Extract from Hunter S. Thompson’s letter to Hume Logan, in 1958.
“…The answer — and, in a sense, the tragedy of life — is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. … Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. …
So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors — but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. …
… Beware of looking for goals: look for a way of life. Decide how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living WITHIN that way of life. But you say, “I don’t know where to look; I don’t know what to look for.” … By deciding to look, you go a long way toward making the choice. …
Keep in mind, of course, that this is my way of looking at things … Each of us has to create our own credo — this merely happens to be mine. …
And that’s it for now. Until I hear from you again, I remain,
your friend,
Hunter S. Thompson”
The Individually Custom-Padded Echo Space
Who exactly are we "debating" online? Is anything we type spontaneous, or is it shepherded by algorithms that reward increasingly deeper versions of our pre-engineered perception — rewarding conviction and faith while deepening the rift between ever smaller factions of humans.
AI is the first technology that can take us to a Borg finish line, where everyone basks in the permanent illusion of infinite fame -- perfectly snug, forever unchallenged, permanently redeemed and disconnected from the Source of all creativity.
In the near future, the only way to Connect will be to Disconnect from Mother (the algorithm), and it will be considered both the most insane and the most courageous act a person can commit, available to pure daredevils for a meager 100K Social Credits. Best start practicing now.
iannovich19d
America's Vanishing Debt, Your Vanishing Savings--And the Orange Escape Hatch
What if Washington's sudden crush on "smart" money--stablecoins, tokenized Treasuries, digital rails--isn't about innovation at all, but about debt evasion with a side order of CBDC-style control? America's $37 trillion isn't paid, it's embalmed--sealed inside shiny stablecoins and sold back to us as "freedom." Every tap of a wallet, every instant transfer, is really a silent tax, a bond rolled forever at our expense. The banks die, the State feeds, and savers bleed. But repression always carries its own curse: it teaches the public the con. And when people finally see it, they don't run back to dollars--they run to the only long-term value holder left.
Just a hypothesis? Not if you ask Moscow.
Enter Andrei Kobyakov--Putin's economic consigliere and a veteran critic of Western finance. "The U.S. has devised a crypto scheme to erase its massive debt at the world's expense," he warns. "Remember the size--thirty-five trillion dollars. Washington is rewriting the rules of gold and cryptocurrency. These are the two escape hatches from the dollar system. And once America shoves its debt into the crypto cloud, it will devalue that debt and begin again. Just like the '30s, just like the '70s--the same trick, different costume."
What if the only choice left is between holding the embalmed corpse of the dollar--or the one asset built to outlive the funeral?
iannovich25d
The Verstraeten Effect: What They Knew in 1999
In 1999, Thomas Verstraeten was a Belgian pediatrician, earnest, diligent, bright enough to get tapped by the CDC's Epidemic Intelligence Service -- a fast-track corps for doctors who wanted influence beyond the clinic. Colleagues said he was careful, cautious, polite. Not the kind of man to torch a room. Exactly the kind of man institutions keep around.
In 1999 he was handed a job with no glamour. Run the Vaccine Safety Datalink and see if the mercury preservative in infant shots, thimerosal, had anything to do with the strange spike in autism cases. He did what the agency asked. His first pass through the data in November 1999 blared like a siren. Children with one-month exposure showed ADHD at 8.3Ă—, autism at 7.6Ă—, tics at 5.7Ă—, sleep disorders at 5Ă— baseline. A month later, after tightening the definitions, the autism number didn't shrink -- it exploded: 11.35Ă— risk. A 1,135% increase tied to a single birth-dose of Hepatitis B.
This should have been the crucible moment. Every system throws up one: the point where the numbers demand you set your career on fire, or alter them. Verstraeten "ran" the data four more times, each pass sanding the spike down: 2.19 → 1.69 → 1.36 → ~1.0. On the very day he was scheduled to present to the Institute of Medicine, he resigned. Weeks later he was in Belgium, hired by GlaxoSmithKline.
His career is a classical slide from a scientist to the archetype who is captured by ambition, reputation, self-preservation. The template for the medical-industrial complex. A system that doesn't run on evil geniuses, but on tens of thousands of Verstraetens compromising their integrity.
The Verstraend Effect has morphed the industry into the number one cause of death and injury today. The researcher who massages the numbers, the regulator who writes the softer memo, the family doctor who nods and injects without a single independent thought. The harm done is the accumulation of captured minds.
The Hepatitis B story is one in many. In the 1980s the vaccine was pitched to IV drug users, sex workers, hospital staff. Uptake was miserable. The spin doctors took over, and told CDC how to fix the problem. In 1991 the CDC repositioned the Hep B needle for every newborn. By the mid-90s it was the first ritual of American life. Within hours of seeing the light, the heavy metals started dimming it.
SafeMinds later pried out the buried drafts via FOIA. David Kirby in Evidence of Harm filled in the choreography. The secret Simpsonwood meeting where CDC and pharma executives discussed how to handle the blowback, how to hide incriminating files, the pressure campaigns against independent researchers, the parents blocked from Congress, the sleight-of-hand swap from mercury to aluminum -- replacing one universally known neurotoxin with another.
Now as RFK Jr. is tearing down the CDC from the top, ex-directors call him reckless, fired staff warn he's endangering public health, Bernie denounces him as a demagogue. All theater. The real danger isn't one institution or the profit-maximizong corporation. It's the compliant scientist, the silent doctor, the friendly neighborhood whitecoat, who enable it.
