If Dems Will Ever Earn My Vote, The First Step Is To STFU

by damagecollateral
Winning…

There’s a particular genre of political masochism I’ve been watching lately that deserves its own category in the DSM. Call it Electoral Tourette’s Syndrome, or maybe just advanced Brand Damage Fetishism. Whatever the clinical term, the Democratic Party has it. Bad.

Look, I get it. The party establishment’s position on Gaza has been, to put it mildly, positively atrocious. Senator Cory Booker—who someone brilliantly nicknamed “AIPAC Shakur” and the universe it still laughing about that—is hardly alone. The whole apparatus has been galactically, catastrophically wrong on this issue, in ways that make their base want to claw their eyes out.

But here’s the thing that really gets me: it’s not just that they’re wrong. It’s that they can’t stop yapping to world how wrong they are, at precisely the moments when shutting up would be the politically savvy move. It’s like watching someone methodically shoot themselves in each foot, then reload and go for the kneecaps.

Take Hillary Clinton. Back in May 2024—when Biden was still the candidate and the party desperately needed to contain the Gaza backlash—Hillary decided to go on MSNBC’s Morning Joe and deliver a lecture to student protesters.

“They don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or, frankly, about history in many areas of the world, including in our own country,” she told Joe Scarborough. She claimed that under her husband’s administration, “an offer was made to the Palestinians for a state on 96% of the existing territory occupied by the Palestinians with 4% of Israel to be given to reach 100% of the amount of territory that was hoped for.”

“If Yasser Arafat had accepted it, there would have been a Palestinian state now for about 24 years,” she insisted, calling it “one of the great tragedies of history.”

Never mind that this narrative has been thoroughly debunked by actual negotiators who were in the room—including Robert Malley from Clinton’s own administration. As Professor Osamah F. Khalil of Syracuse University noted, “For Clinton to say this is really disingenuous.” He pointed out that Arafat had warned Bill Clinton before Camp David “that the two sides were not ready.” To lay blame squarely on the Palestinians was unfair, he added. “Diplomacy is not a one-time mattress sale.”

The real question is: why say this now? Campus protests were erupting across the country. The party’s position on Gaza was already hemorrhaging votes. You’ve got students getting brutalized by police for protesting a genocide your party is funding.

What was the strategic thinking? “You know what will help? If I remind everyone that our party’s foreign policy blob has the same tired talking points they’ve had since Camp David!” Brilliant. Chef’s kiss. Really winning hearts and minds.

The response was swift. Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn, Michigan, which has a substantial Arab and Muslim population, said the city’s “young people” were not taking kindly to being lectured.

But wait—it gets better.

Fast forward to late October. Kamala’s now the candidate, desperately trying to hold Michigan—a swing state with the largest Arab-American population in the country. She’s already hemorrhaging support because of Gaza. The campaign knows this. Everyone knows this.

So Bill Clinton emerges from whatever Epstein-memorial crypt he’s been hiding in, and Good Lord. The man goes full Zionist-ideologue mode, so extreme that he doesn’t just torpedo Kamala—he retroactively destroys his own legacy. Suddenly everyone’s remembering that the Oslo Accords were overseen by this guy, this ghoul who apparently thinks Palestinians deserve whatever happens to them. The “peace process” is revealed as the sham it always was, because of course it was—look who was running it!

“The hardest issue here in Michigan is the Middle East,” Clinton, 78, shakily told the crowd at a “Souls to the Polls” event. “I understand why young Palestinians and Arab Americans here in Michigan think too many people have died. I get that.”

But of course, there’s always a “but.”

“Hamas makes sure that they’re shielded. They’ll force you to kill civilians if you want to defend yourself,” Clinton blurted.

Clinton wasn’t done. He decided to deploy the ultimate historical argument: “I got news for [Hamas]—[Israelis] were there first, before their faith existed,” The Times of Israel he said, referring to Islam. You know, just casually erasing the entire existence of Palestinians as a people who’ve lived on that land for thousands of years.

