Albert Bourla Wants to Give Us More

     Albert Bourla, CEO of Pfizer, net worth 37 million dollars, said "a fourth dose [of vaccine] may be necessary" due to the Omicron Variant of Covid-19, a Variant producing in most cases cold-like symptoms, but (fear response!), an Omicron cold.  Some news outlets, like CNBC, remind us that just because Omicron presents mildly compared to previous Variants, we shouldn't be complacent.  

     Maintain your fear level, people.  We're two years into this pandemic, we've got to keep people freaked about it, especially since it's now like a cold.  I know that a stuffed nose makes me want to die, it's worse than shingles.

     Kidding aside, it should be obvious at least to some that a man who runs a corporation (Pfizer) with its hooks in news media and governments has a special interest in promoting his company's product (the vaccine given to me and millions of others) which has earned his organization 33 billion dollars in 2021.  Bourla allowed himself to go on camera and say we may need a fourth dose but he has no embarrassment in doing so because he represents a corporation more powerful than many third world nations.  

     The Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers make about 1,000 dollars per second, or about 8.6 million dollars per day.  All of that money for "leaky" vaccines.  A leaky vaccine is one that doesn't do the job, like the polio vaccine did.  Covid vaccines fit the model of planned obsolescence: their failure, or wearing off, ensures repeated doses, i.e., profits, like when bombs and missiles made by Raytheon explode, smashing people and buildings, their expensive replacements are needed for the war machine.  

     Some may believe by this point in this essay that I'm an anti-vaxxer.  I'm not.  However, when I got vaccinated in April and May with Bourla's Brew I was under the impression, like millions of others, that it wouldn't be wearing off anytime soon.  Six months is pathetic for coverage.  Now I'm told the third shot (the "booster") is necessary to cover what they should call the leaky failure of the first two shots.  Bourla now, like the Pfizer-influenced government of Israel, speaks of the necessity of a fourth shot, not mentioning the fuck-ton of money coming his company's way from such a shot.  When this gets mandated by governments I have to wonder (because I question authority figures with conflicts of interest) if these governments are sharing the same bed with pharmaceutical giants, responding agreeably to their lobbying, as my government of the U.S. appears to be doing whenever officials and news media pundits speak of the necessity for vaccine mandates.

     We're never encouraged by mainstream news media and politicians to wonder why all these oppressive measures are being taken.  Whether the virus was loosed upon humanity and uncounted animals on purpose or not, reaction to it from governments has caused a planet-wide wave of oppression and assaults on civil and human rights approved of by some of the population.  Billionaire class predators have further increased their wealth vastly while hundreds of millions of people worldwide have become poorer.

     Pfizer has gone to great lengths to conceal their vaccine-related documents, hiding reports on their testing trials (we now know from a Pfizer ex-employee whistleblower who participated in the trials).  The secrecy may be partially attributable to not wanting other vaccine developing corporations to know Pfizer's brewing secrets.  Even so, they're also hiding things.  They've been forced to release some documents--they said they could put out 500 pages per month.  Since the Covid vaccine-related archive contains more pages than a J.K. Rowling fiction series, at the 500 page rate it will take seventy-five years until the last batch of documents is released.  

     Pfizer spokespersons said their documents processing department employs only ten people, and one of them is new at the job.  I'm not making that up.  That is what they claim.

     Wow, the Pfizer Nine, plus the fresh employee who empties the shredded paper bins.  Pfizer can't afford to hire more employees in the documents department, or, of course, they're hiding information about their immoral activities.  They still want to sell us other drugs.  Our sicknesses of all kinds are good business for them.  68,630 opioid deaths in 2020, 840,000 from 1999 to 2019.  The pharmaceutical industry's murder rate approaches Pol Pot's.  Profit from drugs people in pain get addicted to.  Create vaccines susceptible to imperfection (to be polite-sounding) so that more are needed, catering to those addicted to security.

     I'm just asking questions and pondering.  Is that something we're not supposed to do in a country where free speech is supposedly so valued?  Do I trust an obviously compromised man, Bourla, who says we need a fourth dose, especially when many virologists (including Dr. Robert Malone, himself much maligned by mainstream news, sponsored by Pfizer, go figure) say that continuing to give out these doses of vaccine can weaken immune systems, making it more likely one is susceptible to catching Covid-19 in whatever variant.  

     "I NEED ANOTHER VACCINE!"

     For a year and a half I lived in fear of Covid-19, until I began to realize it's the people making money off of it we should be more concerned about.  This may seem a trivial example but Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Democrat, New York), caught heat for her recent Florida vacation.  She has family there so her destination isn't surprising, but pictures of her came out among large groups of unmasked people, she herself

     AOC doesn't' seem to be concerned about the pandemic, the Omicron Variant at least.  She came down with Omicron soon after her Florida vacation.

