W. Niederhut

What utter nonsense. My medical career has been built on the study of science, and on the application of scientific research to clinical psychiatry. Period. As for my alleged "faith" in institutions, I have been referenced in the New York Times, on occasion, as a critic of Big Pharma and its corruption of psychiatry, which hasn't exactly endeared me to the psychiatric establishment.* As for the COVID mortality data, please refer to my most recent post on the subject, which got leap-frogged by this inaccurate, ad hominem nonsense. There is no bona fide scientific controversy about the efficacy of the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines. The argument that co-morbidities rule out COVID as the cause of excess deaths in infected patients makes no sense, as I explained (above.) * Psychiatric Group Faces Scrutiny Over Drug Industry Ties - The New York Times (nytimes.com) * Veterans Agency to Offer New Depression Drug, Despite Cost and Safety Concerns - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

John, I'm a physician, a graduate of Harvard Medical School in the U.S. (class of '83.) To rule out COVID as a cause of death because of medical co-morbities makes no sense, scientifically. Why? Because every infectious illness is a result of an interaction between a pathogen and a host organism. People with a number of co-morbid conditions (including old age) are at an increased risk of morbidity and mortality from COVID infections, but that doesn't mean that COVID didn't "cause" their deaths. Would they have died if they had not been infected with COVID? The answer can be found by studying baseline morbidity and mortality data for those comorbidities before and after the advent of the COVID pandemic-- which is what the "excess deaths" stat is all about. Here's the latest CDC data in the U.S. on COVID mortality with and without vaccines. The risk of death for unvaccinated adults in my age group (65-79) was NINE TIMES HIGHER than for vaccinated adults. I may very well be alive today BECAUSE I got vaccinated. Impact of Vaccination on Risk of COVID-19–Related Mortality (cdc.gov)

Well said, Paul. And, in your analogy of the blind men and the elephant, JFK's conservative defamers in the mainstream media are like blind men who feel the elephant's testicles and conclude that the animal is obviously a sex-crazed beast.

John, I've been studying the CDC statistics carefully since the pandemic began, and the data in the U.S. has shown pronounced efficacy for the Moderna and Pfizer vaccines in preventing mortality and morbidity from COVID. The co-morbidity metric used by the gentleman you reference here is grossly misleading, because co-morbidities increase the risk of mortality and morbidity from COVID infections. An analogy to your argument would be claiming that seatbelts don't reduce the risk of fatalities in car accidents if we look at the subpopulation of people who don't use automobiles.

Earth to Mathew, Chris, and John.. Have you gentlemen studied the COVID mortality stats for vaccinated vs. unvaccinated adults in the U.S.? Among other shocking stats, since mid-2021, almost TWICE as many Republicans have died in the U.S. (excess deaths) as Democrats. Vaccine refusal has been far more prevalent in Republican populations. How do you explain that ghastly statistic?

What about Dolly Parton? 🤥

Today's cartoon for Ben...

John, My wife and I visited Belfast, briefly, in September of 1990. We had taken a train up the Irish coast from Dublin to Belfast, and our train's departure was delayed in Dublin by a bomb threat! Kind of creepy, but we boarded the train any way, and it was quite a scenic trip up the coast through Dundalk. When we got to Belfast, we were driven through the city on a bus to the Belfast docks (to the ferry to Stranraer, Scotland.) Belfast looked like a war zone-- barbed wire everywhere, and armored personnel carriers patrolling the streets. Graffiti on a building said, "Brits Out!" We were somewhat frightened. As for Van Morrison, I've been a fan of his since the days of Brown Eyed Girl, and his terrific 1970 album, Moondance. I'm also an Eric Clapton fan, despite the fact that Eric and Van are anti-vaxxers. Nobody's perfect--with the possible exception of Dolly Parton. 🤥

Speaking of Van the Man, John, I noticed that the great Irish actor/director, Kenneth Branagh, used Van Morrison's songs for the soundtrack in his recent, autobiographical film, Belfast. Van's father was an avid collector of R&B records, which is how Van developed such a keen R&B sensibility during his childhood in Ireland. (Incidentally, my wife and I saw Kenneth Branagh on the stage in London back in 1990, in his own production of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, with Emma Thompson. Unfortunately, I didn't know who Branagh was at the time, but, fortunately, I saved my theatrical brochure.)