The reaction was swift and brutal. Palestinian American comedian Amer Zahr said it is “baffling” how out of touch the Harris campaign is. “It’s hard to imagine anything more insulting than what Bill Clinton said about us. He invoked the oldest Zionist tropes in some bizarre effort to convince us to vote for Kamala Harris.”

Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn—the US’s first Arab-majority city—told Al Jazeera: “When you see the remarks of former President Bill Clinton, talking about how Israel is forced to kill civilians … it gets extremely frustrating.” As one analysis put it, Clinton “appeared to suggest that they’re wrong to be outraged by the catastrophic death toll from Israel’s war in Gaza.”

Social media erupted, with journalist Sana Saeed calling it “one of the most horrific genocidal diatribes a U.S. leader has gone on in decades.”

Xavier Abu Eid, a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team, wrote: “Clinton is concluding what he started in Camp David, July 2000, where he adopted Israeli positions and blamed Palestinians for not accepting them. Don’t know what he had in mind, but this isn’t going to help the Harris campaign add a single vote from Arab Americans.”

And again: why? This was one week before the election. In Michigan. Speaking to Arab Americans. People were desperately searching for reasons to believe Democrats weren’t as monstrous on Gaza as they appeared. He could have lied! Many would have believed him! But nope—he had to make it crystal clear that when it comes to Palestine, Democrats are just Republicans with pronouns.

The pattern was everywhere. Pro-Palestine voices banned from the DNC. A Muslim delegate literally kicked out of a campaign event—not for protesting, just for.. existing while Muslim, I guess? And then—and then—Kamala skips Dearborn, Michigan entirely. The largest Arab-American city in the country. In a swing state. During a razor-thin election.

The message couldn’t be clearer: “We dare you not to vote for us. We’re actively testing how little self-respect you have.” So when pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted a Harris rally in Detroit by simply stating they “won’t vote for genocide,” she shut them up with her catchphrase, “I’m speaking”. Even with polling data showing “growing support for Trump among Arab American voters in Michigan, with many citing dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party’s stance on Middle Eastern conflicts as a primary factor”, the Democrats saw it coming and just… kept going.

So Trump wins, and—wouldn’t you guess? The post-election discourse from the Democratic establishment wasn’t much better. We’re talking photo-ops with Netanyahu, several visits to Israel by Congressmen, the hilariously names “50 States, One Israel” event where 250 states legislators went to Israel, many of whom were Democrats. Not only that, but to ensure not being outdone by future political flubs, freaking Pete Buttigieg decides to repeat atrocity propaganda about October 7th “babies in ovens”—lies that were debunked over and over for two whole years, even by Israeli media itself. If I didn’t know better, I’d think they’re trying to be funny.

I’ve covered a lot of political self-destruction over the years. I’ve seen parties implode, candidates crater, movements eat themselves alive. But this? This suicide-by-megaphone routine the Democrats are running on Gaza? I’ve never seen anything quite like this shutting up handicap.

Someone please explain what I’m missing. Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like a party that would rather lose elections than stop telling pro-Palestine voters to go fondle themselves.

And they wonder why people won’t vote for them.

The Gaza Pause That Isn’t

by damagecollateral

They’re calling it a breakthrough. A triumph of diplomacy. The latest example of American leadership bringing peace to the Middle East, or some such hogwash.

Let’s cut through the victory-lap fog: this ceasefire isn’t about ending anything. It’s about managing the optics of a 77-year-old project that’s been running on autopilot since the Nakba. The deal everyone’s celebrating is really just a calibration—turning down the volume on ethnic cleansing from a scream to a whisper, dialing back to the pre-October 7th simmer that didn’t make quite so many people uncomfortable at brunch.

What’s actually changed on the ground? Let me count the ways: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

Gaza remains an open-air prison. The West Bank is still a patchwork of checkpoints and settlements where armed zealots terrorize families with impunity. Palestinians live under a surveillance state that makes the Stasi look like mall security. And Israeli officials keep saying, out loud, with cameras rolling, that there will never be a Palestinian state—a detail that somehow never makes it into the “path to peace” coverage.

Oh, and Gaza? It’s rubble. Flattened. Block after block of what used to be homes, hospitals, schools—gone.

