Cabeza Revisited and Updated 4

 

Page 364. “Time just disappears from the… equation.” — Albert Einstein: “I came to see that time itself was suspect.” Physicist John Archibald Wheeler: “Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.” Zen Master Huang Po: “Beginningless time and the present moment are the same.” But see “Time Reborn,” by Lee Smolin and also “The Order of Time,” by Carlo Rovelli.

 

“Van Gogh… before he pulled the trigger.” — Again, see the previous references to van Gogh on the notes to pages 27, 152, and 182.

 

“John Charles Fremont.” Another story (partially adapted from what I wrote about Fremont in the sources):

 

Christmas 2021

 

The mountain on the right is called Fremont Peak, named after the explorer — nicknamed The Pathfinder — John C Frémont who climbed it, the literal high point of his expedition, in 1842. That was hardly its purpose, though. Rather he and his men were to chart the route that eventually became known as the Oregon Trail to encourage settlement of the West; the book he and his wife Jesse wrote —Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains — did indeed inspire countless thousands. It has been written that “It was both a keenly observed description of a Western journey by a trained scientist and a dramatic adventure story buffed to a high literarily polish.” The ultimate wilderness book, when all the West was wild. 

 

It’s hard to imagine that anyone could be more attuned to the wonders of Nature than Frémont. His son Frank wrote many years later, “Out-of-doors was life to him. . . . Stormy weather appealed to him as well as fair. Trees were to him sacred . . . flowers especially appealed to him . . . he would guide his horse so as to avoid crushing a flower or anthill; all life had a significance for him. Once we were climbing in the mountains . . . and I came across a snake. Boylike, I started to kill it, but he would not permit it. ‘No, let it go! It has not harmed you and probably enjoys life,’ he said.” But Frémont, most assuredly an adventurer in its finest sense, was not content just to chart the route — just for “fun” they had to go off trail and climb the peak. But then they had to return to civilization… since they were out of coffee.

 

Frémont later became senator from the new state of California and then first Republican candidate for president in 1856, running under the slogan: “Free Soil, Free Men, Fremont.” Though he lost, his run paved the way for Abraham Lincoln’s victory four years later which led to the secession of southern states and the Civil War. This led Lincoln to appoint Frémont Commander of the Department of the West, where his enduring legacy was to recognize the battlefield genius of Ulysses S Grant, raising him to a command position, from which Grant (a distant relative, in the sense all of us life forms are related) turned the tide of the Civil War. 

 

From the Frémonts’ book, describing the summit of Fremont Peak: “Here, on the summit, where the stillness was absolute, unbroken by any sound, and solitude complete, we thought ourselves beyond the region of animated life; but while we were sitting on the rock, a solitary bee came winging his flight from the eastern valley, and lit on the knee of one of the men. “It was a strange place, the icy rock and the highest peak [so he thought] of the Rocky Mountains, for a lover of warm sunshine and flowers; and we pleased ourselves with the idea that he was the first of his species to cross the mountain barrier—a solitary pioneer to foretell the advance of civilization.

 

I believe that a moment’s thought would have made us let him continue his way unharmed; but we carried out the law of this country, where all animated nature seems at war; and, seizing him immediately, put him in at least a fit place—in the leaves of a large book, among the flowers we had collected on our way. The barometer stood at 18.293, the attached thermometer at 44°; giving for the elevation of the summit 13,570 feet above the Gulf of Mexico, which may be called the highest flight of the bee. It is certainly the highest known flight of that insect.”

 

[I suggest Frémont would have been content to marvel at the bee, then let it continue on its journey but that one of the men, without “a moment’s thought,” swatted it. Upon his return Frémont presented his wife Jessie with the flowers and the bee. She kept them until her death.]

 

Anne and I have climbed several of the neighboring mountains. Perhaps we’ll do Fremont sometime. Today Fremont’s name happens to dot the landscape of America—and most fittingly our current vehicle was manufactured in Fremont, California. It’s 17 years old but this means we will have to keep it … until our deaths… (Photo, Phil Grant: “Before the Storm.” More photos of Fremont Peak and the Wind Rivers can be found in my videos on YouTube, especially The Art of the Fugue 1-7, Contrapunctus 2.)

 

Page 365. “Pace of Climate Change Exceeds Estimates.” — Well, maybe not. I just read that the Earth’s temperature has not increased over the last eight years. Please read everything I have previously written in these notes regarding this starting with those to page 248.

 

“So many of our attempts to avoid suffering.” — The most extreme example is all the Covid lockdowns, vaccine and mask mandates. People won’t exercise, they won’t eat foods that provide immunity such as mushrooms or a plant-based diet. An extremely high proportion of those who died from the virus either had do not resuscitate orders, would’ve died within the next year or two anyway, or just hadn’t been taking care of themselves the way we do. So because of them everyone is forced to follow a dangerous protocol to protect them. Which doesn’t even work. Children suffer from missed schooling. People don’t get cancer screenings. Drug overdoses and suicides jump. What I found most disgusting was all the playgrounds wrapped with orange tape to prevent their usage. Sheer idiocy. Below are just a tiny few of the articles describing the Covid insanity.:

 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/benbartee/2023/05/25/study-lockdowns-produced-no-reduction-in-covid-deaths-n1698152

 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/kevindowneyjr/2023/05/21/three-years-of-covid-democrat-tyranny-that-we-should-never-forget-n1696923

 

https://www.city-journal.org/article/the-harm-caused-by-masks

 

https://nypost.com/2023/04/14/the-corrupted-science-behind-bidens-covid-vax-mandates/

 

https://www.foxnews.com/media/orthopedic-surgeon-covid-vaccine-developing-career-ending-condition-been-abandoned

 

https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/10-myths-told-by-covid-experts-now-debunked/

 

https://nypost.com/2023/02/27/natural-immunity-as-effective-as-covid-vaccine-years-after-mandates/

 

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/dont-recommend-fda-infinity-vaccine-booster-strategy

 

https://www.foxnews.com/media/zuckerberg-says-establishment-asked-facebook-censor-covid-misinfo-ended-true-undermines-trust

 

Cardiologists Come to the Same Conclusion Regarding COVID Jab Side Effects

“The Covid mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role or been a primary cause of unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias, and heart failure since 2021…”

 

Until the British cardiologist, Dr. Aseem Malhotra, expressed grave concern about the safety of Covid mRNA vaccines, he was one of the most celebrated doctors in Britain. In 2016 he was named in the Sunday Times Debrett’s list as one of the most influential people in science and medicine in the UK in a list that included Professor Stephen Hawking. His total Altmetric score (measure of impact and reach) of his medical journal publications since 2013 is over 10,000 making it one of the highest in the World for a clinical doctor during this period.

In the early days of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Britain, he advocated the injections for the general public. However, in July of 2021, he experienced a terrible personal loss that caused him to reevaluate the shots—namely, the sudden and unexpected death of his 73-year-old father. His father’s death made no sense to him because he knew from his own examination that his father’s general and cardiac health were excellent.

 

As he put it in a recent interview:

His postmortem findings really shocked me. There were two severe blockages in his coronary arteries, which didn’t really make any sense with everything I know, both as a cardiologist—someone who has expertise in this particular area—but also intimately knowing my dad’s lifestyle and his health. Not long after that, data started to emerge that suggested a possible link between the mRNA vaccine and increased risk of heart attacks from a mechanism of increasing inflammation around the coronary arteries.

 

But on top of that, I was contacted by a whistleblower at a very prestigious university in the UK, a cardiologist himself, who explained to me that there was a similar research finding in his department, and that those researchers had decided to essentially cover that up because they were worried about losing funding from the pharmaceutical industry. But it doesn’t stop there. I then started looking at data in the UK to see if there had been any increase in cardiac arrest. My dad suffered a cardiac arrest and sudden cardiac death at home. Had there been any change in the UK since the vaccine rollout? And again those findings were very clear. There’s been an extra 14,000 out of hospital cardiac arrests in 2021 vs 2020.

 

The more Dr. Malhotra looked into it, the more he felt the same concern about the safety of the mRNA vaccines that Dr. Peter McCullough had felt since the spring of 2021. The alarming incidence of sudden, unexpected deaths during the latter half of 2021 and the first eight months of 2022—especially among the young and fit—strengthened his grave concern and suspicion.

In September of 2022,—after a thorough investigation of the growing volume of data—he came to his conclusion:

 

The Covid mRNA vaccine has likely played a significant role or been a primary cause of unexpected cardiac arrests, heart attacks, strokes, cardiac arrhythmias, and heart failure since 2021 until proven otherwise.

His conclusion, including his precise verbal formulation of it, was identical to the conclusion drawn by Dr. Peter McCullough. Though the two doctors ultimately established contact to compare notes, they reached their conclusions based on their own, independent inquiries, before they spoke with each other.

 

Recently the Vaccine Safety Research Foundation produced Until Proven Otherwise— a short video documentary about the corroborating findings of these two leading cardiologists. I believe it is no exaggeration to say that the gripping, four-minute video is a MUST SEE for everyone. Please share it with your family and friends.

 

Reposted from the author’s Substack

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times. Epoch Health welcomes professional discussion and friendly debate. To submit an opinion piece, please follow these guidelines and submit through our form here.

 

John Leake John Leake studied history and philosophy with Roger Scruton at Boston University. He then went to Vienna, Austria on a graduate school scholarship and ended up living in the city for over a decade, working as a freelance writer and translator. He is a true crime writer with a lifelong interest in medical history and forensic medicine.

 

Dr. Peter A. McCullough MD Dr. McCullough is a practicing internist, cardiologist, epidemiologist managing the cardiovascular complications of both the viral infection and the injuries developing after the COVID-19 vaccine in Dallas TX, USA. He has dozens of peer-reviewed publications on the infection, multiple US and State Senate testimonies, and has commented extensively on the medical response to the COVID-19 crisis in TheHill, America Out Loud, NewsMax, and on FOX NEWS Channel.

 

https://rumble.com/v1rl1kk-until-proven-otherwise-featuring-cardiologists-dr.-peter-mccullough-dr.-ase.html

 

Page 368. “With August allies staunch as these… who’d dare suggest our mission fail?” See Walk in My Combat Boots, by James Patterson and Matt Evers men first Sgt., US Army (retired). Vignettes of about 10 pages each of the experiences of various service members collated by the authors.

