In the early days of the 20th century, a spooky, spindly object appeared in the daytime Ohio skies. As the object glided a short height above a field in Dayton, the general manager of the rail line and his chief engineer ordered the conductor to stop the train while they and all the passengers on board watched in stunned amazement.
Piloting the strange craft – one of the world’s first flying machines – was a man named Orville Wright.
Two young bicycle mechanic brothers from Ohio had successfully piloted heavier-than-air flying machines for increasingly longer distances. Writes Richard Milton in his book Alternative Science: “But despite scores of public demonstrations, affidavits from local dignitaries and photographs of themselves flying, the claims of Wilbur and Orville Wright were derided and dismissed as a hoax by Scientific American, the New York Herald, the US army and most American scientists.”
It’s especially odd considering that Dayton bank president Torrance Huffman had allowed the brothers to use a large tract of farmland he owned for conducting their experiments. A main road and a rail line bordered the land and their flying experiments had allegedly been witnessed for years by hundreds, if not thousands, of people.
With the respected scientist Simon Newcombe deeming heavier-than-air flight impossible, the scientific elite thought it unnecessary to investigate eyewitness reports. As did the local press. Writing in August 1955, reporter Fred C. Kelly relates speaking to Dan Kumler, “who was city editor of James M. Cox's Daily News in Dayton during those early years of flying.”
"People who had been on interurban cars and seen the Wrights flying used to come to the office," Kumler recalled, "to inquire why there was nothing in the paper about the flights. Such callers got to be a nuisance."
"And why wasn't there anything in the paper?" I asked.
"We just didn't believe it," he said. "Of course you remember that the Wrights at that time were terribly secretive."
"You mean they were secretive about the fact that they were flying, over an open field?"
"I guess," said Kumler, grinning, after a moment's reflection, "the truth is that we were just plain dumb."
In 1906 an article appeared in the New York Times acknowledging the reality of the Wright’s flying machine. The brothers were able to prove their claims with finality, with the army and scientific press accepting heavier-than-air flight as a reality.
With its variance between eyewitness testimony and official truth, this fable seems a good historical lesson about the blinkered absolutism of “experts” and the social construction of reality.
I suppose you already have an inkling of where I’m going with this.
Scary monsters and super creepy content providors
Last Halloween night I did a tour with friends of the neighborhood’s spooky lawn displays - some of them quite impressive. As little ghouls, goblins, spooks and spectres pinballed from house to house, I spoke with some of the display makers, renters and owners alike. There was conversation, laughter, drinks, and hardly a face mask in sight - just the old-fashioned Halloween variety.
It was heartening that locals weren’t fearing one another as potential bioterrorists. Unlike Halloween two years ago, when people constructed slides on their steps and bannisters to fire candy into the bags of waiting kids. That was back when we were told the stealthy COVID virus could survive for days on paper, cardboard and other surfaces. Remember that?
It was a lie, of course. A lie in the sense there was no scientific repeatability for this claim - just the opposite - and yet the lie, like so many other peddled COVID lies, continued to linger on in the imaginations of the fearful for months after, leveraged by a media that refused to perform some elementary fact checking, preferring revenue-friendly, fear-based clickbait fronted by horror film headlines.
Nearly three years into this global psy-op, the narrative is collapsing faster than athletes with myocarditis. Yet once one media lie appears to be dead and buried, another erupts from a neighbouring grave to spook the living all over again, whether about the health benefits of masking, plexiglass barriers, the “dangers” from ivermectin and other early treatments, the “safe and effective” COVID vaccines, the risk from exposure to the unvaccinated, or the risk from COVID itself.
And that’s even after the revelations of the Pfizer data dumps (documents which the company wanted sealed for 75 years), the global rise in all-cause excess mortality (people across all age groups inexplicably dropping dead in a statistically bizarre way), and the documented evidence of funding for gain of function COVID virus research at the Wuhan lab through a Tony Fauci bureaucratic ratline.
Oh, I could put up plenty of links for all the above statements. All the citations from government health data, FOIA documents, and scientific journals. Yet the ones who already know don’t need to read this and the ones who don’t, won’t. It’s damn unlikely anyone still clinging to the wreckage of the media master narrative would get this far down the page of a relatively obscure Substack writer.
The hardcore Covidians, who represent somewhere between 25 to to 35 percent of the population, won’t look - even if it’s in front of their faces. And some will respond to the efforts to alert them with hostility. (And I have to remind myself that these most of these folks have been tricked and traumatized, and in no position to rethink their positions on gene therapy they’ve already submitted themselves and their children to).