But sure, let’s pop the champagne.

The kicker? Israel’s already violating the agreement. Five Palestinians dead today. Aid trucks stopped at the border. The usual script. While Gazans understandably grab any respite they can get from the nightmare, the rest of us have zero reason to pretend this represents progress.

Don’t believe the hype. This isn’t Washington riding in on a white horse to save Palestinians from Israeli bombs. This is the U.S. and Europe throwing themselves in front of a runaway train – one they built, fueled, and waved goodbye to as it left the station.

The real story? Israel was about to become ungovernable for its Western sponsors.

In recent weeks, the global backlash hit critical mass. Hundreds of thousands were flooding European streets every weekend, not in scattered protests but in coordinated eruptions of rage. In Italy, the government was staring down the barrel of an actual political crisis. These weren’t your standard-issue marches-that-change-nothing. People were done.

Meanwhile, aid flotillas kept multiplying in the Mediterranean, each one a floating middle finger to the official narrative, magnetic poles for thousands of people who’d had enough of doom-scrolling genocide from their living rooms. The couch-to-action pipeline was real, and it was accelerating.

The imperial brain trust looked at the board and realized Israel had painted itself into a corner so tight that the whole regional chessboard was about to flip. That’s what this “peace deal” is actually about – damage control for the alliance, not mercy for the dead.

The American foreign policy establishment is engaged in a grotesque, self-fellating victory lap, pumping out grandiose “peace” announcements like a pharmaceutical company distributing free samples of Xanax. This isn’t celebration—it’s sedation. It’s a calculated dose of institutional Valium, mainlined directly into the cerebral cortex of an global public that was getting dangerously close to giving a damn.

The game here is transparent if you squint even a little: they need us to exhale, high-five each other about “getting the win,” and then zombie-walk back to our regularly scheduled programming. The pressure worked—actual, real pressure from normal human beings who briefly remembered they’re supposed to have opinions about whether we incinerate strangers on the other side of the planet. So naturally, the Blob is betting we’ll do what we always do: declare victory and go home, precisely at the moment when not going home actually matters.

It’s the oldest trick in the Washington playbook. Give the plebes just enough of a “win” to shut them up, then resume operations while they’re still drunk on their own sense of accomplishment.

Don’t take the bait.

The names of American mercenaries in Gaza must be disclosed

by damagecollateral

– “I think you hit one.”

– “Hell yeah, boy!”

The above is from a recorded exchange between two American mercenaries working with the so-called Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (HRF) as they shot live ammunition at unarmed hungry Palestinians seeking aid.

No; I’m not merely talking about Israeli soldiers. I’m talking about American mercenaries, many of whom are gentile, who have so far killed a significant portion, if not all, of the 800 unarmed hungry Palestinians murdered for sport as they came to receive flour.

These mercenaries are eventually coming home, and we need to be ready to bring them right to court. In fact, we should be taking legal action now against the GHF and working to incarcerate its Christian Ziosupremacist CEO Johnnie Moore. Human life isn’t something humanity can just brush off as some kind of incident in a conflict. If the death penalty came into existence for a reason, setting up a flour trap for hungry unarmed people that you helped starve then picking them off from the safety of a tower above is exactly that reason.

Of note, these mercenaries do not enjoy the legal protections offered by being active service members. Also, many of them signed up specifically so they can kill people with ease. This is evident by the fact that they shoot humans even as they’re leaving aid distribution sites. They know, and have been promised by their handlers, that they will not be fighting Hamas. They would not have signed up otherwise.

Yes, there’s a reason why the word mercenary is a dirty word.

You probably think I’m exaggerating, but if you’ve been in a conflict zone you’d know it’s a magnet for psychopaths from all corners of the globe. It’s one of the things no one writes about in war. Many snipers working in Syria, for example, were neither Syrian nor ideologically aligned with the side they were killing for. Locals working to scout out and hunt down such snipers have gotten used to the unsavory discovery that the sniper they’ve been pursuing for weeks is actually some suburban white dude from Europe or North America who is only there for the “thrill”. He’s bored of a life without murder. There’s a hole in his heart that can only be filled by seeing human heads exploding through a rifle scope. This is a very real and pervasive thing in war.