 

Miguel Ferrer, page 112: “I’m 22 years old and a medical Corpsman for a 20-man advisor team when I arrive in Afghanistan in 2012 as senior medical expert, my job is to teach an African lieutenant commander, Farjaad, who was also a doctor, and his men how to treat casualties.

 

I come in to the job with the mindset that we’re partners. We’ll share medical information and techniques. I’ll help them learn their craft, and they’ll help me learn mine. My pre-deployment training stressed the importance of having this attitude.

 

Farjaad, I soon discover, smokes opium all day long, every day. Sometimes he shows up to my classes, some days he doesn’t. He’s completely incapable of dealing with any negative feedback, no matter how I deliver it.

 

His men are the exact same way. Your attitude is, everybody is talented, and everyone’s level of talent is on par. These Afghans don’t want to learn. They don’t want to improve. I try every which way I can to communicate information. They want no part of it.

 

Page 115: Afghans seem to get hurt on a daily basis. They suffer mass casualties every single week, for months.

When I lose someone, it tears me up. Here I am pouring my blood, sweat, and tears into treating and saving guys who are wounded and dying, and these Afghanis are acting like they don’t care about their own.

 

Page 118: When my deployment ends in August, I returned to the US with mixed feelings.

I feel on top of the world, like a conquering hero returning home. I went to Afghanistan, did my job, survived, and came back. I’m confident in my abilities as a Corpsman.

 

My experience with the Afghanistan Army and the Afghanistanis:  I wasted seven months of my life trying to train those guys in combat medicine. I poured my heart and soul into it, and then I ended up doing their freaking jobs for them. They screwed up at the most basic levels, and they didn’t give a shit. They didn’t give a shit about anything.

 

I keep asking myself if there was something I could’ve done better — should have done better. I keep wondering if I considered every possible option.

 

Page 173: Jason Burke, regarding the “infamous woman who wanted to kill me.”… But the most unbelievable part, what I keep coming back to over and over again, is her connection to the United States. She left Pakistan and went to Texas on a student visa and attended the University of Houston. Massachusetts Institute of Technology took notice of her and offered her a full scholarship. After she graduated from MIT, she went to Brandeis University and earned a PhD in cognitive neuroscience.

 

While our countries educated her, she studied ways to destroy America. While she lived in our country, she went to work for Al Qaeda, first helping operatives renew US travel papers and open post office boxes; graduating to laundering money; and then, following the terrorist attacks we would later call 911, engaged in assault with firearms on US officers. [In Afghanistan]

 

Page 205: Jeddah Deloria “Women do all the work while the men sit with each other and smoke what I’m pretty sure is opium.… The men are in charge and they don’t want equal rights because they don’t want to ruin the lives they already have. It’s our job to persuade everyone we encounter, using our interpreters, to not support the Taliban and to help us. We promise to give them safety. The question to us is always the same: Are you guys going to be here for the long haul? This is Afghanistan. War is constant, and people are constantly at war.…

 

Page 306: Patrick Kern: “All these Iraqi tribes are basically interconnected. They’re all brothers; sister; third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh cousins — and yet they have hated each other for centuries. They’re all at each other’s throats, fighting for power.

 

Their culture values death. They have no problem killing 300 people with one car bomb — men, women, and children. Someone there had to explain to me that when an old man dies in the Arab culture, it’s a tragedy because an old man is full of irreplaceable wisdom, knowledge, and experience. But if a child dies, their attitude is, “we’ll make more.”

 

Every day while I was over there, we would ask ourselves the same question: how do we deal with this situation?

 

To this day, I still don’t have an answer.”

 

The Pianist from Syria; a Memoir, by Aeham Ahmad (who supports Palestinian nationalism), as told to Sandra Hetzel and Ariel Hofmeier, translated by Emanuel Bergmann.

 

For some reason all his encounters Europeans were positive and all those with Syrians, including his brother, and Palestinians were negative. I guess he must be racist,too.

 

Page 38: After six grade, I went to middle school. The principal was a terrible man, quick-tempered and always eager to yell at people. The teachers were afraid of his explosive rage, and the students were terrified of his punishments . . . he was Palestinian, but he was so eager to assimilate that he even joined the Baath party.

 

Page 53: Sometimes it took us half an hour to reach the source of the traffic jam — the accident. Usually we saw dented cars, bystanders, and two men screaming at each other. The traffic police always took the side of the man paying the highest bribe. 

 

Page 54: My new piano teacher . . . her name was an Irina and was also from Russia. . . I liked her . . . she was very friendly. Her Arabic was terrible but she smiled at me.

 

Page 56: During the last year of school, a teacher . . . and Orthodox Christian . . . asked me if I want to be a student. . . . I liked him. He was an excellent pianist and was very direct, pouring his heart on his sleeve. He wasn’t as two-faced as many of my countrymen. In Syria people will smile at you and stab you in the back.

 

Page 64: Four a year and a half, [my father and I] worked [in the music store] each weekend. My brother hardly did anything. Sometimes he tagged along and reluctantly helped a little for about an hour, then he would get into an argument with my parents and leave. One time, when friends of mine that came along to help and my brother sat around playing games on his cell phone, I confronted him. He angrily got up and shoved me to the ground.

 

Page 70: In my despair, I immediately confessed [to the principal for skipping school]. I told him that I’d been hiding in our store. “You have no idea what it’s like here. I can’t take it anymore. People pick fights all the time, everyone’s smokes hash. . . .”

 

Page 184: After only two months [his singing group, with piano, disbanded]. It began with petty jealousies . . . so they quit the group. Didn’t take long for the next few men to complain,

 

Page 266: Herbert [a rockstar] came over to me and said, “a . . . that was quite a performance! . . . I’ll send you an electric piano.” . . . . . . Why would a famous man want to give me an expensive gift? Back in Syria, musicians weren’t like that. The more successful you were, the more arrogant you became. I couldn’t believe how different it was here [in Germany], and thanked him effusively.

 

Page 266: It was amazing how helpful the Germans were. In Syria, when people help you, they usually expect something in return. [Earlier he had noted that monetary gifts for him and his wife at their wedding were carefully recorded so that when the gift giver married they could give the same amount back]

 

I’ve just finished On Saudi Arabia: It’s People, past, Religion, Fault Lines — and Future, by Karen Elliott House (who lived in Saudi Arabia in Muslim homes; she first served as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal mainly focusing on issues that affected American security). I’ve made dozens of notes regarding this book, but they all show how fundamentally different these people are from us. 

 

From the preface: “Over the decades, as I encountered more ordinary Saudis, I became fascinated by their passivity, their unquestioning acceptance of rules laid down by elders, teachers, religious scholars and their Saudi rulers… How, I kept asking myself could people be so docile, so unquestioningly obedient?”

 

Page 5. “Saudis, undereducated and often indolent, sit idly by rather than work for what they regard as slave wages doing menial jobs.” [Imported foreign workers represent 90% of all employees in the private sector.]

 

Page 9. “For all their frustrations, most Saudis do not crave democracy. To conservative Saudis, especially the many devoutly religious, the idea of men making laws rather than following those laid down by Allah in the Koran is antithetical and unthinkable.”

 

Page 28. “Within 50 years of the Prophets death, Muslims murdered a succession of leaders; shot, trampled, and beheaded the Prophet’s grandson; and sacked the holy cities of Medina and Mecca…” and more. They even followed the Yanomamo dinner protocol: “The conquerors invited the surviving [Muslim] rulers to dinner, and after pleasantries, by prearrangement, the waiters locked the doors and clubbed to death their ruler’s guests.… Not surprisingly this depressing history has bred a political fatalism down through the centuries… This resignation to living under corrupt temporal leaders and focusing not on improving life on earth but rather securing a better life in the hereafter helps explain why oppressive and greedy rulers reign for so long in so many Arab countries.” [I’ve come to believe it’s much more than that.]

 

Page 29, 31. “Beyond subjugating women, young Saudis were pressured to attend afterschool training in religious fundamentalism… Saudis overwhelming desire to conform, to pass unnoticed among the rest of society, is surely a boon to Al Saud control. If Westerners love individualism, most Saudis are literally frightened at the mere thought of being different.” If one reflects on Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance, well, I hope the reader will do so.…

 

Page 34. The author lives with a Muslim woman named Lulu. “She has no interest in the world outside her home, where her focus is on serving her husband and ensuring that her children follow a strictly religious path. As the days go by, it becomes clear Lulu not only accepts but welcomes the confines of her life.…”

 

 Page 37. “Lulu’s husband, the sole driver of the family’s SUV, drops the children at a special school that focuses on teaching students to memorize the entire Koran by the ninth grade, along with study of more conventional subjects.” Lulu by the way voluntarily chose to be her husband’s second wife. The first wife lives downstairs. And whenever the husband visits Lulu the author must hide in her bedroom.

 

Page 111. One of three young men tells the author, “my main concern was to obey my parents. There was no discussion. You just obey.” For that reason, says another, despite his deep interest in science and his desire to study it… His parents directed him towards religious studies.… This parental push leads nearly two thirds of university graduates to earn degrees in Islamic subjects that fail to equip them for work in the private sector.…

 

Page 140. “To this day, the concept of educational inquiry is barely nascent in Saudi Arabia. Students from kindergarten through University for the most part sit in front of teachers whose lectures they repeat back to them like echoes. Small wonder, then, that schools are just one more tool for constricting and controlling the minds and lives of Saudis.”

 

Page 143. “The fact is that all too many Saudi students emerge from school knowing little more than the Koran and believing not only in the tenets of their own religion but also that most of the rest of the world is populated by heretics and infidels who must be shunned, converted, or combated.

 

“In Saudi Arabia, the religious establishment does not merely exert a powerful influence on education; education is its wholly-owned subsidiary.”

 

Page 150. “There is no critical thinking even in university,” says one political science professor at King Saud University and re-add. “Students just memorize and repeat. All they want is a diploma and a job in government. They don’t care about their country or about the Arabs or about freedom.” A Sociology professor at the same university similarly laments the lack of curiosity among students.