     The handling of Covid-19 in most of the world has been a chapter in the ongoing saga of rich motherfuckers abusing, brutalizing and taking advantage of the poor and middle class as well as everyone else trusting and gullible enough to believe a narrative of fiction mixed with facts.

     As 9/11 resulted in a power grab, so has Covid-19, just as the Capitol protest of January 6, 2021, resulted in elevating the Capitol Police (a body that failed to protect the Capitol) into a national agency with offices in every state, a boost to authoritarianism that AOC voted for.

Vic Neptune 

          

 

     

Door to Door Sales

     While preparing dinner this evening, I saw a man walk by my kitchen window followed by a woman.  He smiled and waved at me.  I thought they might be guests of my upstairs neighbor and continued cutting chicken.  A knock on the back door accompanied my remembrance that my neighbor wasn't home, so I went to the back hallway shared with my neighbor to answer the door.  

     "Good evening!" the man said, cheerful in the windy frigid weather.  "We knocked on your front door but you didn't answer!"

     I nodded, spotting an electronic device in the man's hand with the corporate word Spectrum printed there.  Spectrum, for my international readers, is a telecommunications company called Charter Communications, owned by Liberty Media Corporation, which owns Sirius XM and the Atlanta Braves baseball team, among other collections of human beings, buildings, and tiny connections similar to, if not exactly the same as, the world of the movie Tron.

     I had a meal to make, it was 6:30, I was getting hungry, rice was cooking.  The man gave me his first name, introduced the woman.  They both smiled, cheerful in the wind though it was cold as a motherfucker.

     He began his spiel: turns out I let my Spectrum subscription lapse.  More than 200 cable channels, great internet speed, an excellent deal all around.

     "I've never had Spectrum, ever."

     "Oh!  Well, what do you have and how much do you pay for internet?"

     "It doesn't matter, I'm not interested."

     "Okay well, have a great night!"

     "You too."

     I wondered later if, in this supposedly little-train-engine-that-could economy of ours, this couple, a husband and wife team perhaps, had done something else with their lives as recently as a year ago.  Struggling to pay off a mortgage, cope with daily expenses, help out their struggling young adult children, they grabbed a job, any job, maybe even a second job, hucksters for Spectrum, a telecom providing its customers with the freedom to press the channel changing button on their remotes more than 200 times before cycling back to the beginning of more channels hardly worth watching.

     I don't know, it's just a thought.  In the summer of 2020, that same back door got knocked on by a middle-aged man offering to do garden and lawn care work.  I don't have a garden and I'm the one who mows the big lawn by arrangement with my landlord, who knocks some dollars off of my rent in return.

     The gig economy.  People who would do anything but drive for Uber, for instance, except that a cold steel shaft has punctured their American dream while business-oriented publications and news networks (like those to be viewed via a Spectrum subscription) insist that the economy may be faltering a bit, but really it's nothing to worry about; we're in good hands.  Competent bankers, the Federal Reserve, Joe Biden's brain, Goldman Sachs, are all looking out for us, and if need be, a war over Ukraine will help boost the arms industry, and don't forget the profits of Big Pharma from their maculate Covid vaccines.

     Everything is fine, don't worry, the couple walking door to door in the dark, schlepping Spectrum in two degree Fahrenheit wind chill couldn't possibly want to do something else with their time.

     Meanwhile, Kamala Harris's poll numbers are even lower than Biden's 33%.  Nancy Pelosi, an eighty-one year old hag who has just announced she's running for re-election, insists that everything she and her Democratic colleagues do is "for the children."  Flint's drinking water problem persists, the criminals who caused that catastrophe have gotten away with it, lead-poisoned children there do not feel Pelosi's care for them.  She and her husband regularly and brazenly engage in insider trading, nobody on Capitol Hill gives a shit because many others in that profession do the same.  The Democrats haven't done anything for the American people since winning big in 2020, but they will lose to the Republicans in 2022.  The Republicans will, I hope, go after Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins of the NIH for their underhandedness in covering up the true circumstances of the Covid-19 disaster.  

     The news media circus will continue, however, as Trump remains in the spotlight to boost ratings that sagged after he flew away from Washington.  It's said by many he'll run for president in 2023 and 2024.  He'll defeat Biden, probably, because the current president sucks so hard at his job.  In my lifetime I've watched one shitty president after another--they just get worse and worse.

     Corporate America runs this country, that's the problem.  The only way to make America great--in a humane sense--is to put a stop to that.  I have no idea how.  But keep speaking out.  

     The first word of such a revolution is NO.

Vic Neptune  

     

     

Joan of Arc, Tom Robbins, Vlad the Impaler, Details and Eternity

      The indentations left from paperclips, usually in the upper left corners of the sheets.  Round confetti from hole punchers.  Rows of staples stuck together inside their box, waiting for use.  Tom Robbins making characters out of cigarette packages and spoons.  Fairy tale postmodernism.  Is it crap or is it good?