And the GHF makes it all “legit”. No need to smuggle yourself solo into a conflict zone and have to learn the terrain the hard way. Apply online and you get to satisfy your thirst for blood and act out your hatred toward “Muzlums” all at once! And if you have a chronic case of butt hurt from what happened to you or your comrades in Iraq or Afghanistan, you get to enjoy the illusion of reclaiming part of your lost manhood, too, by offing some brown people who speak the same language as those who gave you said butt hurt. Not only that, but you get to make a boat load of tax payer money to boot! Apply now!

The reason for the existence of the GHF is to upend the well organized, fair, dignified methods of distribution already established in Gaza by the UN and other humanitarian organizations and replace them with one chaotic, Darwinian scheme in order to humiliate Palestinians and spread chaos to weaken the resolve of Gazans. Many of the GHF’s mercenaries, and certainly all of its management, are fully aware of this and have signed up knowing that this is their goal. Surely some of them, such as the whistleblowers behind the AP report linked above, signed up genuinely thinking they’d be helping Palestinians, but the murder toll so far is too great and the reports too damning to give the GHF or the majority of its mercenaries any benefit of the doubt.

Enough is enough. These f*ckers need to be put on trial. I don’t want one of them to be my neighbor when they come back, and I’m sure most Americans share my sentiment.

To My Dear Conservative Friends

by damagecollateral
Conservatism. The fake kind.

I share your conservatism. Heck, I’m more conservative than half of you on the stuff you supposedly care about. My conservatism actually informs my worldview, which apparently makes me some kind of radical. Because when my conservatism sees over 12,000 children transformed into hamburger in Gaza, it doesn’t shrug and change the channel. It doesn’t wait for permission from a think tank to feel something. My conservatism—the actual, functioning version—makes me want to do something about it right friggin’ now.

My conservatism also tells me that if someone shows up at my door claiming they own my house because their great-great-great-grandfather’s cousin’s neighbor maybe lived here three millennia ago, I’m not handing over the keys. I’m reaching for the gun you people won’t shut up about. And if they start “mowing the lawn”—that’s the term, by the way, that’s what they call it—slaughtering my family and turning me into a refugee, you bet your bum I’m using violence.

Are you seriously telling me you wouldn’t? You, with your Gadsden flags and your Toby Keith ringtones and your entire personality built around the Second Amendment, you’re going to lecture me about “peaceful resistance” while your kids are getting vaporized? Please. Spare me the performance.

My conservatism puts me on the side of people who don’t surrender their homes to satisfy someone else’s delusional sense of divine real estate entitlement. My conservatism tells me I don’t owe reparations for some Bronze Age exodus that may or may not have happened when people were still figuring out the wheel. That’s conservatism. Or it used to be.

My conservatism makes my blood pressure spike when I watch foreign lobbies actively work to abolish my First Amendment rights—making it literally illegal to boycott a country or criticize an ideology. They’re doing this right now, in state legislatures, in Congress, attaching it to highway bills like a tumor. How’s your conservatism handling that? Or does it only activate when someone says “Happy Holidays”?

My conservatism believes in fiscal responsibility, which is apparently now a fringe position. So when we’re shoveling tens of billions to a government conducting a livestreamed genocide while Americans can’t afford insulin and cops are working second jobs at Walmart, my conservatism gets twitchy. Does yours? Or is yours only concerned with deficits when a Democrat’s in office?

So here’s my question: when does your conservatism kick in? What’s the activation code? Do you need Tucker Carlson to say it’s okay first? Or did you buy some premium version of conservatism that only works when it’s convenient, that somehow malfunctions every time it might cost you something real? Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like you’re running a demo version that only boots up when the TV tells it to.

How you know Israel is doomed

by damagecollateral

You know it by the renewed reminders of Israel’s origins. Every time the Palestinian strife is in the news, a lot of the online educational content among Palestine supporters (which is most people around the world and most social media influencers) is about what happened in 1948 and about how Zionism began in the 1800s.