Ben, Don't you ever get tired of posting patent nonsense on this board? What did Steve Bannon announce in his January 5th podcast about the impending attack on the Congress? Did Rudy Giuliani have foreknowledge of the J6 attack on Congress, based on any conversations that he had with Cassidy Hutchinson? Did Trump and Eastman say anything to Mike Pence about the J6 attack? Did Roger Stone have any foreknowledge about the J6 attack? Why did Tony Ornato, Murray, and Chad Wolf delete their agencies' (SS and DHS) texts and Emails from J5-J6? Finally, why did Mike Flynn repeatedly plead the 5th when questioned about J6? Any thoughts?

And if there "is no there there," as Ben wants to believe about the Trump/Willard Hotel cabal J6 coup plot, why did Michael Flynn repeatedly plead the 5th during his testimony to the Congressional J6 committee? What was Flynn so determined to hide? Roger Stone also pled the 5th. Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, and Donald Trump refused to comply with subpoenas. Ben's problem is that he is mistaking the Trump/Willard Hotel cabal's full-fledged cover up for innocence.

Yes, Kirk, it looks like Bobo the Clown will eke out a razor-thin victory in her heavily Republican western Colorado district. Meanwhile, it looks like crime is suddenly no longer a hot topic in the Fox MAGA Bubble this week. Fox’s Coverage of Violent Crime Plummetspoliticalwire.com/2022/11/18/foxs-coverage-of-violent-crime-plummets/ November 18, 2022 Fox News significantly decreased its volume of violent crime coverage in the week of the midterm elections, down 63% from the week prior, Media Matters reports.

Ron, I doubt that Engel will be very forthcoming with the committee. They should give him some LSD and lock him in a room with electronic cockroaches dancing on the floor. The Sidney Gottlieb treatment. Meanwhile, Ben Cole still very much wants to believe that there "is no there there" with Trump and his Willard Hotel coup accomplices. Presumably, they were all just having cocktails with Rudy at the Willard to celebrate the imminent certification of Biden's election. But, does Ben remember what Steve Bannon said on January 5th about the January 6th rally? Does Ben know what Rudy G. said to Cassidy Hutchinson, in advance, about January 6th? Does Ben know what happened at the White House the night Trump tweeted to his fans to "Be there. It will be wild?" Of course not. He didn't listen to the Congressional hearings.

Get a clue, Ben. Rather than continuing to clutter this thread with ahistorical nonsense, take some time to finally study the Congressional J6 witness testimony about Trump's multi-faceted schemes to overturn the 2020 election. Do you even know the historical context of Trump's December 2020 Tweet-- "Be there. It will be wild?" What was happening at the White House that evening? Any idea? For a guy who repeatedly insists that he "studies the evidence" and "keeps an open mind," you're remarkably clueless about the historical facts.

Mathew, You need to do far more remedial reading and far less writing. Try reviewing my old Education Forum thread about Jim Hougan's book Secret Agenda and Watergate. And your ignorance about the evidence in Trump's Ukraine-gate/Zelensky impeachment scandal and his January 6th coup attempt is truly abysmal, but understandable, since you refused to even listen to the sworn Congressional witness testimony in both Trump scandals! It's analogous to presuming to understand Nixon's Watergate scandal without ever listening to the Congressional testimony of witnesses like John Dean. Absurd. Instead, you have buried your head in the Fox/MAGA bubble, and you are numbered with the clueless Republicans who still imagine that Trump was not critically involved in organizing his January 6th coup attempt. As for charges against Trump and his Willard Hotel accomplices, let's recall that they have all been fighting tooth-and-claw to dodge subpoenas, and pleading the 5th when they have testified-- as in Michael Flynn's case. (You would know this if you had listened to Flynn's pathetic Congressional testimony.) The evidence implicating Trump and his Willard Hotel cabal in the J6 coup plot is overwhelming, and the DOJ investigation and prosecution of these scoundrels has not been completed.