 

[Recall Toby Huff’s Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution .…] Many books are banned, libraries often are locked, and at any rate volumes are not permitted to be taken home for most of them.

 

Page 156. Stephane Lacroix, a Saudi expert at The Institute of Political Studies in Paris, sums up the battle over education Saudi Arabia: “The educational system is so controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood, it will take 20 years to change — if at all. Islamists see education as their base so they won’t compromise on this.”

 

Page 157. “Visit any middle-class Saudi home, and you’re likely to see one or more young men of the family, some educated and some not, hanging around, with little prospect and often little interest in finding a job. Second, you are even more likely to see a number of young women of the family, almost surely better educated and more ambitious, who are unable to enter a workforce that offers them precious few opportunities.

 

Page 168. “This corrupting and corrosive influence on the economy has done nothing to increase Saudi employment.… A Saudi prince insists that ‘80% of the corruption is simply because the government doesn’t work, so people pay bribes to get services.

 

Page 170. “… Most of the young Saudis [at a Center that trains auto mechanics… and electricians] appear too sullen and lethargic to want to learn. Many of the trainees appear to be interested only in the government stipend they receive for showing up.” 

 

Page 203. “The idea of individual expression — through art or anything else — is truly foreign to Saudis.” [Who often then choose terrorism.]

 

Page 206. “The Saudi regime walks a fine line between discouraging extremism — to assuage its American protectors and to protect itself. One sheik quoted by the Saudi press agency: “[terrorism] attacks security, spreads terror among people and creates problems for society.” He went on, however, to deplore its damage not so much to the victims of terrorism as to Islam’s reputation…”

 

Page 221. “The royal family is absolutely convinced of the indispensability of its absolute rule. To a man, the scores of princes I’ve met over many years — even those who criticize the government and advocate change — invariably conclude by saying, ‘We are the glue that holds the kingdom together. Without us there is chaos.’”

 

Page 234. “The late King Fahd shoveled money into spreading the radical Wahhabi Islam around the world and granted religious leaders at home wide sway over virtually every aspect of Saudi life. A former Treasury Department official is quoted by the Washington Post reporter David Ottaway in a 2004 article estimating that the late King spent ‘north of 75 billion’ in his efforts to spread Wahhabi Islam. According to Ottaway, the king boasted on his personal website that he established 200 Islamic colleges, 210 Islamic centers, 1500 mosques, and 2000 schools for Muslim children in non-Islamic nations. He also launched a publishing center in Medina that by 2000 had distributed 138 million copies of the Koran worldwide. Indeed, a meeting with almost any Saudi royal concludes with the gift of a copy of the Koran…………”

 

Philip Carl Salzman — another racist (he’s actually called such online) — author of Culture and Conflict: In the Middle East, a professor of anthropology at McGill University, and the founding chair of the Commission on Nomadic Peoples of the International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, as well as being the founding editor of the commission’s published journal, Nomadic Peoples and author of numerous other books and papers. In addition to living with the nomadic Arabs of Baluchistan, he cites numerous references, interestingly including my anthropologist cousin Lois Grant Beck, who lived with the Qashqa’i tribe in Iran. She’s probably another racist, but I haven’t seen her since 1955, so I can’t say for sure. 

 

Culture and Conflict is summarized on the back cover: “Why is the Middle East so troubled? What are the reasons for its relentless conflicts?… Drawing on his own research among nomadic tribes and on the work of other anthropologists who have lived with the Bedouin, Salzman describes the structures and dynamics of the tribal life in which the Islamic Arab Empire and the modern Middle East were built. Most basic is the opposition between kin groups and tribal groups, and the obligation always to support the closer relations against the more distant. Islam itself reflects the contentious fragmentation of tribal life in pitting believers against infidel non-Muslims. Thus we discover that, in Middle Eastern culture, group loyalty is all, and precludes both a broad and inclusive civility and the rule of law.

 

“Wide ranging while grounded in observable evidence, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East is an original analysis and an illuminating overview. Sympathetic to middle Easterners, it identifies the basis of their troubles and our troubles with them. This is an indispensable volume for anyone wishing to understand the contemporary Middle East.”

 

As the saying in Arab countries goes, “Me against my brother. Me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my brother and my cousin against… And so on.”

 

Time for another racist, economic historian Gregory Clark (originally from Britain but now chair of the economics department at the University of California, Davis) and his book, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, winner of the 2008 gold medal in finance/investment/economics. 

From the back cover: “Why are some parts of the world so rich and others so poor? Why did the Industrial Revolution — and the unprecedented economic growth that came with it — occur in 18th century England and not some other time, or some other place? Why didn’t industrialization make the whole world rich — and why did it make large parts of the world even poorer.” 

 

Clive Cook at the Financial Times writes: “Any book that is as bold, as fascinating, and is conscientiously argued and as politically incorrect as this one demands to be read.” And A. N. Wilson at the Daily Telegraph writes: “One of the most fascinating, and the most disturbing, historical works I have read… This is economic history as you have never read it before.” 

 

I will attempt to summarize Clark’s precisely detailed explanation — with numerous charts and graphs — of why the Industrial Revolution did occur where and when it did over a period of many hundreds of years as English society evolved. 

 

Page 184. “The wealthiest testators [who left wills], who are almost all literate, left twice as many children as the poorest… Generation by generation the sons of the literate were relatively more numerous than the sons of the illiterate.” I.e., higher IQ had a significant reproductive advantage, as opposed to nowadays.

 

Page 171-172. Clark discusses “time preference” which “is simply the idea that, everything else being equal people prefer to consume now rather than later. The time preference rate measures the strength of this preference.… Children with high time preference rates in preschool in California did less well academically later and had lower SAT scores.” And on later pages he shows how low time preference rates led to the accumulation of wealth.

 

Page 204. “Innovation explains all modern growth.” And it was these children of the wealthiest (and who would have in today’s world have the highest SAT scores) who provided that innovation. Which sparked the Industrial Revolution.

 

Pages 352-370, Chapter 17, “Why Isn’t the Whole World Developed?” “Because of the extreme inefficiency of Asiatic labor… ‘India is obliged to engage three persons in place of one employed in the Lancashire Mills.’ In 1930 Arno Pearse, the international textile expert, offered the opinion that ‘Labor in India is undoubtedly on a very low power, probably it comes next to Chinese labor in inefficiency, wastefulness and lack of discipline.’”

 

I will leave it at that. Read the whole book. There will probably never be another like it since it’s too politically incorrect.

 

But Clark attempted to atone for his sins in his next book, The Son Also Rises: Surnames in the History of Social Mobility. Ian Morris, the author of Why the West Rules — for Now, writes on the back cover that it “is a remarkable challenge to conventional wisdom about social mobility. Using highly original methods and ranging widely across world history, Clark argues that the activities of governments impact mobility much less than most of us think — and that the only sure path to success is to be born to the right parents. Everyone interested in public policy should read this book.” 

 

But they won’t. The bottom line is it’s almost all in the genes. Just as Steven D. Levitt showed in Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.

 

But the “upside” according to Clark is that due to intermarriage everything will even out in the long run, thus the title. I can’t say I think he’s necessarily right about this. Perhaps the reverse will occur.

 

One interesting fact, though, is that Coptic Christians who have emigrated to the United States top the list of what Clark calls “social competence” — which he determines in this case by the relative representation among physicians. This is because of the Muslim conquests that forced the Copts to either convert, suffer death, or pay a tax. Only the most “socially competent” could pay the tax every year over the last 14 centuries. Black Africans (as opposed to the descendants of slaves), who benefited from “U. S. Immigration policy, which for countries far from the United States is biased strongly in favor of skilled immigrants,” are also high on the list.

 

Page 368. “We did not see our bunting.” — I don’t think we’ve seen our indigo bunting in more than a decade now.

 

Page 371. “Greenland is melting.” — See everything I’ve written about the global warming alarmists starting with notes to page 248.

 

Page 372. “The Clean Energy Myth.” The latest myth is that, as has been discussed previously in these notes, is that wind and solar are clean. They really just shift the burden to other parts of the world.

 

Page 374. “It is if the eternal harmony were conversing within itself.” — Although I mentioned this earlier I should have repeated that these were the words of Johan Wolfgang von Goethe upon listening to Bach.

 

“It is a transfigured world.” — Likewise that this was from J. W. N. Sullivan’s Beethoven: His Spiritual Development. 

 

Page 375. “Who could not even spell cat.” — 

 

https://nypost.com/2023/05/27/texas-marlin-high-school-postpones-graduation-after-85-of-class-fails-to-earn-diploma/

 

Across the country standards are being lowered just to raise the graduation rate. SAT tests are no longer required for many or most colleges just so they have a good excuse not to let in the top-performing Asians. 

 

https://nypost.com/2023/05/28/california-boy-clovis-hung-graduates-from-fullerton-college-with-5-degrees/

 

Page 376. “LASIK surgery.” — If you are contemplating this, don’t. Nothing wrong with glasses. They protect your eyes. A female weather presenter in the Detroit area was blinded by the procedure. She committed suicide.

 

“A perfect storm of crises.” — Perhaps the worst might be EMP: an electromagnetic pulse either from a solar flare or a nuclear weapon detonated at the proper altitude. This would shut down electrical transformers for at least one year (there are no ready replacements) and it is estimated that 90% of the population would die since food could no longer be delivered (electric pumps fill up our gas tanks). Maybe we’ll have a nuclear war with Russia or China over the Ukraine or Taiwan respectively.

 

“Changing the Constitution so he can be president for life.” — Maybe I should have said she… Hope not, either way.

 

Page 378. “Backpack in Utah’s Maze.” — Anne and I have made a total of five trips here (and one around the White Rim of the Island in the Sky District of Canyonlands National Park), at least three since “finishing” Cabeza. We both consider it and Cabeza the two most beautiful places we’ve ever seen. See my video of Bach’s Musical Offering which has photos of both.