That is to say, the historical examination does not stop at how Israel has been illegally occupying the West Bank and Gaza since 1967. No, it almost unfailingly goes back to Israel’s establishing. In other words, the very legality of the existence of Israel is always being subjected to scrutiny.

This is profound. Consider over 7 decades of complete Western acceptance of Israel, journalistic complicity and endorsement, billions spent to prop up and maintain Israel, countless tours for Westerners hosted by Israel, military and intelligence complete integration with the West, thorough corporate endorsement.. All of that, and yet Israel’s very right to exist keeps being reevaluated.

By now, it’s safe to say that this reevaluation will never go away so long as Israel is in existence.

If I were a philosopher, I would be fascinated by this. It is a strong example of the universality and permanence of certain moral values. Despite all efforts, time lapsed, and all attempts at revising history by erasing all mention of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1947-1948, the establishment of Israel never became right, Israel remains an uneasy anomaly and the truth about Israel’s founding could never be concealed. The validity of Israel’s founding is always being questioned and even lamented among large swaths of intellectuals in the West.

To be fair, though, there are factors without which this renewed examination of Israel’s establishing may not take place. If, for hypothetical example, there were no Palestinian resistance, if said resistance were too meager to be of much significance, if Palestinians were not as numerous, if Palestinians were not relatively homogenous culturally, if Palestinians were not relatively universally oppressed, the balance may have tipped in favor of Israel being an easy fit into the collective conscience of the world.

Regardless of the causes and factors, the end result is the same. Israel’s right to exist is always in question despite all efforts, and that’s astonishing and damning at the same time.

American foreign policy strategists should start to envision a future without Israel

by damagecollateral

It should have never made sense. A country created by importing foreigners to steal the lands of the locals and ethnically cleanse them, and in the heart of the Muslim world? On one of Muslims’ main holy places?

Just thinking about the idea feels exhaustingly anti laws of nature. Whoever thought it would work for long cannot have been thinking clearly. If I had to guess, I’d say it was power drunkenness. What we’ve been seeing since 10/7 (and for most of the year in the West Bank) is not some glitch in the code. It’s not an anomalous breakaway event that needs to be corrected so we can go back to the same old program. Rather, what we’re witnessing is the only possible natural consequence for this unnatural project called Israel.

Israel is the way we chose to treat Muslims in the East Mediterranean. The question I keep asking myself is: why did we in America choose to treat Muslims based on a European narrative? Why did we have to transfer Europe’s Crusader baggage into our mindset? After all, it was Muslims in Morocco who were the first to recognize the US after its independence. In fact, Muslim sentiments were in favor of the US since Americans revolted against, and gained independence from, an enemy of Muslims called Britain. Muslims loved the American ideal of freedom from oppression and, after our independence, welcomed our convoys and embassies with open arms.

So why, then, did we decide that we need to stick this thing called Israel as our colonial outpost in the heart of the Muslim world to keep Muslims under our boots? Which brilliant think tank came up with that one?

It could have been much different. We could have chosen to have the whole Muslim world be our friends. Things could have been much more peaceful even without us losing our power or influence in the world. But instead we chose to create an entity that would upend world peace for decades, spend billions to preserve it, and have the planet witness so many wars and conflicts because of it.

Why?

To what end? That is the question that needs to be on the minds of American foreign policy makers. How did the idea that Israel is good for us come to be and how is it actually good for us? It’s ok to rethink basic questions like that every now and then, and for us, it’s about time we do so.

Palestinians may be the most oppressed, but the most manipulated and mislead are Jews

by damagecollateral

In July, President Biden said in a meeting with Israeli President Isaac Herzog: “If there wasn’t an Israel, we’d have to invent one“, and Jews around the world need to understand the implications of this revealing statement.

Jews have long been manipulated into thinking that it is they and their lobbies that have a strong influence on Washington; that Washington is, to some degree, under their control. Many non-Jews around the world have also been manipulated to believe the same. The narrative of a “powerful Jewish lobby” that “controls Western powers” is quite pervasive in many societies. While there is some truth to that narrative, it is only because Israel’s presence is seen as a strategic benefit for Western powers. What Jews need to understand is that Israel benefits Western powers much more than it benefits Jews. In fact, those who pay the highest price for the West’s insistence on the preservation of Israel are Palestinians and Jews.