     Was a time when this writer, Vic Neptune, went by another name.  He'd see, on several occasions, parked cars crammed with clothes, empty bags, full ashtrays, beaded necklaces, and the inevitable Tom Robbins trade paperback novel.  A sight for my walking eyes in the first half of the 1990s.  Some Generation X women affected or lived deeply an "alternative" lifestyle, listening to "alternative" music (the Lemonheads were hardly radical, but oh well), "crashing" on friends' and acquaintances' or just-met-you couches, car serving as transportation and clothes closet.

     I saw the Robbins novel, Another Roadside Attraction on top of folded laundry in a plastic basket on the backseat of a Chevy Beretta.  I saw Still Life With Woodpecker amid a scattering of CD cases on the passenger seat of a Chevy Cavalier that had a Grateful Dead sticker on the rear window.

     My mother, born in 1924, read Skinny Legs and All for her book club.  She enjoyed its fairy tale qualities with characters based on inanimate objects, similar to an old cartoon from her 1930s film-watching.

     Robbins, interviewed by telephone, said he was lying in bed with the radio on, waiting to hear the number 23 uttered or sung before he would get up.  Gus Van Sant adapted his novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, with River and Joaquin Phoenix's sister, Rain, who proved that not all of the Phoenix children can act.  Van Sant showed with this movie how even a good director can make a turkey.  Alfred Hitchcock made the great film Strangers on a Train but also the mind-numbingly boring The Paradine Case, a courtroom drama managing to make even Alida Valli uninteresting to watch, with Gregory Peck doing a lawyerly Atticus Finch except we care about Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, if not the racist Atticus from Harper Lee's posthumous somewhat "controversial" novel, Go Set a Watchman.

     I see knickknacks on my desk now that could be characters.

     The yellow marble pigeon figurine from Mexico, the beak broken off when I dropped it on a hard floor.  An old shoelace.  A Winnie the Pooh in yellow plastic, a green Piglet, both from an early 1970s cereal box.  A copy of The Hamlet by William Faulkner on my desk because last night I wanted to grab a random quote but didn't get around to it.  Sometimes a book used for this purpose will sit on my desk for months, moved around or just occupying one spot, dust lines forming around its edges.  The Hamlet is next to The Ticket That Exploded by William S. Burroughs, quoted in the post dated September 18, 2021, please read it if you haven't.  Read all the others too if you haven't, please.  Recommend them to friends.

     A collection of Robert Louis Stevenson short stories supports the Burroughs trade paperback.  19th Century adventure and intrigue, Jekyll and Hyde, The Body Snatcher underneath Burroughs' experimentalism, and why not?  Burroughs was born in St. Louis, home of the St. Louis Arch.  The city was named after Louis the Ninth of France, son of Blanche of Castile, the king who died on crusade, in Tunisia of all places.  The Arch represents an arc connecting east and west, but also a steel rainbow, like railroad tracks, commercial interconnections, the interruption of migratory patterns of hoofed animals that  provided the main food supply of Plains Indians, thus, the St. Louis Arch is a metallic slam against Native Americans made to live on reservations now threatened by oil exploration approved of by the Biden administration.

     Run-on sentences must be avoided, my high school English Honors teacher said.  The above paragraph might've been marked by her with red Sharpie, accompanied by explanations of my errors in black ink.

     "I expect more from you," she once wrote about my mediocre essay on Oedipus Rex.

     I could've simply written: "Oedipus killed his father, fucked his mother, when he found out the truth he blinded himself.  Tragic."

     Even in high school, the problem was my brain spills out through my fingers; I feel a need to acknowledge these thoughts (in first draft, anyway) read by strangers in the United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, Australia, Bolivia, Portugal, Singapore, Vietnam, and all other nations at one time or another.  I aim to be interesting, but I also try to not let my mad way of expressing thoughts become incoherent, like the late essays of Ulrike Meinhof, a leftist commentator turned terror group member (Baader-Meinhof) whose work for the first several years of her career as a journalist formed a cogent anti-capitalist argument, but gave way to rants seeming to resemble piles of pulled out uncombed hair.

     Meinhof's political dedication, I suggest, warped her sense of reality.  A story goes that when she lived in Hamburg, well into her radicalization, she refused to decorate her apartment with lamp shades.  Naked bulbs made her rooms glow with blaring light because lamp shades are "bourgeois."  She voluntarily had in her apartment the kind of light one finds in basements, or in the prison where she committed suicide (if she committed suicide).

     I mention small things like indentations from paperclips because I'm a filmmaker (YouTube channel John Berner, watch them please) but also I notice the little objects in a room, in a scene, a shot, arrangements of objects and how they form relationships depending on the composition.