 

Page 396. "Don't eat meat." — See:

 

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/friday-favorites-which-foods-and-diets-have-the-lowest-carbon-footprint/?subscriber=true&utm_source=NutritionFacts.org&utm_campaign=4ec216b171-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_7_26_2022_12_48_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_40f9e497d1-4ec216b171-28774106&mc_cid=4ec216b171&mc_eid=6550b05490

 

https://nutritionfacts.org/video/friday-favorites-dairy-and-cancer/

 

https://nutritionfacts.org/audio/wary-of-dairy/

 

Finally, the appearance of the Grim Reaper at the coronation of King Charles may portend the fate of our species:

 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/robert-spencer/2023/05/07/was-that-the-grim-reaper-at-charles-coronation-n1693221

 

A few more Christmas stories:

 

It started to snow. Hard. Not as in hard, heavily. Rather, hard, horizontally.

“Maybe we should set up the tent,” Anne said.

 

But I wanted to see the stars, and there were sure to be plenty of them here, in late September, ensconced in our sleeping bags by the shores of half-frozen Knoll Lake, above 12,000 feet in Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains. But other than three or four glimpsed for an instant or two between the scudding clouds . . . there were . . . no stars.

 

“My face is cold,” Anne said. She can’t sleep when there’s wind on her face. I set up the tent.  

 

Next morning . . . same thing. The plan had been . . . to camp on the top of 13,468’ Mount Febbas last night — for a great view and photos of a glorious sunrise. But we’d been slow and the forecast we’d gotten five days previously, before we’d started in the valley, hadn’t been that bad: 20% chance of showers. But now, after four days backpacking that 20% chance of rain showers had morphed into 100% chance of blizzard. Mountain weather.

 

After two hours of sitting, tea, and breakfast, however — hope! You could almost tell there might be a sun up there, somewhere, someplace, somehow — behind the rushing clouds, that is. Time to go! We packed everything up including the tent (a good half hour’s work) and began our . . . summit assault!

 

But . . . it got darker . . . and darker . . . and darker . . . and then . . . a flash! BOOM! Not that brilliant, to be totally exposed at 13,000 feet . . . in a thunderstorm. Down we went. Set up the tent. Had more tea. Did more sitting. Listened to the tent flapping. Exciting day.

 

Next morning . . . same thing. With food running low, nothing to do but head back . . . except . . . the way we’d come had been over large steep boulders that were now . . . encrusted with ice and snow. Not exactly our, pardon the expression, cup of tea. I checked the map and it seemed we could make it down off-trail, following gently sloping Horse Ridge — so named since the first exploratory party in 1833 had ridden up on, you guessed it, horses (The Adventures of Captain Bonneville [who led the expedition, and continued from there to climb the true highest peak in the Wind Rivers, Gannett Peak] can be found online). Then, with a bit of route finding we could loop back to the main trail.

 

Our one bit of good fortune was that the 60 mile-per-hour streaming snow and searing wind would be at our backs, assisting and — most markedly — inspiring our progress. We snatched a quick — very quick — glance at the highest peak of the range, Gannett, then headed off. Three or four hours later — sunshine! Calm, relatively speaking that is, winds! Warmth! We settled down in real grass — not rocks, as before — snacked and relaxed. And took the picture here of the main range shrouded in stormy snow squalls.

 

Then down to the trail, eventually making camp. The sky was clear so I almost didn’t set up the tent . . . which would have been less than brilliant since in the morning it was sagging under 4 inches of snow. Or more. Out we trudged, through snow and ice, three more days, to the truck. Past small flock of miniature ducks diving and splashing around in the icy glacial runoff, having a heckuva time—unlike a pair of half-frozen not-so-hardened hikers who had had enough.

 

We returned a year later, hiking the route in reverse. Except for a large plume from a forest fire to the North blowing away from us there was nary a cloud in the sky. But the timing wasn’t right for camping on the top, and it turned out my favorite picture was on the way up, just a bit down from the grassy spot where the first had been taken, showing Gannett, all its glaciers, and it’s perfect glacially carved valley . . . in all their splendor. Nice place, the Wind Rivers. If you don’t mind the weather, that is. And bring lots of tea. Best for the coming year,            

 

 

After six days of backpacking at higher elevations, carrying all our water (good exercise and builds moral fiber, too!) we were now goofing off, relatively speaking, on the seemingly flat — but rocky roller coaster when driving! — White Rim sandstone formation in the Maze district of Canyonlands National Park.

 

Directly across the Green River was the more widely known, not to mention widely traveled, White Rim Jeep Trail. Here there was nobody. Which was why we were here. Not there. The truck was parked at the edge of a sharp drop-off, and very sharply undercut — the harder sandstone providing a cap over the underlying softer shales — so a hundred feet down . . . there was naught but air. The numerous white slabs 500 feet below us made us hope the forces of molecular attraction would keep doing their job, preventing the slab—and us!— from falling into the abyss, at least for the next day or so. 

 

Actually, here the white was getting tinged with a gorgeous gold —see

www.meaningofwilderness.com/maze-musical-offering for photos — enhancing its allure, and inspiring us for the upcoming modest hike, mostly following its rim. When we’d checked in, a Ranger had admonished us, when hiking off trail, to stay either on slick rock or in washes so as not to leave a permanent imprint of our sojourn. Following the rim this was no problem but returning I’d planned a shortcut over a spur of Ekker Butte. And sure enough, there was a cute little wash leading right up. And there, in the wash itself, was, despite there having been only a couple inches rain this year, a copious quantity of cute miniature wildflowers to delight our eyes. But before that, following the sandstone rim, there hadn’t been much. Until . . . 

 

A huge pothole, 10-15 feet across, adopted by . . . a huge claret cup cactus. With a huge display of flowers . . . all in bloom. 

 

Photo time. But. There’s always a but.

 

Our mini-weather radio had advised us to prepare for a big storm the following day. No concern for now, but its precursors of wondrous cirrus and cumulus clouds were beginning to fly across the sky and sun to the South. A most delightful backdrop for the cactus. But. Here comes the but: all the glorious blooms of the cactus were — most logically — facing the sun. While it was easy enough to capture them on film, the sky behind was a bland and boring blue. And the northern side with the spectacular sky behind was, you got it, also boring! No blooms at all. 

 

What to do? Simple. Cheat. Which photographers have been doing, by any and all means possible, since the inception of their art. It’s just that with Photoshop it’s a whole ‘nother ballgame. I still shoot film, using the top-of-the-line Nikon circa 1972 passed down from my father, scanning the slides into my computer with a top-notch Nikon scanner— giving them the resolution of a 24 megapixel digital camera. I.e., not bad at all. I took six or eight exposures, crawling close on my belly for three or four of the cactus and then turning the other way, taking another three or four of the sky. My version of Photoshop allows one to select any part of the image in various ways, so . . . once home, after selecting the best exposures of each and making adjustments, I selected the boring sky, clicked delete, then the exciting one, clicked copy, then paste, did a little more fiddling (actually a lot more fiddling) and . . . voilà! One of my favorite photos.

 

“But that’s not the way it really was,” you say? Well, when we get home and I look at the photos in the computer I always tell Anne how bad they all are. Because they don’t seem nearly as nice as the way it really was. Theoretical physicist Brian Greene writes in The Fabric of the Cosmos, “The reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is.” So maybe Photoshop helps make these pictures . . . a glimmer plus.

 

I should also note that I used my extreme wide angle lens in this photo, which even in vertical shots takes in much more sky than human vision is capable of.  So you get the Big picture. Maybe a glimmer squared. But still just a glimmer.

 

The following additions I don’t have the patience to put in the proper location so I’m just adding them here:

 

 

 

https://pjmedia.com/benbartee/2024/02/22/study-american-children-prescribed-multiple-psychiatric-drugs-at-increasing-rates-n4926683

Nobel Prize winner Roger Penrose has estimated that the combined probability of all the physicals constants having their measured values appropriate for the evolution of life is 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 123, a phenomenally unlikely outcome.

Steven Weinberg in The First Three Minutes: "the effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lists human life a little above the level of farce and give us that some of the grace of tragedy." Genuine spirituality and the greatest art fit in that category. What he means is tragedy for the finite being which is doomed to dissolution. But our only reason for being here is to give all we can for the Infinite Spirit"

https://www.foxnews.com/media/harvard-professor-all-hell-broke-loose-study-found-no-racial-bias-police-shootings

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/02/12/feds-to-wreck-22m-acres-with-solar-panels-as-us-enemies-dig-up-coal-gas-n4926360

https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/gross-misconduct-the-nail-in-the-coffin-for-antidepressants-5576949

https://pjmedia.com/benbartee/2024/02/05/italy-gang-of-migrants-commit-a-diversity-gang-rape-13-year-old-n4926148

https://pjmedia.com/benbartee/2023/09/24/report-migrants-committed-almost-70-of-violent-crimes-in-france-last-year-n1729547

https://pjmedia.com/robert-spencer/2024/02/05/dearborn-named-americas-jihad-capital-mayor-and-biden-respond-about-the-way-youd-expect-n4926143

SciencePop Mech Pro: Science
Your Very Own Consciousness Can Interact With the Whole Universe, Scientists Believe
A recent experiment suggests the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a quantum wave that connects with the rest of the universe.

BY SUSAN LAHEYPUBLISHED: OCT 18, 2023
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When people talk about consciousness, or the mind, it’s always a bit nebulous. Whether we create consciousness in our brains as a function of our neurons firing, or consciousness exists independently of us, there’s no universally accepted scientific explanation for where it comes from or where it lives. However, new research on the physics, anatomy, and geometry of consciousness has begun to reveal its possible form.

In other words, we may soon be able to identify a true architecture of consciousness.

The new work builds upon a theory Nobel Prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, Ph.D., and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff, M.D., first posited in the 1990s: the Orchestrated Objective Reduction theory (Orch OR). Broadly, it claims that consciousness is a quantum process facilitated by microtubules in the brain’s nerve cells.

 

Know Your Terms: Microtubules

These are tubes made of protein lattices, and they form part of the cell’s cytoskeleton, which is its structural network.

Penrose and Hameroff suggested that consciousness is a quantum wave that passes through these microtubules. And that, like every quantum wave, it has properties like superposition (the ability to be in many places at the same time) and entanglement (the potential for two particles that are very far away to be connected).

Plenty of experts have questioned the validity of the Orch OR theory. This is the story of the scientists working to revive it.