The billions of American taxpayer dollars that go to Israel each year aren’t some sort of charity or gift that is given out of an emotional commitment. That money is actually a lucrative investment by the US that brings hefty returns. If there were no Israel, America would have to pay billions of dollars more for maintaining several aircraft carriers that would be needed in the region, only without the intelligence, weapons, and technology benefits that Israel provides in return.

Meanwhile, nearly all of the damage incurred upon Israeli Jews from having to contend with Palestinian and other regional enemies is suffered by those Israelis alone. America and its allies cheer on Israel and send all kinds of aid (as an investment, as they benefit greatly from Israeli services) but suffer almost none of the human and security losses suffered by Israeli Jews. At some point Jews need to start wondering if America would ever send its own soldiers to fight Palestinians on the ground instead of using Jews as canon fodder to preserve its interests. At some point, Jews need to ask themselves what it is exactly they are gaining from all of this.

Any insinuation that Hamas’ recent attack is unprovoked or disproportionate is either hopelessly ignorant or extremely supremacist

by damagecollateral

So yeah, Hamas’ ongoing attack is shockingly massive even to Palestinians themselves. But if you’ve been following the Palestinian struggle from the inception of Israel to the ongoing attacks on Gaza and the West Bank to the home and land confiscations to the daily humiliation and subjugation of Palestinians to the constant encroachments on Muslim holy grounds, Hamas’ ongoing attack compared to what Israel does is like a drop of ink in a tank of blood.

You can compare however you wish. Civilian casualties? Let’s not even go there. Frivolous imprisonment without charge? Even for minors? Hamas keeps a few captives for exchange negotiations while Israel has a whole prison system for Palestinian resistors. Deliberate targeting of schools, shelters, hospitals, and places of worship? Israel has done all of that while Hamas hasn’t (they’ve leveled seven mosques in Gaza in the last 48 hours). Daily humiliation and subjugation of an entire population and reducing them to dwellers of an open air prison? That’s Israel’s line of work, not Hamas’. Use of white phosphorus and cluster bombs on civilians? Israel did it. Hamas did not. Economic and agricultural sabotage? Israel did it. Hamas didn’t.

If you’ve been following things, you know that the list goes on. And if you’ve been following things, you know that the damage Hamas has incurred is literally nothing compared to Israel.

Now, if someone has indeed been informed of Israel’s actions but still chooses to be outraged by Hamas’ ongoing attack then excuse my French, but that’s an extreme case of supremacism. I don’t have to explain why this is the case but I will exercise my right to judge that person’s world view and to treat it accordingly.

I just ask that such people acknowledge and embrace their own supremacism. I hope they can reach the courage to be open about it. After all, being supremacist and honest is better than being supremacist and dishonest. I wish they would just say that Palestinian/Muslim lives are worth less than Israeli/Jewish ones. The world can see their supremacy pretty clearly, so their dishonesty is only making them look worse. Being honest might be a minor upgrade.

Stop shaming the vaccine hesitant. Start understanding them.

by damagecollateral

It’s hard to write a piece like this. On the one hand, I’m not a conspiracy theorist when it comes to COVID. I do know that it’s a real disease that has killed millions around the globe and that it is a global threat that we need to face and combat. It’s not hype. It’s real and we should absolutely protect ourselves from it.

I’m also not anti-vaccine. I myself would take a COVID vaccine if I felt that the risk involved in not taking it justifies the risk of taking it. I never hesitated to take a vaccine before. I think vaccines are a great human accomplishment and I do not subscribe to the overblown fears of autism or the rare side effects of conventional vaccines.

But when it comes to the available vaccines for COVID, namely the mRNA and vector DNA vaccines (which encompass all vaccines available in the US so far), I have serious reservations that can be understood and appreciated. And, no, I do not believe that they change our genetic makeup.

