Wednesday Poetry, etc. – Some Thoughts

I am moving on from my book about the Boston Gang Wars back in 1956 to 1976 which yet still need much editing and polishing but the pieces have all been put together which is the first step.

My next project is a book about James Whitey Bulger himself which I have tentatively titled: “The Boston Fairy Tale.”  To ensure the correctness of the title I went to my bulky Webster’s Dictionary rather than the web which has for most people has sadly replaced the paper edition to look up the definition of “fairy tale.” I found on the cover an article I had affixed there some years back under scotch tape. It read:

Anti-Cuban exile leaders retort that all of the Communists’ schools and hospitals do not justify their monolithic political system. At least one gray-haired man on Old Havana’s San Ignacio street would agree. Asked about the revolution, the Cuban looked around warily and the spat out: ‘It may be all right for the young people. They don’t know anything else. In the old days I was only a poor shoemaker but I could do what I pleased . . . Freedom has no price.'”

On another subject I was reading about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s use of Professor Moriarity as a super villain. Some suggested he modeled him after John O’Connor Power who was born in County Roscommon, Ireland. He was involved in a dispute with his former nationalist radical colleagues. The story from Wikipedea goes:

“An immense mass of people assembled in the Free Trade Hall [Manchester] on the 16 September 1876, to hear a lecture from Mr. John O’Connor Power, MP, on a non-political subject. The chair was taken by Mr. J. G. Biggar, MP. On rising to introduce the lecturer, he soon discerned that trouble was impending, that there was, so to say, “a storm in the offing.” An “Advanced” person, a Mr. Flesh of Ramsbottom, came on the Platform and informed him that at a meeting of Nationalists held on the previous evening, it was decided that the lecture might be allowed to proceed only on the condition that the lecturer should first answer satisfactorily a series of questions which had been drawn up for him. The main purpose of those interrogatories was to ascertain whether he held and was prepared to support the principles of Wolfe ToneLord Edward Fitzgerald, and Robert Emmet. The chairman said those questions were not in order, as the lecture was to be on a non-political subject; however, he would leave it to the lecturer to deal with the queries as he thought fit, Mr. O’Connor Power then came to the front and said, amidst much noise, that with regard to the questions that had been read, his view was identical with that of the chairman. He begged leave to point out – He could say no more: the platform was rushed; there was a smashing of chairs and tables, a noise of heavy blows, and of fierce exclamations from men engaged in close combat, mingled with the shouts and screams of women, while blood flowed freely from many wounded persons … The subject of Mr. O’Connor Power’s intended lecture was “Irish Wit and Humour”.

 

4 Comments

  1. The National Review had a long article on attorney John Durham about a year ago. Claims he took down numerous Boston gangsters, and one FBI agent. Rather glowing article, except noted that he works slow.

    It sounds like you have an axe to grind with him. Even so, I’d love to read your review of the half dozen or so convictions the National Review summarized.

  2. Stay healthy

    Tuesday, October 13, 2020
    The testing mess, lack of reliable data on Covid-19, and a hypothesis why
    Within the first 10 days of January a sequence for the Chinese SARS-CoV-2 virus had been published by Edward Holmes of Australia. (He coauthored the March Nature Medicine paper I have publicly criticized.) Holmes works closely with Chinese scientists who passed this to him, possibly without CCP authorization.

    People were able to immediately start devising PCR tests based on this published sequence even without a virus.

    After that, as the virus travelled to many countries, scientists around the world started isolating the virus locally. There have been many thousands of isolations from patients from many countries, and scientists have decoded the genome, i.e., sequenced the virus, which has 30,000-34,000 nucleotides, and shown what mutations are occurring when, in different parts of the world. Alina Chan helped create a website that characterizes these strain differences by location.

    The virus has been cultured in many countries, as early as January-February, including by CDC:

    1. Akst J. Australian Lab Cultures New Coronavirus as Infections Climb. The Scientist. https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/australian-lab-cultures-new-coronavirus-as-infections-climb-67031.

    2. CDC has grown the COVID-19 virus in cell culture, which is necessary for further studies, including for additional genetic characterization. The cell-grown virus was sent to NIH’s BEI ResourcesRepository for use by the broad scientific community.

