Trust the science, bruh! /  by Nathan Jones

Dr. Anthony Fauci (C) speaks as US President Donald Trump listens during a press conference on COVID-19 in the Rose Garden of the White House on March 13, 2020, two days before the publication of the “Proximal Origin” paper dismissing the lab leak theory of Covid’s origin. (Photo by Chen Mengtong/China News Service via Getty Images)

As we enter a new phase of Covid freak-out, it’s well worth remembering how little we ought to trust the “experts.” As Matt Taibbi, Alex Gutentag, and Michael Schellenberger reveal:

Fauci Diverted US Government Away From Lab Leak Theory Of Covid’s Origin

The former director of the U.S. National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the U.S. government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, visited CIA headquarters to “influence” its review of COVID-19 origins, the House Oversight Committee reported yesterday.

Last month, Committee Chair Brad Wenstrup made headlines when he revealed that seven CIA analysts “with significant scientific expertise" on the agency’s Covid-19 Discovery Team (CDT) received performance bonuses after changing a report to downplay concerns about a possible lab origin of the virus.

Now, a months-long investigation by Racket and Public, which included interviews with the CIA whistleblower behind last month’s revelations and others in a position to know, reveals that Fauci not only visited the CIA but also pushed the controversial“Proximal Origin of SARS CoV-2” paper, published by Nature Medicine, in meetings at the State Department and the White House.

Previous reporting already showed that Fauci “prompted” the “Proximal Origin” paper, according to its authors. Lead author Kristian Andersen expressed grave doubts about the natural origin theory even months after Nature Medicine published the paper. And they described themselves as pressured by “higher ups,” referring to individuals in the White House and other government agencies.

Now, the new information from multiple sources, including a CIA whistleblower, a senior government investigator, and a senior official, suggests a broad effort by Fauci to go agency-by-agency, from the White House to the State Department to the CIA, in an effort to steer government officials away from looking into the possibility that COVID-19 escaped from a lab.

“Fauci’s expert opinions were a significant consideration and were part of our classified assessment,” said the CIA whistleblower, a decorated and long-serving CIA officer with expertise in Asia. “His opinion substantially altered the conclusions that were subsequently drawn.”

Fauci had reasons to push scientists and intelligence analysts to believe the virus had a zoonotic origin since his agency had issued a grant to fund research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.

The Wenstrup press release noted that the whistleblower’s information suggested Fauci was escorted in “without record of entry.” According to the CIA whistleblower, the CIA purposely did not “badge” Fauci in and out of the building so as to hide any record that he had been there.

“Fauci came to our building, to promote the natural origin of the virus,” the CIA whistleblower said. “He knew what was going on. I mean, you see all the redacted documents that are coming out. He was covering his ass and he was trying to do it with the Intel community… I know he came multiple times and he was treated like a rockstar by the Weapons and Counter Proliferation Mission Center. And, he pushed the Kristian Anderson paper.”

The star of evening set against the darkening sky is lonely /  by Nathan Jones

Keep your soul free. What matters most in life is not knowledge, but character; and character would be endangered if a man were under his work, so to speak, struggling with Sisyphus’s stone. There is a knowledge other than that which is of the domain of memory: the knowledge of how to live. Study must be an act of life, must serve life, must feel itself impregnated with life. Of the two kinds of men, those who endeavor to know something, and those who try to be someone, the palm is to the second. What we know is like a beginning, a rough sketch only; the man is the finished work.

It is certainly true that intellectuality contributes to the sovereignty of man; but it is not enough. Besides morality, which includes the life of religion, various broad aspects of the human condition must be considered. We have spoken of life in society, of practical activities: let us add communion with nature, care of one's home, the arts, friendly and formal gatherings, a little poetry, the practice of speaking, intelligent sport, public demonstrations.

It is hard to settle exactly the measure of all these things; I have confidence that the reader will find here at least the spirit in which to decide. It is a sure indication both for thought and practice to be able to appreciate the relative value of things.

