin theory of COVID-19 extolled by such figures as Nobel prize winning virologist Luc Montagnier, researcher Judy Mikovits, bioweapons expert Francis Boyle, and now recently joined by leading scientists among China’s own CDC, a project was undertaken under the nominal helm of NATURE Magazine in order to refute the claim. This research report which has been cited thousands of times was titled ‘The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2’.
This project was led by a team of evolutionary virologists using a line of reasoning that “random mutation can account for anything” and was parroted loudly and repeatedly by Fauci, WHO officials and Bill Gates in order to shut down all uncomfortable discussion of the possible laboratory origins of COVID-19 while also pushing for the global vaccine campaign now underway. M
Lincoln’s system had been known as ‘American System of National Economy’, a name created by the father of Germany’s Zollverein Friedrich List years earlier. Unlike British Free Trade, this ‘American System’ was premised on protectionism, national banking, long term infrastructure and most importantly placed the source of value on the human mind’s capacity to make discoveries and inventions as outlined by Lincoln’s 1858 speech by the same name. In this system, the Constitutional concept of the General Welfare was not mere ink on parchment but rather the governing principle of monetary value and national policy.
Lincoln’s chief economic advisor and coordinator of the export of the American system internationally after the Civil War was named Henry C. Carey. As early as 1851, Carey wrote his Harmony of Interests which stating:
“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labour of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the labourer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”
In Russia, American System follower Sergei Witte, Transport Minister and close advisor to Czar Alexander III, revolutionized the Russian economy with the American-made trains that rolled across the Trans-Siberian Railway. Not even the Ottoman Empire remained untouched by the inspiration for progress, as the Berlin to Baghdad Railway was begun with the intention of unleashing a bold program of modernization of southwest Asia.
The construction of continental railroads, and industrial powers of nations internationally was quickly bringing the world land bridge concept first elaborated by Colorado’s Governor William Gilpin quickly into being. For those who are unaware, Gilpin (who was also Lincoln’s body guard and loudest advocate of America’s transcontinental railroad) spent decades championing the international system of win-win cooperation which he outlined in his 1890 Cosmopolitan Railroad stating:
“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events”.
The British Empire knew that this emerging new paradigm would render both its maritime control of international trade as obsolete as its international program of usury and cash cropping.
It was clear that something had to change dramatically, for if the empire could not adapt in response to this new paradigm, it surely would soon perish. The task of re-shaping imperial policy from a “material force” approach of control to a more “mental force” of control, was assigned to T. H. Huxley and the X Club. This group established the guiding scientific principles of empire that were soon put into practice by two new think tanks known as the Fabian Society and Rhodes Scholar Trust which I outlined in my 3-part series ‘Origins of the Deep State in North America’.
Huxley, who is famously known as ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ for relentlessly promoting Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection (a theory in whose scientific merits he didn’t even believe) soon decided that the group should establish a magazine to promote their propaganda.
Founded in 1869, the magazine was called Nature and featured articles by Huxley and several X Club members. The deeper purpose of the X Club and its magazine as outlined in a 2013 report entitled ‘Hideous Revolution: The X Club’s Malthusian Revolution in Science’, was geared towards the redefinition of all branches of science around a statistical-empiricist interpretation of the universe which denied the existence of creative reason in mankind or nature. Science was converted from the unbounded study and perfectibility of truth to a mathematically sealed “science of limits”.
The science of “limits” became the foundation of an oligarchical economic science for the elite and naturally had to be kept hidden from the minds of the general population since it followed Thomas Malthus’ mathematical principle of population growth. Malthus’ “principle” of population supposed that unthinking humans reproduce geometrically while nature’s bounty only grows arithmetically and as such periodic population collapses were an unavoidable law of nature which could at best be managed by an oligarchical scientific priesthood who were obliged to periodically cull the herd.
Malthus and the X Club leaders believed that nature bestowed upon the ruling class certain tools to accomplish this important task (namely war, famine and disease) and Malthus stated so cold-bloodedly in his 1799 Essay on Population:
“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.”
The X Club’s support of the Darwinian theory of Natural Selection was less a scientific decision in this respect and more of a political one, as Darwin later admitted in his autobiography that his own theory arose directly from his study of Malthus:
“In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic inquiry, I happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population, and being prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes on, from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The result would be the formation of a new species. Here then, I had at last got a theory by which to work”.
By universalizing Malthus onto all living creation, the X Club obscured the qualitative difference between humans and monkeys which was advantageous for an empire that can only control humans when they adopt the law of the jungle as standards of moral practice and identity formation rather than anything actually moral.
It was thus no accident that Henry C. Carey targeted Darwinism, Malthus and the X Club relentlessly in his Unity of Law: An Exhibition on the Relations of Physical, Social, Mental and Moral Science (1872). In this important book, Carey attacked all systems founded upon master-slave relations saying:
“Hence it is that it has given rise to the doctrine e of over-population, which is simply that of slavery, anarchy and societary ruin, as the ultimate condition of mankind; that, too, coming as a consequence of laws emanating from an all-wise and all powerful Being who could, if He would, have instituted laws in virtue of which freedom, order, peace and happiness would have been the lot of man. That these latter have been instituted- that the scheme of creation is not a failure; that is marred by no such errors as those assumed by Mr. Malthus; is proved by all the facts presented for consideration by the advancing communities of the world- the habit of peace, among both individuals and nations, growing with growth of numbers, and increase in power for self-direction.”
Although we are told too often today that no alternative system ever existed outside of Darwin’s theory of evolution, a closer inspection of science history during the 19th century proves that to be far from true.
