Profiles In Courage

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In new windProfiles in Courage: Vera Sharav


)When most people hear the name “Vera Sharav,” the first thing they think of is “Holocaust survivor.” But surviving the Third Reich was just the beginning of this feisty librarian’s hero’s journey.

Like many heroes, Vera’s greatness blossomed from tragedy. Born Vera Roll in Romania in 1937, she was nearly four when Romania allied with Germany in 1941. Vera and her parents wound up in the Mogilev concentration camp, where her father later died of typhus.

Speaking in a 1984 oral history interview, Vera’s mother, Mary Roll, recalled, “I couldn’t get a piece of bread, and [Vera] would cry so bitterly. Days and days, nothing in her mouth.”

Famine and disease stalked them daily. “Every morning,” Mary said, “they would bring out … loads of corpses, frozen to death, loaded like wood on these carts and transported to mass graves.”

Fearing her daughter would starve to death, Mary decided to lie. She got Vera into an international rescue mission for orphans by saying Vera was one, too.

In 1944 at the age of six-and-a-half, Vera was to set sail on the Mefküre merchant ship with sixty-one other children.

But she refused. “I was sitting there crying,” Vera remembers. “I didn’t want to go on that boat. Nothing would move me.”

Instead, she insisted on boarding the boat with the family she had befriended on the way to the harbor city, a family she trusted to take care of her.

“The voyage entailed crossing the Black Sea from Romania to Istanbul, Turkey, en route to Palestine by train along the Mediterranean,” Vera told me. “This route crossing Syria and Lebanon was only open for several weeks in 1944.”

She continued, “Between the time I was rescued from the concentration camp and the voyage to Palestine took about eight months.”

When I asked Vera where she stayed during those eight months, she recalled, “That was an odyssey—bouncing two months with one family, three months another, then three months with mother’s brother the banker, the family having converted and having a princess as friend. It’s during these months that I learned to discern people whom I could trust.”

Vera said, “For three years, I was raised by my mother’s sister and family on a family farm in Palestine. These were the happiest years of my childhood, during which I healed. After a four-year separation, I was reunited with my mother in New York in January 1948.”

Fusilladed by machine guns and cannons, the Mefküre was to sink two days later. Only 5 of the 320 refugees survived.

Vera would never forget this lesson about life-saving disobedience. “That’s where I would have been,” she notes, “had I listened to authority.”

The ultimate badass, Vera later traced her ungovernability to this experience. “I realized why sometimes I would be very stubborn—nobody, no ideology, no rationalization would change my mind.”

This fierce determination would empower Vera to transcend her devastating grief after tragedy struck again in 1994.

That is when Vera and her husband, Itzhak, learned about the cataclysmic consequences of not being given informed consent.

Their firstborn son, Ami, suffered a deadly reaction to clozapine, a purported “miracle” drug that had been prescribed for the schizo-affective disorder he’d been diagnosed with as a teenager several years prior.

When Vera reported Ami’s symptoms of weakness and difficulty walking to his psychiatrist, the psychiatrist not only failed to recognize the signature signs of neuroleptic malignant syndrome—a known potentially lethal reaction to antipsychotic drugs Vera had never been informed about—but he increased the dosage of clozapine and threw on another antidepressant.$100M Leads: How to Ge...Hormozi, AlexBest Price: $17.74Buy New $17.24(as of 06:47 UTC - Details)

Ami died three days later.

Her grief compounded by guilt, Vera lamented, “After all I had learned about not trusting authority, I trusted this doctor and pushed Ami to take the medication.”

This unfathomable loss lit a conflagration under Vera, who would go on to found the Alliance for Human Research Protection (AHRP), an organization committed to defending medical ethics from corrupting influences. Guided by the Nuremberg Code, Hippocratic Oath, and 2005 UNESCO Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights, AHRP members advocate for freedom of choice; honest disclosure; informed consent; and truth and scientific integrity.