    But the virus cannot be cultured in ordinary small hospital labs, because SARS is a designated biological warfare (“Select”) agent with pandemic potential and must (by US law) be cultured only in high containment laboratories. So culture tests are not commercially available, but they are being done under specified conditions.

    Testing for the virus is a disaster. There are over 100 available tests within the United States and more overseas. CDC completely messed up its test, which did not work, but it refused to allow anyone else to develop a test during January and February. CDC appears to have known their test was no good, restricting it to under 1000 people in total during those two months. Possibly germane is the fact that CDC’s Covid response was managed by Lisa Messonier, MD, who is Rod Rosenstein’s sister. (Rosenstein is the former Deputy Attorney General who, according to the NYT, discussed wearing a wire to record Trump and suggested that cabinet members consider using the 25th Amendment against Trump.)

    By Feb 29, the FDA said it would allow companies to apply for an emergency use authorization for their tests, but the procedure was so complicated that only 6 entities applied over the first week. So, in the middle of March we still didn’t have tests in the US so the FDA then said anyone who had a test could offer it and subsequently send the FDA information on the test performance.

    By late March there was an explosion of tests being offered and nobody had any idea how they compared with each other nor how sensitive nor specific they were, apart from their manufacturers’ claims.

    After a while, FDA realized that many of these tests were worthless and they took a number of tests made in China off the market but left the others, still about 100 tests.

    There are no reliable numbers I know of for how well these tests have performed. Some people have looked at small numbers of tests and tried to get an idea in their local community.

    You should be informed, however, that part of the problem is the virus itself. It doesn’t always stimulate the antibodies that labs are looking for, and some people who get Covid do not make those antibodies in sufficient quantity to be measured. There were similar problems with SARS-1 tests. (But SARS-1 had 8K total cases and we have 750 M, so you would have expected some of those issues to be resolved. Plus, I am not current on what is happening in other countries.)

    As far as the PCR tests go, it was hoped they would be the gold standard but it has not worked out that way. There are many potential problems with PCR tests. The target nucleotide sequence (the primer) that is chosen may not be totally specific to this virus, and cross react with sequences from other microorganisms or ?

    At least six different primers (approximately 20 nucleotide long sequences) have been selected for use by different companies, and we don’t know how they compare with each other. Different machines are being used. Different cycle lengths, i.e., number of doubling cycles, are used in different labs. They have widely varying limits of detection, by 3 plus orders of magnitude. Finally, unless the lab is very clean, it is easily contaminated, which may also provide false positives.

    If the sample is not obtained carefully, or if it is obtained too early or too late in the course of the illness, the amount of virus on the swab may not reach the limits of detection of the test.

    The FDA has posted a website recently (late September) in which FDA says they have sent out small test kits to dozens of companies and labs that developed tests, to see how the tests/labs perform. Not all of the test kits have been returned, and it appears this was a voluntary exercise:

    https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/coronavirus-covid-19-and-medical-devices/sars-cov-2-reference-panel-comparative-data

    Coupled with all the above confusion is the fact that the media appear to have deliberately tried to give us bad information about most aspects of the illness and of the pattern and severity of illnesses and number of cases. I recommend that nonscientists be aware that we are being played by the media and every piece of information you see may have been put out there with an ulterior motive, mostly to increase fear.

    If you look at the suppression of effective treatments, the falsely elevated case and death numbers, and the prolonged lockdowns which make little sense, because this is a disease that can be effectively treated, even without remdesivir and vaccines, and which at this point in time seems to have morbidity similar to influenza, you realize we are being subjected to a wholly different agenda than what is being presented.

    We are being made to think this pandemic is much more severe than it really is, and the powers that be are doing their best to prolong the emergency. For example, Tony Fauci finds it a challenge to sufficiently scare the public:
    “The wide range of clinical manifestations of the disease … makes conveying the dangerousness of Covid-19 incredibly challenging,” Fauci said in an October 13 interview with STAT.
    Our economies are being destroyed and many jobs will never come back. (US 2nd quarter GDP declined 33%, on par with the Great Depression.)