Data won’t reach those in the grip of ideology. I prefer to think - probably mistakenly - that some might have their cognitive dissonance tweaked by satire, though!
It’s all reminiscent of the rumoured flying machine of the Wright Brothers a century earlier. Any over-educated fool of the time knew that heavier-than-air flight was impossible. And all those who claimed to have witnessed some guy riding an airborne jalopy? Most likely liars, confabulists and superstitious attention seekers.
Then as now, trust The Science™ and don’t look up.
Amnesty?
That said, there are signs that the professional class - the doctors, journalists, and policy wonks who signed off and vectored the mass harms into the population - are getting increasingly edgy about possible retribution. Brown University economics professor Emily Oster recently penned a piece for The Atlantic entitled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty,” arguing we need to forgive, forget, and move on.
There’s been plenty of sharp and spirited reaction to this on Substack and elsewhere, so no need for me to reinvent the spiel. Suffice it to say that while Oster questions the wisdom of school lockdowns and masking, she resolutely avoids the sticky problem of vaccine adverse events and deaths, and the global rise in all-cause excess mortality.
It’s the kind of journalism that gives disengenousness a bad name. Professing to respect data, Oster peddles a thesis is that “we didn’t know,” which is utter bullshit. Early into this scam, legions of brave doctors, scientists and researchers were supplying plenty of data and advice contrary to the narrative ( e.g. The Great Barrington Declaration). And how were they thanked? With cancelling, deplatforming, and sudden career death syndrome.
And it continues. One of those early COVID Cassandras, Dr. Peter McCullough, the man with the most citations in medical journals for cardiac research, is reportedly being stripped of his credentials and professional responsibilities - for the high crime of speaking out.
As for Oster, is she sincerely blinkered or performing a limited hangout striptease? Who cares! She’s already been given more bandwidth online than she deserves. Either way, her piece seems less a mea culpa than additional media misdirection from one of the worst of the COVID-era offenders, The Atlantic.
Forgiveness is all well and good, but not at the price of accountability.
Breaking Open the Head
We have in our hands immensely powerful tools of communication, understanding, and distraction. In the midst of this information overload, we can be selective and see only what we want to see, while thinking thoughts we identify as our own.
Have we also lost something even more in our Faustian bargain of abstracted hyperconnection? Some capacities of intuition and perception, perhaps? In Myth and Meaning, French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote of his initial shock when he discovered that “a particular tribe” of South American aboriginals could look up and see the planet Venus in full daylight with the naked eye. He describes this as “something that to me would be utterly impossible and incredible.” Yet he learned this was feasible from astronomers, given the planet Venus is the brightest magnitude ‘star’ in the sky. Levi-Strauss concluded that “today we use less and we use more of our mental capacity than we did in the past.”
Most anthropologists wouldn’t have bothered to consult star charts to check the aboriginal claims, of course. They would have thought the people were being charmingly if stubbornly folkloric. Perhaps even “seeing things,” like those non-expert savages on the trains in Dayton who witnessed a flying jalopy.
In his 2000 book Breaking Open the Head, Daniel Pinchbeck commented on Levi-Strauss’ discovery of the tribal daytime Venus sightings:
We have sacrificed perceptual capabilities for other mental abilities to concentrate on a computer screen while sitting in a cubicle for many hours at a stretch – something those Indians would find ‘utterly impossible and incredible’ – or to shut off multiple layers of awareness as we drive a car in heavy traffic. In other words, we are brought up within a system that teaches us to postpone, defer and eliminate most incoming sense data in favour of a future reward. We live in a feedback loop of perpetual postponement. For the most part, we are not even aware of what we have lost.
And in the past two years, we have lost so very, very much more. Great numbers of people haven’t clued into exactly what, although they surely feel the God-sized hole at the centre of our post-Enlightenment culture.
Yet I don’t regard the situation as hopeless. Not when I see a Georgetown professor contorting herself into a performative pretzel in the pages of a respected liberal journal, trying to rationalize two and half years of tyranny. Not when I see video clips of government lawyers flailing at the Freedom Convoy Inquiry in Ottawa. And not when I see happy adults milling around in the dark in close quarters, no longer regarding their neighbours and other children as possible vectors of plague. It gives me a fragile but optimistic sense of humanity reclaiming its birthright as a social species.
Keep looking up.
Delusion and Illusions vs facts; it seems that we're as dumb as we always were except the dumb ones rule! And they are the people we always thought were the smart ones...and they're STILL trying to put a spell on us...
Really like the piano guy well placed there in a very relevant article Geoff.