“I tried to find the best treatment, and I wound up bumping against the obscenity of the mental health system,” Vera told Nature reporter Charlie Schmidt in 2008. “I became an outspoken critic of modern medicine, a watchdog. And to my surprise, I had no competition, and I still have no competition.”

Pouring herself into her newfound calling as a human rights activist, Vera discovered the eugenicist underbelly of biomedical research.

Vera’s peer-reviewed article Children in Clinical Research: A Conflict of Moral Values appeared in the American Journal of Bioethics in 2003. The abstract reads in part:

“This paper examines the culture, the dynamics and the financial underpinnings that determine how medical research is being conducted on children in the United States. Children have increasingly become the subject of experiments that offer them no potential direct benefit but expose them to risks of harm and pain.… Emphasis, however, is given to psychoactive drug tests because of the inherent ethical and diagnostic problems involved in the absence of any objective, verifiable diagnostic tool.”

Vera—who earned a master’s degree in library science from the Pratt Institute in New York in 1971, nearly two decades after majoring in art history at City College of New York—has written other influential peer-reviewed articles, including:

Vera spoke out against unethical research on mentally ill subjects, organizing testimonies by victims and their families at the National Bioethics Advisory Committee (NBAC) that led to the cessation of twenty-nine National Institute of Mental Health clinical trials.

She raised awareness about the suicidal tendencies triggered by antidepressants, bringing together bereaved parents to testify at FDA hearings.

Vera would later break the story about an internal GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) memo acknowledging Paxil—which GSK had admitted in 2006 increased suicidal behavior—was no better than a placebo at treating depression, leading to its 2012 conviction for federal fraud charges and a $3 billion fine.

After discovering New York Psychiatric Institute researchers had conducted unethical experiments on black and Hispanic boys using the drug fenfluramine, Vera leaked the story to reporters, leading to the 1998 New York Times article Experiments on Children Are Reviewed and the Boston Globe series Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill by Robert Whitaker.

Whitaker—who would go on to make a career out of covering medical research and pharmaceutical industry corruption, winning the George Polk Award for Medical Writing—credited Vera with setting him on that trajectory.

“It all came from Vera,” he said. “Her work brought me into this field.”

With her lifelong instruction in the hallmarks of totalitarianism, medical tyranny, and eugenics, it’s no wonder she was one of the first—if not the first—to expose the COVID propaganda and its authoritarian, democidal agenda.

Vera published Coronavirus Provides Dictators & Oligarchs with a Dream Come True on March 26, 2020—a mere thirteen days after President Trump had issued the COVID-19 Emergency Declaration.

In that article, she documents philanthropath Bill Gates’s digital surveillance aims and vaccine-profiteering scheme, quoting a Reddit AMA session where he stated, “Eventually we will have some digital certificates to show who has recovered or been tested recently or when we have a vaccine who has received it.”

Vera observes that this statement “acknowledges the intent to utilize digital technology to gain control over people’s compliance with government-dictated medical interventions—especially regarding compliance with vaccination—Bill Gates’ particular obsession.”


The Continental Reckoning

Today's selection -- from Continental Reckoning by Elliott West. The most ambitious big U.S. government project of the nineteenth century was the transcontinental railroad:

"No event in the West during these years commanded more public attention than the Pacific rail project. Journals and newspapers followed it in scores of articles, and few literary visitors resisted observing and writing about the spectacle. Its scale and visibility alone made it difficult to ignore, but it had more than that going for it. The simple fact of its being built, the particulars of how it was carried out, and imagined events and threats that in fact were not there were the ideal makings for myths around the emerging West and its meanings for a reconstructing America. 