Across the Universe
To explain quantum consciousness, Hameroff recently told the TV program Closer To Truth that it must be scale invariant, like a fractal. A fractal is a never-ending pattern that can be very tiny or very huge, and still maintain the same properties at any scale. Normal states of consciousness might be what we consider quite ordinary—knowing you exist, for example. But when you have a heightened state of consciousness, it’s because you’re dealing with quantum-level consciousness that is capable of being in all places at the same time, he explains. That means your consciousness can connect or entangle with quantum particles outside of your brain—anywhere in the universe, theoretically.

Image no longer available
An illustration of the brain’s network of neural axons transmitting electrical action potentials. (Getty Images)
Other scientists had an easy way to discard this theory. Efforts to recreate quantum coherence—keeping quantum particles as part of a wave instead of breaking down into discrete and measurable particles—only worked in very cold, controlled environments. Take quantum particles out of that environment and the wave broke down, leaving behind isolated particles. The brain isn’t cold and controlled; it’s quite warm and wet and mushy. Therefore, consciousness couldn’t remain in superposition in the brain, the thinking went. Particles in the brain couldn’t connect with the universe.

But then came discoveries in quantum biology. Turns out, living things use quantum properties even though they’re not cold and controlled.

 

Know Your Terms: Quantum biology

This is the study of quantum processes in living organisms, like superposition and quantum entanglement, that actually facilitate biological processes beyond the subatomic level.

Photosynthesis, for example, allows a plant to store the energy from a photon, or a quantum particle of light. The light hitting the plant causes the formation of something called an exciton, which carries the energy to where it can be stored in the plant’s reaction center. But to get to the reaction center, it has to navigate structures in the plant—sort of like navigating an unfamiliar neighborhood en route to a dentist appointment. In the end, the exciton must arrive before it burns up all of the energy it’s carrying. In order to find the correct path before the particle’s energy is used up, scientists now say the exciton uses the quantum property of superposition to try all possible paths simultaneously.

GIVE YOUR BRAIN A WORKOUT ?
melting brain
Quantum Physics May Finally Explain Consciousness
near death experience, conceptual illustration
Objective Reality May Not Exist, Scientists Say
teyonah parris as captain monica rambeau in marvel studios' the marvels photo courtesy of marvel studios © 2023 marvel
Unraveling the Marvels of Quantum Entanglement
New evidence suggests microtubules in our brains may be even better at guarding this quantum coherence than chlorophyll. One of the scientists who worked with the Orch OR team, physicist and oncology professor Jack Tuszynski, Ph.D., recently conducted an experiment with a computational model of a microtubule. His team simulated shining a light into a microtubule, sort of like a photon sending an exciton through a plant structure. They were testing whether the energy transfer from light in the microtubule structure could remain coherent as it does in plant cells. The idea was that if the light lasted long enough before being emitted—a fraction of a second was enough—it indicated quantum coherence.

Specifically, Tuszynski’s team simulated sending tryptophan fluorescence, or ultraviolet light photons that are not visible to the human eye, into microtubules. In a recent interview, Tuszynski reports that, across 22 independent experiments, the excitations from the tryptophan created quantum reactions that lasted up to five nanoseconds. This is thousands of times longer than coherence would be expected to last in a microtubule. It’s also more than long enough to perform the biological functions required. “So we are actually confident that this process is longer lasting in tubulin than … in chlorophyll,” he says. The team published their findings in the journal ACS Central Science earlier this year.

Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.
Tuszynski notes that his team is not the only one sending light into microtubules. A team of professors at the University of Central Florida has been illuminating microtubules with visible light. In those experiments, Tuszynski says, they observed re-emission of this light over hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. “That’s the typical human response time to any sort of stimulus, visual or audio,” he explains. Shining the light into microtubules and measuring how long the microtubules take to emit that light “is a proxy for the stability of certain … postulated quantum states,” he says, “which is kind of key to the theory that these microtubules may be having coherent quantum superpositions that may be associated with mind or consciousness.” Put simply, the brain is not too warm or wet for consciousness to exist as a wave that connects with the universe.

While this is a long way from proving the Orch OR theory, it’s significant and promising data. Penrose and Hameroff continue to push the boundaries, partnering with people like spiritual leader Deepak Chopra to explore expressions of consciousness in the universe that they might be able to identify in the lab in their microtubule experiments. This sort of thing makes many scientists very uncomfortable.

Still, there are researchers exploring what the architecture of such a universal consciousness might look like. One of these ideas comes from the study of weather.

The Architecture of Universal Consciousness
Timothy Palmer, Ph.D., is a mathematical physicist at Oxford who specializes in chaos and climate. (He’s also a big fan of Roger Penrose.) Palmer believes the laws of physics must be fundamentally geometric. The Invariant Set Theory is his explanation of how the quantum world works. Among other things, it suggests that quantum consciousness is the result of the universe operating in a particular fractal geometry “state space.”

That’s a mouthful, but it roughly means we’re stuck in a lane or route of a cosmic fractal shape that is shared by other realities that are also stuck in their trajectories. This notion appears in the final chapter of Palmer’s book, The Primacy of Doubt, How the Science of Uncertainty Can Help Us Understand Our Chaotic World. In it, he suggests the possibility that our experience of free will—of having had the option to choose our lives, as well as our perception that there is a consciousness outside ourselves—is the result of awareness of other universes that share our state space. The idea starts with a special geometry called a Strange Attractor.

You may have heard of the Butterfly Effect, the idea that the flap of a butterfly’s wing in one part of the world could affect a hurricane in another part of the world. The term actually refers to a more complex concept developed by mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz in 1963. Lorenz was trying to simplify the equations used to predict how a particular climate condition might evolve. He narrowed it down to three differential equations that could be used to identify the “state space” of a particular weather system. For example, if you had a particular temperature, wind direction, and humidity level, what would happen next? He began to plot the trajectory of weather systems by plugging in different initial conditions into the equations.

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He found that if initial conditions were different by even one one-hundredth of a percent, if the humidity was just a fraction higher, or the temperature a hair lower, the trajectories—what happens next—could be wildly different. In the graph, one trajectory might shoot off in one direction, forming loops and spins, seemingly at random, while another creates completely different shapes in the opposite direction. But once Lorenz started to plot them, he found that many of the trajectories wound up circulating within the boundaries of a particular geometric shape known as a strange attractor. It was as if they were cars on a track: the cars might go in any number of directions so long as they didn’t drive it the same way twice and they stayed on the track. The track was the butterfly-shaped Lorenz attractor.

lorenz attractor in rainbow colors
Getty Images
Artwork of a Lorenz attractor, named after Edward Lorenz, who developed a system of ordinary differential equations. In particular, the Lorenz attractor is a set of chaotic solutions of the Lorenz system which, when plotted, resemble a butterfly or figure eight. Minute variations in the initial values of the variables would lead to hugely divergent outcomes. For this phenomenon, of sensitivity to initial conditions, he coined the term butterfly effect. This effect is the underlying mechanism of deterministic chaos.
Palmer believes that our universe may be just one trajectory, one car, on a cosmological state space like the Lorenz attractor. When we imagine “what if …?” scenarios, we’re actually getting information about versions of ourselves in other universes who are also navigating the same strange attractor—others’ “cars” on the track, he explains. This also accounts for our sense of consciousness, of free will, and of being connected with a greater universe.

“I would at least hypothesize that it may well be the case that it’s evolving on very special fractal subsets of all conceivable states in state space,” Palmer tells Popular Mechanics. If his ideas are correct, he says, “then we need to look at the structure of the universe on its very largest scales, because these attractors are really telling us about a kind of holistic geometry for the universe.”

Tuszynksi’s experiment and Palmer’s theory still don’t tell us what consciousness is, but perhaps they tell us where consciousness lives—what kind of a structure houses it. That means it’s not just an ethereal, disembodied concept. If consciousness is housed somewhere, even if that somewhere is a complicated state space, we can find it. And that’s a start.

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SUSAN LAHEY
CONTRIBUTOR
Susan Lahey is a journalist and writer whose work has been published in numerous places in the U.S. and Europe. She's covered ocean wave energy and digital transformation; sustainable building and disaster recovery; healthcare in Burkina Faso and antibody design in Austin; the soul of AI and the inspiration of a Tewa sculptor working from a hogan near the foot of Taos Mountain. She lives in Porto, Portugal with a view of the sea.

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After Antidepressants, a Loss of Sexuality
Some patients are speaking up about lasting sexual problems after stopping antidepressants, a poorly understood condition.

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A close-up view looking down into an open orange pill bottle containing green and white Prozac pills on a black surface.
The label on Prozac, one of the most widely prescribed S.S.R.I.s, warns that sexual side effects may persist after the drug is discontinued. But researchers are only just beginning to quantify long-term sexual problems.Credit...Colin Temple/Alamy
Azeen Ghorayshi
By Azeen Ghorayshi
Nov. 9, 2023
Doctors and patients have long known that antidepressants can cause sexual problems. No libido. Pleasureless orgasms. Numb genitals. Well over half of people taking the drugs report such side effects.

Now, a small but vocal group of patients is speaking out about severe sexual problems that have endured even long after they stopped taking selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most popular type of antidepressants. The drugs’ effects have been devastating, they said, leaving them unable to enjoy sex or sustain romantic relationships.

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“My clitoris feels like a knuckle,” said Emily Grey, a 27-year-old in Vancouver, British Columbia, who took one such drug, Celexa, for depression from age 17 to 23. “It’s not a normal thing to have to come to terms with.”

The safety label on Prozac, one of the most widely prescribed S.S.R.I.s, warns that sexual problems may persist after the drug is discontinued. And health authorities in Europe and Canada recently acknowledged that the medications can lead to lasting sexual issues.

But researchers are only just beginning to quantify how many people have these long-term problems, known as post-S.S.R.I. sexual dysfunction. And the chronic condition remains contested among some psychiatrists, who point out that depression itself can curb sexual desire. Clinical trials have not followed people after they stop the drugs to determine whether such sexual problems stem from the medications.

“I think it’s depression recurring. Until proven otherwise, that’s what it is,” said Dr. Anita Clayton, the chief of psychiatry at the University of Virginia School of Medicine and a leader of an expert group that will meet in Spain next year to formally define the condition.

Dr. Clayton published some of the earliest research showing that S.S.R.I.s come with widespread sexual side effects. She said patients with these problems should talk to their doctors about switching to a different antidepressant or a combination of drugs.