The mechanism of action of the Pfizer, Moderna, J&J, and AZ vaccines is such that they all rely on, or at least result in, our immune system attacking and killing our own skeletal muscle cells for us to gain immunity against COVID-19. The mechanism is simple in principle: the vaccine is made of DNA or mRNA strands enveloped either in lipid droplets or viral envelopes. The DNA/mRNA strand enters a skeletal muscle cell. That cell then uses the DNA/mRNA strand to create a foreign protein (the viral spike protein), which is then displayed on the cell’s membrane. Our T-cells recognize these proteins as foreign and, accordingly, destroy the entire skeletal muscle cell as if it were a cell that developed a DNA mutation, such as what happens to cancer cells that are cleared out by the immune system.

This is all fine until we realize a few things:

1- This is a very similar mechanism to the one by which many viral infections are believed to lead to autoimmune disease. There’s a list of viruses with which being infected leads your immune system to attack and kill the cells that the virus has infected. This would be beneficial if the immune system stops at killing infected cells and leaves the rest of the tissue alone. However, in some people the immune system instead gets “trained” to attack and kill all cells of the type that was infected (and sometimes other cell types too) whether they were infected with the virus or not. Many autoimmune diseases are thought to originate by such a mechanism.

One might argue that the human immune system is always destroying mutated cells in our bodies, and that’s true, but skeletal muscle cells don’t multiply, so they don’t mutate nearly as often as multiplying cells. Indeed, malignant tumors originating from cells that don’t normally multiply, such as rhabdomyosarcomas (skeletal muscle tumors), generally have poor prognoses, which could be because our immune systems aren’t used to clearing them since they rarely multiply, so they rarely mutate.

I wish the available vaccines had a delivery method that would have mucous membrane cells exposed to them instead of skeletal muscle cells. If the same vaccines could be delivered via nasal spray, for example, I would be more open to taking one of them. This is because these cells are routinely infected with respiratory viruses and our immune systems are generally pretty good at clearing the infected mucous membrane cells without developing autoimmune reactions against all normal mucous membrane cells in our bodies. We have no idea if the same applies to non-dividing cells such as skeletal muscle, neural, and certain connective tissue cells.

So when the news came out about a number of people developing myocarditis after receiving the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (over 1000 reported cases in the US alone so far), I was not surprised, and I doubt any of the vaccine developers were surprised either. It made perfect sense to me that the vaccines have caused immunity against other muscle cells such as those of the heart. And while this has been minimized in the media and most cases were “treated” with steroids and other meds, there is currently no way to know the long term cardiac complications of these affected individuals. Will their myocarditis be a condition that flares up every now and then? Will they develop other inflammatory conditions of the heart or other muscle tissues? We have no way of knowing, and more importantly, we have no way to cure such conditions if they develop, which brings me to my next point:

2- We are largely utterly hopeless in curing autoimmune disease. Yes, we know how to “manage” them, mostly with expensive medications that patients have to stay on for life, only to eventually succumb to their autoimmune illness anyway.

Not only that, but the medical community generally looks at patients of autoimmune disease who try to seek actual cures outside of conventional medicine with a great deal of disdain when the medical community itself is unable to provide satisfactory solutions for their debilitating conditions. To be sure, I am not an advocate for alternative medicine and I know that the majority of its advocates are shills who prey on the sick’s desperation for cure, but at least I understand these patients’ frustration with what modern medicine has to offer. The medical community needs to develop this understanding. Doctors need to realize that their methods of managing autoimmune disease are not satisfactory. They need to keep seeking actual cures. It is not ok for the medical community to have such low expectations of medicine that steroids and biologics are viewed as the end goal or even as satisfactory treatments. Unfortunately, many doctors have gotten stuck in their struggle to “manage” their patients that they lost sight of the fact that we should be looking for cures. Actual cures.