“The most obvious theme was of western settlement as the unifying sequel to the Civil War's saving the Union. As if in relay, the Union Pacific's first rails were being laid simultaneously with the end of the war. Its most prominent field commanders came from high in the ranks in eastern campaigns. Maj. Gen. Grenville Dodge had served in Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, and Brig. Gen. Jack Casement in engagements throughout the war, eventually marching through Georgia under William T. Sherman. Sherman himself would oversee protection along the route. Descriptions of construction evoked troops in mass array. Construction teams stood ‘like the grand reserve of an army’ behind the graders, and once at work their spiking of rails sounded up close like a ‘hotly contested skirmish’ and from a distance like the ‘roar of the wonderful advance.’ 


“In 1873 the popular Croffut's Transcontinental Tourist Guide recalled that in 1860 the nation had faced being riven, not into two, but into three parts—North, South, and West. It had taken the Civil War, that ‘carnival of blood,’ to convince naysayers into building the Pacific railroad that now joined all three into one. The next year Croffut's would feature on its cover John Gast's American Progress, with its floating female figure leading the railroad westward while stringing a telegraph line. Politicians hailed the project as truly national. A ‘free and living Republic’ would spring up along rail lines as ‘surely as grass and flowers follow in the spring,’ one promised. His reference was not to Nevada or Oregon but to the former Confederacy. Railroads were called agents of both reconstruction and recommitment. They would fuse all sections into one by tapping their resources, easing the movement of their peoples, and overcoming a bloody past with a binding prosperity.

The U.S. Post Office issued a commemorative stamp in 1944, on the 75th anniversary of the first transcontinental railroad in America.


“In this, the shift in the railroad's message could not have been sharper. An especially illuminating irony of the Union Pacific is this: Credit Mobilier, the corrupt engine that drove construction of what was now celebrated as the nation's great unifier, had been born in dedication to national division. Before it was acquired and renamed by Thomas Durant and George Francis Train, it was the Pennsylvania Fiscal Agency, brainchild of Duff Green, an ardent slavery apologist from Georgia who hoped to fund lines from New Orleans through Texas and then both westward to Southern California and southwestward through Mexico to Mazatlan. His was one of many visions of a powerful bi-oceanic Southeast resting on the institution ‘intended by a wise Providence’ for any civilized order—Black slavery. 


“Now, with the Union preserved, the rhetoric of sectional dissonance gave way to one of railroads as agents of coalescence. As with the telegraph, bodily metaphors seemed irresistible. When the Pacific line was completed, Chicago celebrated with a hundred thousand persons in a seven-mile-long procession that ended with a windy oration by Vice President Schuyler Colfax. His imagery was both tangled and revealing. The nation had been literally reborn. Before the war it had been divided north-to-south but also, overall, had been a sprawling, inchoate body, what France's Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand had called ‘a giant without bones,’ In the war that body had found its strength and now, reaching westward, it had found its form. The new America lay toward the Pacific, the railroad its spine and with ‘iron ribs in every direction’ and arms reaching for the commerce of Asia.


“This vision, of the railroad embodying a renewed nation, had distinctive western colorations. First among them was virility, a West of unbridled masculine energy. Its clearest description was in the towns, ‘Hell on Wheels,’ that served as supply and recreation points. North Platte in Nebraska, Julesburg in Colorado, Benton, Laramie, Cheyenne, and Green River in Wyoming, and Bear River in Utah—some had been snoozing stage stops before being shaken awake. Others were built from nothing. All were collections of tents and flimsy plank buildings along dust-blown streets. Like other western working sites, notably mining camps and cattle towns, they were dominated by young men with spending money and glands at full throttle, on the loose from monotonous grunt work done under tight discipline. There was open, rampant vice. Visitors like Henry Morton Stanley wrote of the many hard cases, sharpers, and especially prostitutes, ‘expensive articles [who] come in for a large share of the money wasted.’ A large, revolving population of over-liquored men translated into plenty of brawling and high-decibel disorder. There were a handful of homicides and in Bear River a riot that took at least a dozen lives. Cheyenne vigilantes hanged seven men in 1867 and 1868.  