She worries that too much attention on seemingly rare cases of sexual dysfunction after S.S.R.I.s are stopped could dissuade suicidal patients from trying the medications. “I have a really big fear about this,” she said.

By the mid-2000s, the sexual effects of S.S.R.I.s were well recognized. In fact, the drugs so reliably dulled sexual responses that doctors began prescribing them for men with premature ejaculation.

But sexual symptoms that endure after stopping the drugs haven’t received much attention in the medical literature.

In 2006, a handful of cases of persistent genital numbness were reported in Canada and the United States. That same year, a newsletter for the American Psychological Association described emerging data on the lasting sexual effects of the drugs.

Image
Audrey Bahrick, a former psychologist at the University of Iowa, started taking Prozac in 1993, when she was 37 and struggling with a difficult job in a new city.Credit...Kathryn Gamble for The New York Times
“I believe that we have barely begun to appreciate the pervasiveness and complexity of the impact on sexuality of these medications,” Audrey Bahrick, then a psychologist at the University of Iowa, wrote in the article.

In an interview, Dr. Bahrick said she felt an ethical obligation to call attention to the condition because she had experienced it herself.

She started taking Prozac in 1993, when she was 37 and struggling with a difficult job in a new city. Within one day of taking the pill, her clitoris and vagina felt numb. “It was like there was a glove over them — a very, very muffled sensation,” she recalled.

For a while, she said, the trade-off was worth it: The antidepressant made her feel energized and more resilient. But after two years, she stopped taking it for the sake of her relationship. The sexual symptoms persisted, however, and the relationship ended.

“It never occurred to me that this would be something that would in fact, in my life, never resolve,” said Dr. Bahrick, who is now 67.

In the decades since, the use of S.S.R.I.s has soared, especially among teenagers. They are prescribed not only for depression and anxiety, but for a range of other conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, eating disorders and premenstrual symptoms. Yet researchers are still struggling to understand how S.S.R.I.s work, and why the sexual problems are so pervasive.

The drugs target serotonin, an important chemical messenger in the brain as well as other parts of the body. The molecule is involved in blunting sexual responses, including the orgasm reflex that originates in the spinal cord. Serotonin also affects estrogen levels, which in turn can affect arousal.

But depression, too, dulls the sex drive. Among unmedicated men with depression, 40 percent report a loss of sexual arousal and desire, and 20 percent struggle to reach orgasm. Common conditions like diabetes and cardiovascular disease can also cause sexual problems.

Drug trials rarely look at what happens when medications are stopped. And studying what happens after people get off S.S.R.I.s is particularly challenging because many people never stop taking them.

Given the lack of data, “persistent sexual dysfunction caused by S.S.R.I.s is a hypothesis, not a proven phenomena,” said Dr. Robert Taylor Segraves, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine who has studied the effects of antidepressants on sexuality.

Still, some researchers have found ways to estimate the prevalence of the condition. A recent study in Israel reported that about one in 216 men who discontinued S.S.R.I.s were subsequently prescribed medications for erectile dysfunction, a rate at least three times as high as that among the general population.

And when many patients report similar problems — like the distinctive symptom of genital numbness — the signal should not be dismissed, said Dr. Jonathan Alpert, head of the American Psychiatric Association’s research council.

Image
Roy Whaley, of Somerset, England, belongs to the PSSD Network, a global advocacy group formed last year. “We feel very neglected,” he said.Credit...Francesca Jones for The New York Times
Some patients who have taken finasteride, which treats hair loss in men, or isotretinoin, an acne medication, have also reported genital numbness and other sexual problems after stopping the medications. That may point to a common biological mechanism, Dr. Alpert said.

“Everything begins with anecdotal reports, and science needs to follow,” he said.

Other researchers are particularly worried about the growing number of young people who start the medications before their sexuality has fully developed.

“People put on these drugs at a young age may just never know who they might otherwise be if they hadn’t been on this drug,” said Yassie Pirani, a counselor in Vancouver.

In a new survey of 6,000 L.G.B.T.Q. young people that has not yet been peer-reviewed, Ms. Pirani and collaborators at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia found that people who had stopped antidepressants were 10 times more likely to report persistent genital numbness than those who had never taken the drugs.

Ms. Pirani described one of her patients, age 33, who had taken S.S.R.I.s from age 11 to her mid-20s. “Her whole sexual history, she could have sex, but she never really felt anything,” Ms. Pirani said.

Some of her patients, she added, wondered for years whether they were asexual before understanding that the medications may have played a role. When they turned to doctors for help, they were often dismissed.

In recent years, many patients have found support for their condition online. About 10,000 people are members of a Reddit group for those with post-S.S.R.I. sexual dysfunction, up from 750 members in 2020. In 2018, dozens of patients and doctors petitioned regulators in Europe and the United States to add warnings about the risk of persistent sexual problems to drug labels, spurring the European Medicines Agency to do so the following year. (A spokeswoman for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said the agency was still reviewing the petition.)

“We feel very neglected,” said Roy Whaley, a 38-year-old from Somerset, England, who belongs to the PSSD Network, a global advocacy group formed last year.

Mr. Whaley briefly took the antidepressant Citalopram at age 22 to treat his obsessive-compulsive disorder. Sixteen years later, his penis feels almost like it has been injected with a local anaesthetic, he said. He has lost his libido and feels no pleasure from orgasms. At times, he said, this loss of sexuality has made him feel suicidal.

Over the years, doctors have repeatedly suggested that Mr. Whaley’s sexual problems were psychological, according to medical records reviewed by The New York Times. One record from 2009 noted that the Citalopram was “exceptionally unlikely” to be the cause.

His current doctor does believe him, he said, partly because of the statement from European regulators.

For Dr. Bahrick, who has continued to publish research on the topic, the recent recognition of her condition is cold comfort, considering the unknown number of people who have lost a core experience of being human.

“It’s not just numb genitals,” Dr. Bahrick said. “It’s a reorientation to being in the world.”

Audio produced by Tally Abecassis.

Azeen Ghorayshi covers the intersection of sex, gender and science for The Times. More about Azeen Ghorayshi

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.A Critic at LargeOctober 11, 2010 Issue

Alms Dealers
Can you provide humanitarian aid without facilitating conflicts?

By Philip Gourevitch

October 4, 2010

London 1969 The worldwide reaction to the Biafran war gave rise to the modern humanitarianaid industry.
London, 1969: The worldwide reaction to the Biafran war gave rise to the modern humanitarian-aid industry.Photograph by Evening Standard / Getty
In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and, in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid, visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie, withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews, too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised. Suddenly, Biafra’s hunger was one of the defining stories of the age—the graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience—and the humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being.

“There were meetings, committees, protests, demonstrations, riots, lobbies, sit-ins, fasts, vigils, collections, banners, public meetings, marches, letters sent to everybody in public life capable of influencing other opinion, sermons, lectures, films and donations,” wrote Frederick Forsyth, who reported from Biafra during much of the siege, and published a book about it before turning to fiction with “The Day of the Jackal.” “Young people volunteered to go out and try to help, doctors and nurses did go out to offer their services in an attempt to relieve the suffering. Others offered to take Biafran babies into their homes for the duration of the war; some volunteered to fly or fight for Biafra. The donors are known to have ranged from old-age pensioners to the boys at Eton College.” Forsyth was describing the British response, but the same things were happening across Europe, and in America as well.

Stick-limbed, balloon-bellied, ancient-eyed, the tiny, failing bodies of Biafra had become as heavy a presence on evening-news broadcasts as battlefield dispatches from Vietnam. The Americans who took to the streets to demand government action were often the same demonstrators who were protesting what their government was doing in Vietnam. Out of Vietnam and into Biafra—that was the message. Forsyth writes that the State Department was flooded with mail, as many as twenty-five thousand letters in one day. It got to where President Lyndon Johnson told his Undersecretary of State, “Just get those nigger babies off my TV set.”

That was Johnson’s way of authorizing humanitarian relief for Biafra, and his order was executed in the spirit in which it was given: stingily. According to Forsyth, by the war’s end, in 1970, Washington’s total expenditure on food aid for Biafra had been equivalent to “about three days of the cost of taking lives in Vietnam,” or “about twenty minutes of the Apollo Eleven flight.” But Forsyth, who was an unapologetic partisan of the Biafran cause, reserved his deepest contempt for the British government, which supported the Nigerian blockade. Even as Nigeria’s representative to abortive peace talks declared, “Starvation is a legitimate weapon of war, and we have every intention of using it,” the Labour Government in London dismissed reports of Biafran starvation as enemy propaganda. Whitehall’s campaign against Biafra, Forsyth wrote, “rings a sinister bell in the minds of those who remember the small but noisy caucus of rather creepy gentlemen who in 1938 took it upon themselves to play devil’s advocate for Nazi Germany.”

The Holocaust was a constant reference for Biafra advocates. In this, they were assisted by Biafra’s secessionist government, which had a formidable propaganda department and a Swiss public-relations firm. The cameras made the historical association obvious: few had seen such images since the liberation of the Nazi death camps. Propelled by that memory, the Westerners who gave Biafra their money and their time (and, in some cases, their lives) believed that another genocide was imminent there, and the humanitarian relief operation they mounted was unprecedented in its scope and accomplishment.

In 1967, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the world’s oldest and largest humanitarian nongovernmental organization, had a total annual budget of just half a million dollars. A year later, the Red Cross was spending about a million and a half dollars a month in Biafra alone, and other N.G.O.s, secular and church-based (including Oxfam, Caritas, and Concern), were also growing exponentially in response to Biafra. The Red Cross ultimately withdrew from the Nigerian civil war in order to preserve its neutrality, but by then its absence hardly affected the scale of the operation. Biafra was inaccessible except by air, and by the fall of 1968 a humanitarian airlift had begun. The Biafran air bridge, as it was known, had no official support from any state. It was carried out entirely by N.G.O.s, and all the flying had to be done by night, as the planes were under constant fire from Nigerian forces. At its peak, in 1969, the mission delivered an average of two hundred and fifty metric tons of food a night. Only the Berlin airlift had ever moved more aid more efficiently, and that was an Air Force operation.