Many doctors are unfortunately unable to put themselves in place of their patients to realize that immunosuppression is not a solution. If I as a healthy young adult am given the choice between 1) contracting COVID and risking a small chance of being hospitalized and an even smaller chance of dying and 2) taking a vaccine that could cause me to develop an autoimmune disease of which there is no cure, I’d choose COVID any day. And while it’s true that the chance of developing chronic ailment from the vaccines is small, they haven’t been around for long enough to be sure. And while there is a real risk of long term complications from COVID infections, the track record of novel solutions that are eventually found to have more risk than benefit is not exactly gleaming with hope. Which brings me to my next point:

3- We have every reason to be suspicious of novel “solutions” when it comes to biological manipulation. In fact, not being suspicious after all the disastrous fiascos of the 20th and 21st-century drug recalls, pesticides, herbicides, GMOs, and other “creative solutions” that alter biology is naive at best and stupid at worst. Thalidomide was a great drug for several years before we found out its nasty side. DDT was deployed for many years before being removed from the market. mRNA and DNA COVID vaccines haven’t been around for 2 years yet and we’re supposed to treat them as if they’re perfectly safe. The time factor isn’t cancelled out by the fact that the vaccines have been given to tens of thousands of people in their clinical trials. If you give small doses of lead daily to a million people, it will still take years for toxic effects to show.

4- Mainstream media is selling vaccines very much like it sold the war on Iraq. There are daily horror stories about unvaccinated people getting hospitalized and regretting not getting the vaccine, but these cases are actually quite rare and I have not heard of any in my area. I’m not saying that the media is lying, but they are certainly over-presenting infected cases and avoiding all mention of the actual risk of getting hospitalized or dying from infection if you’re a young healthy adult.

At the same time, there is a deliberate underplaying of vaccine side effects. I’m hearing about actual people in my local community who had side effects ranging from anaphylactic reactions to loss of function in their arm to blood clots. Why aren’t these cases being reported by the media? Is the media ever capable of learning from its mistakes? And will the media bear any real consequence for their faulty reporting if we find out some deleterious side effect of the vaccines?

Don’t get me wrong; if I have to take one of the current vaccines, I will. If I have to travel overseas, if I have to go on immunosuppressive therapy for some condition, if I’m old, or if I develop a risk factor that would increase my risk of nasty side effects from COVID, I’ll take the vaccine. But as a young, healthy adult, it is tiring that the media is not even attempting to understand where the vaccine hesitant are coming from or how to address their concerns. We have very scientific, very legitimate reasons to refuse the current vaccines.

I’ll take a vaccine when it’s the protein based, conventional type. I’ll take an mRNA/DNA vaccine that is delivered to mucous membrane cells, and I’ll take the mRNA/DNA vaccine after it’s been in the market for 10+ years and we have statistics showing clearly the lack of significant long term side effects. Aside from that, I’m not taking it. I’d rather get COVID than take one of the currently available vaccines.

The public’s tolerance of being killed on the spot by police

by damagecollateral

Law-and-order-centric individuals claim to conjure logic and common sense when they declare that “if you don’t want to get shot by police, don’t mouth off to a police officer”, which highlights the strange infestation that we grew up accepting – namely that it’s acceptable for the punishment for certain acts to be field execution by police officers, with no trial and no due process.

We in the US are somehow OK with the notion that one deserves to be killed instantly for things like yelling at a police officer, running away from a police officer, reaching into your glove compartment in front of a police officer, not putting your hands where a police officer can see them, and a whole slew of other infractions, some explicitly taught in police academies while others can be left to a police officer’s judgement on the spot.

“An officer has to do whatever they have to do to defend themselves”, say law-and-order-centric people. But to respond with certain death to an uncertain threat essentially and fundamentally implies that the life of a police officer is more valuable than that of his/her victim. For this reason, this mentality of life supremacy is extremely uncommon in other countries.

“Well, criminals have guns and will shoot at police if they can”. Sure, and no one is arguing that a police officer cannot respond to fire with fire, but this is not what’s happening in the US. Here, police officers are responding with overwhelming and excessive lethal force against the least suspicion of a threat, stepping more and more into clear non-threat territory with their lethal force in a way that reveals deep angst, psychological disturbance, and/or a yearning to shoot someone, not a mere need to defend oneself.

And they always get away with lying about it. Isn’t it amazing that police departments predictably get away with lying to the public in their official statements? The videos that eventually surface clearly show that PDs were utterly and knowingly lying, but they never seem to be held accountable for it.

This all has to stop.