But Dubya Bush's paramour was, apparently, the only one who ended up "committing suicide" with a shotgun, like George De Mohrenschildt. It sounds like a signature CIA style hit to me. Some skilled people were also involved in tampering with Dubya's National Guard records at the Air Force Finance Center in Denver back in the day, then forging the letter that was used to set up the deflective Rather-gate pseudo-scandal. I have also wondered whether guys associated with the Company helped GHWB set up Gary Hart's "Monkey Business" psy op in 1988. "Mr. George Bush of the CIA" didn't want to run against Gary Hart in 1988.

Ben, I, obviously, can't fix your ignorance and fixed delusions about January 6th and Trump's Willard Hotel coup associates-- Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Michael Flynn, Roger Stone, Bannon, et.al. As James DiEugenio, himself, tried to tell you during the hearings last summer, you should have listened to the damning Congressional testimony about Trump's foreknowledge of the J6 violence risk, and the run up to his "Be there. It will be wild" Tweet in December of 2020. Trump was the mastermind of the entire seditious debacle. You and Mathew Koch are like two guys who never watched the Congressional Watergate hearings, who then continue to post false narratives about Nixon's Watergate scandal. Carl Bernstein described people like you and Mathew Koch well when he said that, "If Fox News existed in the 1970s, Nixon might have survived Watergate."

The obvious problem here is that Mathew Koch and Benjamin Cole didn't listen to the extensive sworn testimony in the Congressional J6 committee hearings this year or, in Mathew's case, to the sworn testimony in Trump's first impeachment hearings. Instead, they only listened to the false, alternate narratives being pushed by Trump and the Trumplicon media to cover up Trump's misconduct. Mathew doesn't even seem to know that the GOP-controlled Senate refused to even review the damning evidence against Trump in the Zelensky extortion case! Kirk is correct about the worthless redundancy of these debates, but aren't they also a microcosm of the disinformation/ignorance problem in the U.S. today-- where a high percentage of Republicans remain clueless about Trump's crimes? As Carl Bernstein said, "If Fox News had existed in the 1970s, Nixon might have survived Watergate."

Get a clue, Mathew. You're dead wrong again, and you, frankly, have no credibility on this forum. You're posting a completely erroneous opinion about the Trump impeachment evidence presented by the primary witnesses in the Zelensky case-- Vindman, Sondland, and Fiona Hill. What's worse is that you haven't even listened to, or read, the definitive witness testimony in the case! How ridiculous is that? Your daily false narratives here mostly come from Fox News. Then, you make the same idiotic mistake in the J6 case, repeating the bogus GOP/Fox trope about Cassidy Hutchinson's firsthand witness Congressional testimony, under oath, being "hearsay." Guess what? It wasn't hearsay, as Jim Jordan claimed. Hutchinson is a highly credible, firsthand witness of events in the Trump White House in the days and weeks leading up to Trump's coup attempt. She was in the thick of it, as Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' assistant. But how could you know the facts, being a Fox News watcher? A number of Trump's sleazeballs-- including Tony Ornato and perennial l-i-a-r, Jim Jordan-- tried to discredit Hutchinson's damning testimony, but Ornato was afraid to testify to Congress under oath. He also erased his J6 texts and Emails. The Fox "patriot purge" narrative is bunk. Trump and his Willard Hotel cabal organized the J6 attack on Congress, and blocked security.