The air bridge was a heroic undertaking, and a stunning technical success for a rising humanitarian generation, eager to atone for the legacies of colonialism and for the inequities of the Cold War world order. In fact, the humanitarianism that emerged from Biafra—and its lawyerly twin, the human-rights lobby—is probably the most enduring legacy of the ferment of 1968 in global politics. Here was a non-ideological ideology of engagement that allowed one, a quarter of a century after Auschwitz, not to be a bystander, and, at the same time, not to be identified with power: to stand always with the victim, in solidarity, with clean hands—healing hands. The underlying ideas and principles weren’t new, but they came together in Biafra, and spread forth from there with a force that reflected a growing desire in the West (a desire that only intensified when the Berlin Wall was breached) to find a way to seek honor on the battlefield without having to kill for it.

Three decades later, in Sierra Leone, a Dutch journalist named Linda Polman squeezed into a bush taxi bound for Makeni, the headquarters of the Revolutionary United Front rebels. In the previous decade, the R.U.F. had waged a guerrilla war of such extreme cruelty in the service of such incoherent politics that the mania seemed its own end. While the R.U.F. leadership, backed by President Charles Taylor, of Liberia, got rich off captured diamond mines, its Army, made up largely of abducted children, got stoned and sacked the land, raping and hacking limbs off citizens and burning homes and villages to the ground. But, in May, 2001, a truce had been signed, and by the time Polman arrived in Sierra Leone later that year the Blue Helmets of the United Nations were disarming and demobilizing the R.U.F. The business of war was giving way to the business of peace, and, in Makeni, Polman found that former rebel warlords—such self-named men as General Cut-Throat, Major Roadblock, Sergeant Rape Star, and Kill-Man No-Blood—had taken to calling their territories “humanitarian zones,” and identifying themselves as “humanitarian officers.” As one rebel turned peacenik, who went by the name Colonel Vandamme, explained, “The white men are soon gonna need drivers, security guards, and houses. We’re gonna provide them.”

Colonel Vandamme called aid workers “wives”—“because they care for people,” according to Polman, and also, presumably, because they are seen as fit objects of manipulation and exploitation. Speaking in the local pidgin, Vandamme told Polman, “Them N.G.O. wifes done reach already for come count how much sick and pikin [children] de na di area.” Vandamme saw opportunity in this census. “They’re my pikin and my sick,” he said. “Anyone who wants to count them has to pay me first.”

This was what Polman had come to Makeni to hear. The conventional wisdom was that Sierra Leone’s civil war had been pure insanity: tens of thousands dead, many more maimed or wounded, and half the population displaced—all for nothing. But Polman had heard it suggested that the R.U.F.’s rampages had followed from “a rational, calculated strategy.” The idea was that the extreme violence had been “a deliberate attempt to drive up the price of peace.” Sure enough, Polman met a rebel leader in Makeni, who told her, “We’d worked harder than anyone for peace, but we got almost nothing in return.” Addressing Polman as a stand-in for the international community, he elaborated, “You people looked the other way all those years. . . . There was nothing to stop for. Everything was broken, and you people weren’t here to fix it.”

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In the end, he claimed, the R.U.F. had escalated the horror of the war (and provoked the government, too, to escalate it) by deploying special “cut-hands gangs” to lop off civilian limbs. “It was only when you saw ever more amputees that you started paying attention to our fate,” he said. “Without the amputee factor, you people wouldn’t have come.” The U.N.’s mission in Sierra Leone was per capita the most expensive humanitarian relief operation in the world at the time. The old rebel believed that, instead of being vilified for the mutilations, he and his comrades should be thanked for rescuing their country.

“Sire they also want dental.”
“Sire, they also want dental.”
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Is this true? Do doped-up maniacs really go a-maiming in order to increase their country’s appeal in the eyes of international aid donors? Does the modern humanitarian-aid industry help create the kind of misery it is supposed to redress? That is the central contention of Polman’s new book, “The Crisis Caravan: What’s Wrong with Humanitarian Aid?” (Metropolitan; $24), translated by the excellent Liz Waters. Three years after Polman’s visit to Makeni, the international Truth and Reconciliation Commission for Sierra Leone published testimony that described a meeting in the late nineteen-nineties at which rebels and government soldiers discussed their shared need for international attention. Amputations, they agreed, drew more press coverage than any other feature of the war. “When we started cutting hands, hardly a day BBC would not talk about us,” a T.R.C. witness said. The authors of the T.R.C. report remarked that “this seems to be a deranged way of addressing problems,” but at the same time they allowed that under the circumstances “it might be a plausible way of thinking.”

Polman puts it more provocatively. Sowing horror to reap aid, and reaping aid to sow horror, she argues, is “the logic of the humanitarian era.” Consider how Christian aid groups that set up “redemption” programs to buy the freedom of slaves in Sudan drove up the market incentives for slavers to take more captives. Consider how, in Ethiopia and Somalia during the nineteen-eighties and nineties, politically instigated, localized famines attracted the food aid that allowed governments to feed their own armies while they further destroyed and displaced targeted population groups. Consider how, in the early eighties, aid fortified fugitive Khmer Rouge killers in camps on the Thai-Cambodian border, enabling them to visit another ten years of war, terror, and misery upon Cambodians; and how, in the mid-nineties, fugitive Rwandan génocidaires were succored in the same way by international humanitarians in border camps in eastern Congo, so that they have been able to continue their campaigns of extermination and rape to this day.

And then there’s what happened in Sierra Leone after the amputations brought the peace, which brought the U.N., which brought the money, which brought the N.G.O.s. All of them, as Polman tells it, wanted a piece of the amputee action. It got to the point where the armless and legless had piles of extra prosthetics in their huts and still went around with their stubs exposed to satisfy the demands of press and N.G.O. photographers, who brought yet more money and more aid. In the obscene circus of self-regarding charity that Polman sketches, vacationing American doctors turned up, sponsored by their churches, and performed life-threatening (sometimes life-taking) operations without proper aftercare, while other Americans persuaded amputee parents to give up amputee children for adoption in a manner that seemed to combine aspects of bribery and kidnapping. Officers of the new Sierra Leone government had only to put out a hand to catch some of the cascading aid money.

Polman might also have found more heartening anecdotes and balanced her account of humanitarianism run amok with tales of humanitarian success: lives salvaged, epidemics averted, families reunited. But in her view the good intentions of aid—and the good that aid does—are too often invoked as excuses for ignoring its ills. The corruptions of unchecked humanitarianism, after all, are hardly unique to Sierra Leone. Polman finds such moral hazard on display wherever aid workers are deployed. In case after case, a persuasive argument can be made that, over-all, humanitarian aid did as much or even more harm than good.

“Yes, but, good grief, should we just do nothing at all then?” Max Chevalier, a sympathetic Dutchman who tended amputees in Freetown for the N.G.O. Handicap International, asked Polman. Chevalier made his argument by shearing away from the big political-historical picture to focus instead, as humanitarian fund-raising appeals do, on a single suffering individual—in this instance, a teen-age girl who had not only had a hand cut off by rebels but had then been forced to eat it. Chevalier wanted to know, “Are we supposed to simply walk away and abandon that girl?” Polman insists that conscience compels us to consider that option.

The godfather of modern humanitarianism was a Swiss businessman named Henri Dunant, who happened, on June 24, 1859, to witness the Battle of Solferino, which pitted a Franco-Sardinian alliance against the Austrian Army in a struggle for control of Italy. Some three hundred thousand soldiers went at it that day, and Dunant was thunderstruck by the carnage of the combat. But what affected him more was the aftermath of the fight: the battlefield crawling with wounded soldiers, abandoned by their armies to languish, untended, in their gore and agony. Dunant helped organize local civilians to rescue, feed, bathe, and bandage the survivors. But the great good will of those who volunteered their aid could not make up for their incapacity and incompetence. Dunant returned to Switzerland brooding on the need to establish a standing, professionalized service for the provision of humanitarian relief. Before long, he founded the Red Cross, on three bedrock principles: impartiality, neutrality, and independence. In fund-raising letters, he described his scheme as both Christian and a good deal for countries going to war. “By reducing the number of cripples,” he wrote, “a saving would be effected in the expenses of a Government which has to provide pensions for disabled soldiers.”

Humanitarianism also had a godmother, as Linda Polman reminds us. She was Florence Nightingale, and she rejected the idea of the Red Cross from the outset. “I think its views most absurd just such as would originate in a little state like Geneva, which can never see war,” she said. Nightingale had served as a nurse in British military hospitals during the Crimean War, where nightmarish conditions—septic, sordid, and brutal—more often than not amounted to a death sentence for wounded soldiers of the Crown. So she was outraged by Dunant’s pitch. How could anyone who sought to reduce human suffering want to make war less costly? By easing the burden on war ministries, Nightingale argued, volunteer efforts could simply make waging war more attractive, and more probable.

It might appear that Dunant won the argument. His principles of unconditional humanitarianism got enshrined in the Geneva Conventions, earned him the first Nobel Peace Prize, and have stood as the industry standard ever since. But Dunant’s legacy has hardly made war less cruel. As humanitarian action has proliferated in the century since his death, so has the agony it is supposed to alleviate. When Dunant contemplated the horrors of Solferino, nearly all of the casualties were soldiers; today, the U.N. estimates that ninety per cent of war’s casualties are civilians. And Polman has come back from fifteen years of reporting in the places where aid workers ply their trade to tell us that Nightingale was right.

The scenes of suffering that we tend to call humanitarian crises are almost always symptoms of political circumstances, and there’s no apolitical way of responding to them—no way to act without having a political effect. At the very least, the role of the officially neutral, apolitical aid worker in most contemporary conflicts is, as Nightingale forewarned, that of a caterer: humanitarianism relieves the warring parties of many of the burdens (administrative and financial) of waging war, diminishing the demands of governing while fighting, cutting the cost of sustaining casualties, and supplying the food, medicine, and logistical support that keep armies going. At its worst—as the Red Cross demonstrated during the Second World War, when the organization offered its services at Nazi death camps, while maintaining absolute confidentiality about the atrocities it was privy to—impartiality in the face of atrocity can be indistinguishable from complicity.