    There is a meme that has been used by leaders of multiple countries and the World Economic Forum, and that is “Build back better.”

    The best current hypothesis is that the World Economic Forum and its ilk are using the pandemic as a means to destroy the current economy and rebuild and finance it to their own specifications.

    They are using terms like: preventing climate change, green, save the earth, biodiversity, sustainability, non-racist, equitable, fair– to sweeten the image of what is to come.

    Which seems to be a surveillance state with increased top down control and a reduced standard of living. Green goals may be part of it; after all, the leaders need pristine forests and fields for their own use. Maybe, or maybe not, for our use.

    This view is consistent with statements by Peter Daszak, CEO of EcoHealth Alliance, who is associated with WIV, NIAID, DOD and facilitated transfers of bat coronaviruses found around the world to scientific and military labs. Quoted in the WaPo, “Pandemics as a whole are increasing in frequency,” said Peter Daszak, a disease ecologist who is president of EcoHealth Alliance, a public health organization [a charitable way to describe his organization–Nass] that studies emerging diseases. “It’s not a random act of God. It’s caused by what we do to the environment.”
    Daszac told Slate, “I’ve found that things like land use, change, deforestation, road building, mining, and agricultural intensification are the reasons we push ourselves into wildlife habitat and get infected.”
    Peter Horby, co-director of the Recovery trial in the UK, which poisoned people with HCQ to prevent its use for Covid, recently tweeted, “this is where we should be headed” regarding a video on bicycle commuting produced by the World Economic Forum. The NYT and other outlets have run similar pieces on how human incursions into nature are destroying nature and producing pandemics. In August, Tony Fauci and David Morens, in CELL, wrote,
    “in a human-dominated world, in which our human activities represent aggressive, damaging, and unbalanced interactions with nature, we will increasingly provoke new disease emergences. We remain at risk for the foreseeable future. COVID-19 is among the most vivid wake-up calls in over a century. It should force us to begin to think in earnest and collectively about living in more thoughtful and creative harmony with nature…”
    The pandemic and prolonged lockdowns, which are huge overreactions to the actual seriousness of the illness, coupled with suppression of effective treatments, appear to be the means to get us to the “new normal”.
    Posted by Meryl Nass, M.D. at 1:31 PM 0 comments

    • The above post fits in perfectly with Matt’s blog article.

      Stay healthy?

      “Did you ever get you face stuck in a record changer?” – Webley Webster

  3. Matt

    “Better to write for yourself and have no public than to write for the public and have no self”

    Cyril Connolly

    Thank you Matt for reminding us of the freedoms
    we have in this wonderful country.
    The freedoms to democratically elect our political
    leaders only to have them assassinated by law enforcement
    on behalf of the Deep State.
    The freedom to live healthy lives in spite of Bombogenesis created
    by Exxon Mobil, or Covid 19, a man made virus designed to thin
    the herd for the Military Industrial complex.

    I will think of you every time I go out to my car and find my
    tires slashed or paint deliberately gouged by keying.
    Did I forget the anonymous hang up phone calls?

    Yes Matt I salute you. A true patriot. I really do want to
    believe in you and what you say….
    Unfortunately behaviour is truth.

    In other newes

    https://libertarianinstitute.org/everything-will/from-okc-to-abu-ghraib-the-kenneth-trentadue-case/

    From OKC to Abu Ghraib: The Kenneth Trentadue Case
    by Will Grigg | Jul 3, 2019

    https://www.statnews.com/2020/10/13/selling-stock-like-clockwork-modernas-top-doctor-gets-1-million-richer-every-week/

    Selling stock like clockwork, Moderna’s top doctor gets $1 million richer every week
    By DAMIAN GARDE @damiangarde and ADAM FEUERSTEIN @adamfeuerstein OCTOBER 13, 2020

    http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=9019&Method=Full

    Climate disasters doubled in the last decade
    Climate change spurs doubling of disasters since 2000: UN
    Report by UN body says 6,681 climate-linked events recorded since the turn of the century, up from 3,656 during the previous 20 years.
    Al Jazeera, Oct. 12, 2020

    Plandemic: Indoctornation