     There are many ways to film Dracula, based on the Bram Stoker novel from 1897, but first one must confront the novel's epistolary format.  Written as letters and diaries, the story isn't presented directly, but as memory, and subjective memories at that.  Dracula's subjective viewpoint isn't presented--he's the Other.  A former man who drinks blood, shape shifts into a wolf, sleeps in a coffin during the day, doesn't drink wine, can't be seen reflected in a mirror, so does that mean his reverse image is invisible?  What is the nature of Dracula's Shadow?  Is that Shadow timid?  Imbued with a sense of unworthiness, like a slave or captive of the past, the 15th century when the real Prince Vlad Dracul breathed the same planetary atmosphere as King Edward the Fourth of England?

     Did Dracul venture to England long before coming to live in Carfax Abbey?  Did he have a summit with Edward IV?  Did he donate to the Yorkist Cause, the Red Rose, the more appealing color, to Dracula, than the White Lancastrian Rose?

     In the 15th Century, in Britain, two aristocratic factions duked it out for thirty odd years, Wars of the Roses so-called, the White Rose representing the Royalist faction "led" at first by allegedly feeble-minded, definitely mentally ill King Henry VI of England and France, by condition of the Treaty of Troyes in 1420, whereby also mentally ill King Charles VI (Henry's maternal grandfather) disinherited his son Charles (of later Joan of Arc-related fame) in favor of whatever issue may come from the marriage of marauding King Henry V and Princess Catherine, Charles's daughter.

     Henry as a baby became King of France and King of England, with elder relatives running the government.  A crown the size of a halved coconut, I guess, was used to crown the infant.  

     Little Henry, about the age of ten, witnessed the burning to death of Joan of Arc.  Did this traumatize him?  Were sensibilities and stomachs a bit different then?  

     His father, the fifth King Henry, whom the child didn't really know (the elder Henry died in 1422), watched horrific executions as a teenager, sitting next to his father, Henry IV.  Creativity with names didn't exist with aristocrats then or with commoners for that matter.  I have an early seventeenth century Norwegian ancestor named Engebret Engebretsen.  

     The smell of cooking human flesh probably didn't faze Henry the boy King.  At ten did he understand the underlying reason why the English wanted Joan dead?  She was mainly a threat to them due to her "Voices."  Throughout her trial there seems to have been a mounting desperation to hear her confess her Voices, rather than God's messengers (St. Michael and St. Catherine), were actually from the Devil.  The English needed Joan of Arc to be wrong, or rather, a messenger (unwitting perhaps) of demonic power.  If God supported Joan, God supported the French in a war that had been going on since 1337.  Now, at the trial in 1431, Joan must confess her guidance by the Deceiver, otherwise, God must oppose England and that can't fucking be.

     Joan, though she recanted, changed her mind, an act sending her to the stake prepared for her outside Rouen Cathedral.

     Vlad Tepes, the man who gave his history to the Dracula fictional legend, came along after Joan, but he lived during the Wars of the Roses in Wallachia (some of modern Romania), concerned mostly with containing the Turks.  From them he learned impalement.

     Impalement: a wooden stake pounded into the ground and then sharpened provides the "chair" for the condemned.  Naked, the victim is lowered via the anus onto the stake, down and down until the victim has a shaft of wood thrust up inside his or her body, the torture technicians careful not to pierce vital organs which may lead to a quick death.  Feet hanging near the ground, the victim may last days.  They can be heard begging for mercy from passersby to kill them, something not done, probably, because a citizen of Draculaland doesn't go against the wishes of the Count, or Prince in this case.

     Why people carry out such punishments (as well as modern torture-death punishments) is one reason we haven't been let back into Eden.

     The burning of Joan, the impalement of Vlad's victims, the probable creation of Covid-19 in a lab...these events and diseases, wars and wanderings of peoples fleeing strife, civil wars and the more gentle arts of life, exist as actual moments gone or recounted, lived in now to be remembered later, but also forgotten.  A person's experience is always genuine.  Whether it's understood, or believed, or sympathized with, is usually an unreliable thing to count on.  Many people, including those with entries of their own in encyclopedias, saw Joan of Arc burn.

     A citizen of the U.S. or Mexico, or Singapore, or wherever else, dying of some ailment also feels a special drama deeply gripping to their lives and those around them, just as Vlad's impaled were up against a great question mark so tantalizingly close but far enough away in a subjective time caused by pain, that the eternity of their last moments, suspended inches above the ground provided to them Forever-on-a-stick, the material object holding them to Earth, even as the wood flaming below Joan smoked and ashed her body, while leaving behind (reportedly) her heart.

     A Tom Robbins vampire novel is needed, but the time when young women had his books showing in their cars is gone, like the smoke of their cigarettes.

     

Vic Neptune