“The Crisis Caravan” is the latest addition to a groaning shelf of books from the past fifteen years that examine the humanitarian-aid industry and its discontent. Polman leans heavily on the seminal critiques advanced in Alex de Waal’s “Famine Crimes” and Michael Maren’s “The Road to Hell”; on Fiona Terry’s mixture of lament and apologia for the misuse of aid, “Condemned to Repeat?”; and on David Rieff’s pessimistic meditation on humanitarian idealism, “A Bed for the Night.” All these authors are veteran aid workers, or, in Rieff’s case, a longtime humanitarian fellow-traveller. Polman carries no such baggage. She cannot be called disillusioned. In an earlier book, “We Did Nothing,” she offered a prosecutorial sketch of the pathetic record of U.N. peacekeeping missions. Then, as now, her method was less that of investigative reporting than the cumulative anecdotalism of travelogue pointed by polemic. Her style is brusque, hardboiled, with a satirist’s taste for gallows humor. Her basic stance is: J’accuse.

Polman takes aim at everything from the mixture of world-weary cynicism and entitled self-righteousness by which aid workers insulate themselves from their surroundings to the deeper decadence of a humanitarianism that paid war taxes of anywhere from fifteen per cent of the value of the aid it delivered (in Charles Taylor’s Liberia) to eighty per cent (on the turf of some Somali warlords), or that effectively provided the logistical infrastructure for ethnic cleansing (in Bosnia). She does not spare her colleagues in the press, either, describing how reporters are exploited by aid agencies to amplify crises in ways that boost fund-raising, and to present stories of suffering without political or historical context.

Journalists too often depend on aid workers—for transportation, lodging, food, and companionship as well as information—and Polman worries that they come away with a distorted view of natives as people who merely suffer or inflict suffering, and of white humanitarians as their only hope. Most damningly, she writes: “Confronted with humanitarian disasters, journalists who usually like to present themselves as objective outsiders suddenly become the disciples of aid workers. They accept uncritically the humanitarian aid agencies’ claims to neutrality, elevating the trustworthiness and expertise of aid workers above journalistic skepticism.”

Maren and de Waal expose more thoroughly the ignoble economies that aid feeds off and creates: the competition for contracts, even for projects that everyone knows are ill-considered, the ways in which aid upends local markets for goods and services, fortifying war-makers and creating entirely new crises for their victims. Worst of all, de Waal argues, emergency aid weakens recipient governments, eroding their accountability and undermining their legitimacy. Polman works in a more populist vein. She is less patient in building her case—at times slapdash, at times flippant. But she is no less biting, and what she finds most galling about the humanitarian order is that it is accountable to no one. Moving from mess to mess, the aid workers in their white Land Cruisers manage to take credit without accepting blame, as though humanitarianism were its own alibi.

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Since Biafra, humanitarianism has become the idea, and the practice, that dominates Western response to other people’s wars and natural disasters; of late, it has even become a dominant justification for Western war-making. Biafra was where many of the leaders of what de Waal calls the “humanitarian international” got their start, and the Biafra airlift provided the industry with its founding legend, “an unsurpassed effort in terms of logistical achievement and sheer physical courage,” de Waal writes. It is remembered as it was lived, as a cause célèbre—John Lennon and Jean-Paul Sartre both raised their fists for the Biafrans—and the food the West sent certainly did save lives. Yet a moral assessment of the Biafra operation is far from clear-cut.

After the secessionist government was finally forced to surrender and rejoin Nigeria, in 1970, the predicted genocidal massacres never materialized. Had it not been for the West’s charity, the Nigerian civil war surely would have ended much sooner. Against the lives that the airlifted aid saved must be weighed all those lives—tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands—that were lost to the extra year and a half of destruction. But the newborn humanitarian international hardly stopped to reflect on this fact. New crises beckoned—most immediately, in Bangladesh—and who can know in advance whether saving lives will cost even more lives? The crisis caravan rolled on. Its mood was triumphalist, and to a large degree it remains so.

Michael Maren stumbled into the aid industry in the nineteen-seventies by way of the Peace Corps. “In the post-Vietnam world, the Peace Corps offered us an opportunity to forge a different kind of relationship with the Third World, one based on respect,” he writes. But he soon began to wonder how respectful it is to send Western kids to tell the elders of ancient agrarian cultures how to feed themselves better. As he watched professional humanitarians chasing contracts to implement policies whose harm they plainly saw, he came to regard his colleagues as a new breed of mercenaries: soldiers of misfortune. Yet, David Rieff notes, “for better or worse, by the late 1980s humanitarianism had become the last coherent saving ideal.”

How is it that humanitarians so readily deflect accountability for the negative consequences of their actions? “Humanitarianism flourishes as an ethical response to emergencies not just because bad things happen in the world, but also because many people have lost faith in both economic development and political struggle as ways of trying to improve the human lot,” the social scientist Craig Calhoun observes in his contribution to a new volume of essays, “Contemporary States of Emergency,” edited by Didier Fassin and Mariella Pandolfi (Zone; $36.95). “Humanitarianism appeals to many who seek morally pure and immediately good ways of responding to suffering in the world.” Or, as the Harvard law professor David Kennedy writes in “The Dark Sides of Virtue” (2004), “Humanitarianism tempts us to hubris, to an idolatry about our intentions and routines, to the conviction that we know more than we do about what justice can be.”

Maren, who came to regard humanitarianism as every bit as damaging to its subjects as colonialism, and vastly more dishonest, takes a dimmer view: that we do not really care about those to whom we send aid, that our focus is our own virtue. He quotes these lines of the Somali poet Ali Dhux:

A man tries hard to help you find your lost camels.

He works more tirelessly than even you,

But in truth he does not want you to find them, ever.

In May of 1996, in the hill town of Kitchanga in the North Kivu province of eastern Congo (then still called Zaire), I spent a night in a dank schoolroom that had been temporarily set up as an operating room by surgeons from the Dutch section of Médecins Sans Frontières. A few days earlier, a gang from the U.N.-sponsored refugee camps for Rwandan Hutus—camps that were controlled by the killers, physically, politically, economically—had massacred a group of Congolese Tutsis at a nearby monastery. Members of the M.S.F. team had been patching up some of the survivors. A man with a gaping gunshot wound writhed beneath the forceps of a Belarusian doctor, chanting quietly—“Ay, yay, yay, yay, yay, yay”—before crying out in Swahili, “Too much sorrow.”

Everyone knew that the Hutu génocidaires bullied and extorted aid workers, and filled their war chests with taxes collected on aid rations. Everybody knew, too, that these killers were now working their way into the surrounding Congolese territory to slaughter and drive out the local Tutsi population. (During my visit, they had even begun attacking N.G.O. vehicles.) In the literature of aid work, the U.N. border camps set up after the Rwandan genocide, and particularly the Goma camps, figure as the ultimate example of corrupted humanitarianism—of humanitarianism in the service of extreme inhumanity. It could only end badly, bloodily. That there would be another war because of the camps was obvious long before the war came.

Aid workers were afraid, and demoralized, and without faith in their work. In the early months of the crisis, in 1994, several leading aid agencies had withdrawn from the camps to protest being made the accomplices of génocidaires. But other organizations rushed to take over their contracts, and those who remained spoke of their mission as if it had been inscribed in stone at Mt. Sinai. They could not, they said, abandon the people in the camps. Of course, that’s exactly what the humanitarians did when the war came: they fled as the Rwandan Army swept in and drove the great mass of people in the camps home to Rwanda. Then the Army pursued those who remained, fighters and noncombatants, as they fled west across Congo. Tens of thousands were killed, massacres were reported—and this slaughter was the ultimate price of the camps, a price that is still being paid today by the Congolese people, who chafed under serial Rwandan occupations of their country, and continue now to be preyed upon by remnant Hutu Power forces.

Sadako Ogata, who ran the U.N. refugee agency in those years, and was responsible for all the camps in Congo, wrote her own self-exculpating book, “The Turbulent Decade,” in which she repeatedly falls back on the truism “There are no humanitarian solutions to humanitarian problems.” She means that the solution must be political, but, coming from Ogata, this mantra also clearly means: no holding humanitarianism accountable for its consequences. One of Ogata’s top officers at the time said so more directly, when he summed up the humanitarian experience of the Hutu Power-controlled border camps and their aftermath with the extraordinary Nixonian formulation “Yes, mistakes were made, but we are not responsible.”

It is a wonder that the U.N. refugee chiefs’ spin escaped Linda Polman’s notice: it’s the sort of nonsense that gets her writerly pulse up. But Polman does effectively answer them. “As far as I’m aware,” she remarks, “no aid worker or aid organization has ever been dragged before the courts for failures or mistakes, let alone for complicity in crimes committed by rebels and regimes.”

Aid organizations and their workers are entirely self-policing, which means that when it comes to the political consequences of their actions they are simply not policed. When a mission ends in catastrophe, they write their own evaluations. And if there are investigations of the crimes that follow on their aid, the humanitarians get airbrushed out of the story. Polman’s suggestion that it should not be so is particularly timely just now, as a new U.N. report on atrocities in the Congo between 1993 and 2003 has revived the question of responsibility for the bloody aftermath of the camps. There can be no proper accounting of such a history as long as humanitarians continue to enjoy total impunity.

During my night at the schoolroom surgery in Kitchanga, the doctors told me about a teen-age boy who had been found naked except for a banana leaf, which he had plastered over the back of his head and shoulders. When the leaf fell away, the doctors saw that the boy’s neck had been chopped through to the bone. His head hung off to the side. I saw the boy in the morning. He was walking gingerly around the schoolyard. The doctors had reassembled him and stitched him back together. And he was not the only one they had saved. This was the humanitarian ideal in practice—pure and unambiguous. Such immense “small mercies” are to be found everywhere that humanitarians go, even at the scenes of their most disastrous interventions. What could be better than restoring a life like that? The sight of that sewed-up boy was as moving as the abuses of the humanitarian international were offensive. Then, later that day, the doctors I was travelling with told me that, to insure their own safety while they worked, they had to prove their neutrality by tending to génocidaires as well as to their victims. And I wondered: If these humanitarians weren’t here, would that boy have needed them? ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 11, 2010, issue.

Philip Gourevitch has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker since 1995 and a staff writer since 1997.