During this period, an anti-Darwinian scientific revolution was blossoming in the life sciences under the guiding leadership of figures like James Dwight Dana, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Alexander von Humboldt, Georges Cuvier, Karl-Ernst von Baer, and Benjamin Silliman. These scientists not only began questioning the static theory of nature as derived from a literal reading of the Bible, but made huge strides in realizing the higher causal mechanisms defining the flow of evolution. This process was outlined in a 2010 lecture delivered by the author of this report entitled “the Matter Over Darwin’s Missing Mind”.
Unlike many of our modern scientists, these figures never saw a dichotomy separating science from religion, as “science” was understood as nothing less than the investigation and participation in God’s Creation, and as such the biosphere and all “units” within it were implicitly defined as more than the sum of its parts and all fast approaching theories of evolution that were driven by intention, harmony and directionality.
This outlook was showcased brilliantly by the great naturalist and embryologists Karl Ernst von Baer who wrote in his On the Purpose of Nature (1876):
“The reciprocal interconnections of organisms with one another and their relationship to the universal materials that offer them the means for sustaining life, is what has been called the harmony of nature, that is a relationship of mutual regulation. Just as tones only give rise to a harmony when they are bound together in accordance with certain rules so can the individual processes in the wholeness of nature only exist and endure if they stand in certain relationships to one another. Chance is unable to create anything enduring, rather it is only capable of destruction.”
Huxley and the Darwinians on the other hand, promoted an opposing “bottom up” interpretation of evolution by starting with the imagined ‘random mutations’ in the immeasurably small which supposedly added up to the collective sum of all species and biosphere. This biosphere was thus defined as little more than the sum of its parts.
The imperial school of Huxley’s X Club denied not only creativity’s existence from this higher metaphysical standpoint, but also denied the fact that humanity can uniquely translate the fruits of those creative discoveries into new forms of scientific and technological progress which had the effect of increasing our species’ ability to transcend our “limits to growth” (or as modern neo-Malthusians have termed our “carrying capacity”).
Throughout the 20th century Nature Magazine has won an ugly reputation as an enforcer of deductive/inductive models of thinking which have destroyed the careers and lives of many creative scientists.
One of these scientists was the preeminent immunologist Jacques Benveniste (1935-2004) who suffered a 15 year witch hunt led by Nature Magazine as punishment for his discoveries on “water memory and life” (ie: how organic molecules configure the geometry of H2O molecules and imprint their “information” into said water).
This defamation campaign began in 1988 when Nature Magazine conducted an “official” attempt to duplicate the results of Benveniste’s discoveries on water’s power to retain the information of allergenic substances within its structure which continued to cause allergic reactions upon living tissues and organs long after all traces of the substances were filtered from various solutions.
As outlined in the 2014 documentary Water Memory, Nature Magazine went so far as to hire a stage magician named James Randy to co-lead an investigative team which intentionally botched Benveniste’s results, lied about the data and condemned Benveniste as a fraudster. This operation ruined the scientist’s reputation, dried up his funding and kept biology locked into the materialist cage for another three decades. Nature Magazine’s slander campaigns were described by Benveniste as a “mockery” which used “McCarthy-like methods and public defamation campaigns” to crush him.
Whether or not COVID-19 arose naturally as Nature Magazine attests or whether it arose in a laboratory as Dr. Luc Montagnier, and the Chinese CDC officials have come to believe, what is certain is that science can be temporarily retarded, but its course of evolution cannot be held back forever.
Today, the legacy of Alexander von Humboldt, Karl Erst von Baer and Cuvier, Dana, Vernadsky and Benveniste is alive and well with Dr. Montagnier and teams of international researchers who have taken the theoretical, experimental and clinical work on water memory to a revolutionary new level with the opening up of a new school of quantum optical biophysics as I outlined in my recent paper Big Pharma Beware:
Dr. Montagnier Shines New Light on COVID-19 and The Future of Medicine.
Describing the coming revolutions in biology, Montagnier said:
“The day that we admit that signals can have tangible effects, we will use them. From that moment on we will be able to treat patients with waves. Therefore it’s a new domain of medicine that people fear of course. Especially the pharmaceutical industry… one day we will be able to treat cancers using frequency waves.”
With Montagnier’s bold call for an international scientific crash program into wave harmonics therapy to deal with COVID-19, and with the new alignment of nationalist systems amidst the multi-polar alliance led by Russia and China, there is a serious chance that the new paradigm of win-win cooperation championed by Henry C. Carey, Lincoln and other international patriots in the wake of America’s Civil War, may actually be blossoming once more.
https://www.dw.com/en/immune-memory-gives-shot-in-the-arm-to-vaccine-hopes/av-56216607
https://podcastindex.org/podcast/836788
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02020-1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvZ6M7U4L4o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvqQo5FogtU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVm1cho3bf4&t=44s
https://www.dw.com/en/anal-covid-19-swabs-why-is-china-doing-them/av-56789590
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbcAzMzyTGOM7uY4KLnjUNw
https://fort-russ.com/2021/01/keynes-sleight-of-hand-from-fabian-eugenicist-to-world-government-high-priest/
https://study.com/academy/lesson/rna-editing-definition-processes.html
https://asreview.org/2021/01/22/thomas-huxley-once-respected-now-rejected/
https://darwinday.org/educate/oxforddebate/
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/05/06/the-rise-of-optical-biophysics-and-the-clash-between-two-sciences/
https://soundcloud.com/oneradionetwork/the-history-of-science-as-a-religion-may-20-2020
https://www.nature.com/articles/209599a0.epdf?no_publisher_access=1&r3_referer=nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/209601a0.pdf