…

We must always be more than we are; the philosopher must be something of a poet, the poet something of a philosopher; the craftsman must be poet and philosopher on occasion, and the people recognize this fact. The writer must be a practical man, and the practical man must know how to write. Every specialist is first of all a person, and the essential quality of the person is beyond anything that he thinks or does.

…

I know a man who at the sight of a rapid mountain torrent inevitably thought of the movement of worlds–those masses that rush through space with the same speed, under the governance of the same laws, depending on the same forces, thanks to the same God with whom everything begins and to whom everything returns. Going back to his work he felt himself uplifted by the unique Force, filled with the Presence that is everywhere; and his obscure activity was rooted in communion with all being.

Yet you let your mind get cramped and your heart grow dry, and you imagine that it is loss of time to follow the course of the torrents or to wander among the stars. The universe fills man with its glory, and you do not know it. The star of evening set against the darkening sky is lonely, it wants a place in your thought, and you refuse to admit it. You write, you compute, you string propositions together, you elaborate your theses, and you do not look.

…

The intellectual I have in view is a man of wide and varied knowledge complementary to a special study thoroughly pursued; he loves the arts and natural beauty; his mind shows itself to be one in everyday occupations and in meditation: he is the same man in the presence of God, of his fellows, and of his maid, carrying within him a world of ideas and feelings that are not only written down in books and in discourses, but flow into his conversation with his friends, and guide his life.

At bottom, everything is connected and everything is the same thing. Intellectuality admits of no compartments. All the objects of our thought are so many doors into the "secret garden," the "wine cellar" which is the goal of ardent research. Thoughts and activities, realities and their reflections, all have one and the same Father. Philosophy, art, travel, domestic cares, finance, poetry, and tennis can be allied with one another, and conflict only through lack of harmony.

What is necessary every moment is to be where we ought to be and to do the thing that matters. Everything makes one harmony in the concert of the human and the divine.

– A. G. Sertillanges, excerpted from The Worker and the Man in The Intellectual Life (1921)

The Goal of Psychotherapy /  by Nathan Jones

“No longer is one allowed to believe that the goal of psychotherapy consists in making something conscious at any price. Becoming conscious is no more than a transitory stage in the psychotherapeutic process. It has to make conscious the unconscious–including the spiritual unconscious– only in order to allow it finally to recede back to unconsciousness. To put it in the terms of the Scholastics, what therapy has to achieve is to convert an unconscious potentia into a conscious actus, but to do so for no other reason than to restore it eventually as an unconscious habitus. It is the task of the therapist, in the final analysis, to reinstate the spontaneity and naïveté of an unreflected existential act.”
— Viktor Frankl in The Unconscious God (1975)

Other people do not recognize your secret claims on life /  by Nathan Jones

Analysis sets going or accentuates a play of forces within the self between two groups of factors with contrasting interests. The interest of the one group is to maintain unchanged the illusions and the safety afforded by the neurotic structure; that of the other group is to gain a measure of inner freedom and strength through overthrowing the neurotic structure. It is for this reason that analysis … is not primarily a process of detached intellectual research. The intellect is an opportunist, at the service of whatever interest carries the greatest weight at the time. The forces that oppose liberation and strive to maintain the status quo are challenged by every insight that is capable of jeopardizing the neurotic structure, and when thus challenged they attempt to block progress in one way or another. They appear as "resistances" to the analytical work, a term appropriately used by Freud to denote everything that hampers this work from within.

Resistance is by no means produced only by the analytical situation. Unless we live under exceptional conditions life itself is [a] great a challenge to the neurotic structure. … A person's secret claims on life are bound to be frequently frustrated because of their absolute and rigid character. Others do not share his illusions about himself, and will hurt him by questioning or disregarding them. Inroads upon his elaborate but precarious safety measures are unavoidable. These challenges may have a constructive influence, but also he may react to them first with anxiety and anger, one or the other prevailing, and then with a reinforcement of the neurotic tendencies. He becomes still more withdrawn, more dominating, more dependent, as the case may be.

— Karen Horney in Self Analysis (1942)