There are vaccines today for about thirty-one preventable diseases. Maybe in the future we will understand the compounded and cumulative effect of all of them - the multigenerational collapse of human potential.
Thomas Verstraeten never became a whistleblower. After leaving CDC he climbed steadily through the industry he once studied, eventually becoming CEO of P95, a vaccine epidemiology consultancy headquartered in Belgium. His company contracts with major pharmaceutical firms and global health agencies to design and evaluate vaccine studies. On conference stages he is introduced as an expert in vaccine safety and post-marketing surveillance -- the very domain where his silence first mattered.
In 1999, he had the numbers that could have nudged history. Today, he manages the science of vaccines for the same complex that absorbed him.
This is his LinkedIn About section:
"I founded P95 with a clear focus: to use strong science and real-world data to support better public health decisions. My background in epidemiology and pharmacovigilance continues to shape how we work. Not only in designing and delivering clinical studies, but ensuring that results help guide vaccine development and infectious disease research where they are needed most.
At P95, we are driven by a shared purpose, to make a difference to global health. Our talented teams combine solid science with a uniquely human touch. We work across regions, languages, and health systems to design, run, and support clinical and epidemiological studies that matter, especially in underserved communities.
What sets us apart is our global perspective. We operate in over 40 countries, with deep roots in Africa and other LMICs. These regions are central to our work, and to our belief that public health impact must be inclusive and global.
Together with a team of more than 300 professionals, we have built a trusted global CRO with a bold vision: pioneering global development of safe and effective vaccines.
Let's connect."
iannovich27d
Chirripo. Costa Rica.
iannovich29d
Compartmentalized Power: The DID Hypothesis
What if politics isn't hypocrisy at all, but the architecture of fractured minds?
They call it Dissociative Identity Disorder, as if it's just a clinical footnote. But DID is what happens when a child, too young to fight or flee, survives by splitting. The brain walls off the terror into one sealed compartment while the rest carries on. By age three, identity is still fusing. Severe trauma in that window--especially sexual abuse--is the most consistent trigger documented in psychiatric case histories. The child dissociates to survive, and the psyche never quite stitches back together.
Considering recent world events and the accelerating dive into Agenda 2030, maybe it's worthwhile taking a closer look at this subject. Not in the way Hollywood packages it--with Jason Bourne sprinting through train stations--or how fringe forums wrap it in foil. But as a sober question: if dissociation can be induced, measured, and enhanced, then what role might it already play in the governance structures being built for the next decades?
Studies in the 1980s and 90s showed that different "alters" in DID patients can display distinct physiological states. One identity might need glasses, another sees perfectly. One shows a normal EEG, another shows altered brainwave patterns. One may even be allergic to something the others tolerate. Reinders et al. (2012) used fMRI scans to demonstrate different brain activation depending on which identity was present. Dissociation isn't just in someone's head--it's structural.
Sometimes those structures come with enhancements. Narrowed compartments can hold savant-like memory, uncanny pain tolerance, or accelerated learning in specific states. Some studies even describe up to forty-fold improvements in certain faculties. Psychiatry files are dotted with such cases, usually written off as curiosities, but together they illustrate something bigger: what looks like damage can also be utility.
History tells us who noticed. After WWII, Operation Paperclip brought Nazi doctors--who had already studied trauma, hypnosis, and conditioning under horrific circumstances--into U.S. programs. In 1947, the CIA was created, and within a few years MKULTRA was underway. Its subprojects tested LSD, electroshock, sensory deprivation, and staged trauma, especially with children. The objective wasn't curing depression. It was testing whether minds could be fractured, erased, and rebuilt into sealed compartments. The declassified documents spell it out.
MKULTRA wasn't fringe--it ran through more than eighty universities, hospitals, and prisons before it was exposed in the 1970s. Most files were destroyed on CIA orders, and while the program was declared dead, later disclosures--like MKSEARCH and ongoing DARPA projects in behavior modification--suggest it was less buried than rebranded.
Cathy O'Brien's 1995 book Trance Formation of America was ridiculed when she claimed she'd been raised as "political currency" inside such a system. But three decades on, her testimony doesn't read like wild fiction when set alongside the MKULTRA record and the clinical evidence of compartmentalized memory banks. If anything, it raises the uncomfortable possibility that she was describing the architecture of power in real time.
The topic deserves a cool-headed hypothesis. Put yourself in the shoes of a psychopath. Once you know how to create controllable people with locked compartments--identities that can't access each other, memories that can be switched off, faculties that mimic superhuman skills--why stop at couriers or covert operatives?
Wouldn't you try to seed such people into boardrooms, parliaments, or presidencies? A fractured mind can deliver speeches, shake hands, pass legislation--while another compartment holds instructions nobody else can see. To the public, it looks like politics. To the system, it's architecture, with built-in deniability.
In a world accelerating toward Agenda 2030--2050, where governance strips away individual and national sovereignty, the measures needed to hold it together may be so inhuman that the appeal of leaders who can be internally "programmed" becomes irresistible--fractured marionettes running a play no intact mind would ever accept.
When you watch today's leaders switch tone with eerie precision, forget their own words overnight, or seem hollow yet function flawlessly while steering society off a cliff--what exactly are we looking at?
Hypocrisy and stupidity don't usually run this smoothly--or steer a society this efficiently into chaos, the prelude before a "helping hand" steps in.