Well, it's truly amusing to see two guys-- Ben Cole and Mathew Koch-- who refused to even listen to the extensive witness testimony in the Congressional January 6th hearings this year talk now about wanting to know the "full story" of January 6th. Huh? It's similar to Mathew Koch presuming to tell us about Trump's 2019 extortion phone call to Zelensky while adamantly refusing to read Alexander Vindman's definitive firsthand witness testimony about Trump's phone call. If Ben and Mathew really want the full story about Trump's January 6th coup attempt, why didn't they listen to Cassidy Hutchinson's and Pat Cippollone's firsthand witness testimony to Congress?! Instead, Ben and Mathew bought into Tucker Carlson's Faux "patriot purge" narrative about January 6th -- that Trump was set up and victimized by the Deep State. Geez... And Christopher Wray just explicitly debunked Tucker Carlson's "patriot purge" narrative in his testimony quoted in Mathew's Catholic News Service (CNS) report (above.) As I already pointed out to Ben, repeatedly, during the past year, the only bona fide FBI scandal relating to J6 is that Christopher Wray's apparent intel about the impending attack on the Capitol never resulted in appropriate security for the U.S. Congress on January 6th! Why not? The true story about January 6th is that Donald Trump, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, Roger Stone, and the Willard Hotel cabal organized the J6 attack on the Capitol to obstruct the certification of Biden's election, and Trump's appointees at the Pentagon blocked the deployment of the National Guard to defend Congress.

There are a lot of salacious stories in the M$M about the sex lives of Democrats Bill Clinton and the Kennedy brothers. But how many salacious stories have people read about Republicans? In a spirit of bipartisanship, herewith... 🤥 The 15 Most Sordid Presidential Sex Scandals In History | Thought Catalog Gipper the Ripper? (slate.com) : The Strange Death of the Woman Who Filed a Rape Lawsuit Against Bush | OpEd News

I met R.D. Laing at a round table conference back in (?) 1986 or '87 at the Colorado Psychiatric Hospital. Interesting guy. But, I was always prejudiced against LSD growing up. Like a lot of my peers, I was indoctrinated to believe that people who took LSD were at risk of leaping out of windows to their deaths. Many years (decades) later I finally learned the true story about Frank Olson, Sidney Gottlieb, and MK-Ultra. And I have only recently begun to realize that psychedelics may have genuinely therapeutic effects, under the right circumstances. Johns Hopkins University has done some pioneering research in that area recently.

Never have, but I may try a dose or two now that it's legal. I'm curious about the therapeutic potential of psilocybin, especially in relation to musical creativity.

According to Stormy Daniels, Trump's johnson is shaped like a toad stool. As far as I know, it's the only known, public description of a U.S. president's johnson, other than Johnson referring to his johnson as, "Jumbo."

Coping with Trumplicon fascism has acquired another potentially useful therapy in Colorado... 🤥 Colorado voters legalize psilocybin and psychedelic therapy Colorado is the second state to legalize medicinal psychedelics www.denverpost.com/2022/11/08/colorado-results-prop-122-legalizing-psilocybin-psilocin-mushrooms/ November 11, 2022 Colorado is poised to become the second U.S. state to legalize medicinal psychedelics.Proposition 122, Access to Natural Psychedelic Substances, was supported by about 52% of the vote as of 12:35 p.m. Friday with 2,240,233 votes counted, according to the Secretary of State’s Office. The measure was ahead by nearly 108,000 votes as of that time. Natural Medicine Colorado, the campaign behind the measure, declared victory at 5:20 p.m. Wednesday. Luke Niforatos, CEO of Protect Colorado’s Kids, the opposition group fighting the measure, confirmed to The Denver Post he had conceded. The Associated Press confirmed the election results Friday morning. The measure legalizes psilocybin and psilocin, two compounds found in “magic mushrooms,” for use in therapeutic settings and paves the way for the establishment of “healing centers” where adults 21 years old and up can use the substances under the supervision of licensed professionals. Additionally, Proposition 122 decriminalizes the personal growing, use and sharing of psilocybin and psilocin, as well as ibogaine, mescaline and dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, for adults. Colorado follows Oregon, which legalized psilocybin in 2020. Natural Medicine Colorado lauded the results as a history-making win.