“That rough reality, however, was consistently overstressed. An eastern reporter claimed absurdly that Julesburg hosted 750 brothels and gambling houses. Samuel Bowles wrote that the towns, ‘congregation[s] of scum and wickedness,’ averaged a murder a day. Stanley agreed on the homicidal clip and noted that men walked the streets of Julesburg who had murdered for five dollars. The going rate in Cheyenne was ten, wrote a Chicago Tribune correspondent. There is nothing to back up such claims, however. The Frontier Index, a newspaper that moved with the railroad, eagerly recorded the violence it witnessed from Laramie to Green River to Bear River, yet between March and November of 1868 it noted only a single murder and three lynchings (and dozens of arrests for public drunkenness and disorderly conduct).


“Even correcting for lively exaggeration, there seems something like a compulsive inflation of mayhem and dissipation that would be repeated over and again by visitors to the new country. The towns pictured at the tip of the railroad were expressions of expansion as national machismo. It was an image that would appear and prosper in various settings, a West of hairy chests and split lips.”

Continental Reckoning The American West in the Age of Expansion
 
author: Elliott West  
title: Continental Reckoning: The American West in the Age of Expansion  
publisher: University of Nebraska Press  
date:  
page(s): 196-198

Twenty Operation Overlords and Forty Norman Invasions a Year

One if by land, two if by dinghy . . .

I guess you could call it “soft war.” Warfare without the hardware. And you’re not supposed to feel it.

Just keep your eyes on Putin in Ukraine and the IDF in Gaza. Nothing to see here in the ol’ homeland.

If you do notice, and raise an eyebrow, you are obviously a racist in a nation founded by racists. If you notice and rejoice, well, let it not be whispered that you are in fact a racist in a nation despised by its own governing majority, that seeks to tear it asunder by means of racial animus and/or cultural self-loathing.

Can it possibly be claimed that today’s America is less racist than in 1865 or 1965? Or that Great Britain is fundamentally more democratic than in the era of its most imperial kings and queens?

Are we supposed to think that a collapsing demographic of “white” citizens and a deliberate open borders policy are coincidental? That the latter isn’t designed to accelerate the former?

Or that a nation whose popular majority votes for a “Brexit” from the EU and is then steadily undermined by Remainers among its own elected representatives — that this nation governs “by the consent of the governed”?

Whatever happened to the days when invasions and ethnic cleansings came straightforwardly at the point of a spear — led by the likes of Alexander, Mehmet and Suleyman, or Hitler, and fueled by ideologies such as Jihad, Aryan supremacy, and Manifest Destiny?

Whatever happened to the days when invaders were sometimes repelled and dispatched, rather than coddled and released without bail for all but the most heinous crimes that even the complicit media can’t entirely ignore, such as the rapes and murders of women and girls who thought they still lived in a civil society — the days when the so-called Leader of the so-called Free World wouldn’t minimize these crimes by pointing out that women and girls — and boys, come to think of it — are also groomed and raped by their own relatives, teachers, and priests.

The progressive One-Worlders and Co-Existers, of course, have the answer: It is precisely to avoid those age-old bloody tribalist invasions that we are instituting the current open-door, mostly peaceful invasions. (Mostly peaceful, that is, until they arrive at your subway station or train, or at your neighborhood jogging trail or public park.) Clearly, goes their reasoning, if we eliminate tribalist nation-states — as the League of Nations, United Nations, and European Union were designed to do, if we simply DEI our populations, then the terrible wars of the past will indeed become a thing of the past, and the planet will be saved. If you don’t get it, listen to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Well, pardon me if I still don’t get it. Is being raped by “Paki” grooming gangs in the same general area of England where Hadrian’s Wall was once erected to keep out the barbarians more desirable than being a Trojan woman carted off as spoils of war by the likes of Agamemnon? Is coordinated Pro-Palestinian desecration of our campuses more enlightened than, say, Krystallnacht? Did the BLM “Summer of Love” in 2020 bring us closer to a more civilized, kinder and gentler society?

Are there social advances stemming from this assault on whiteness that I’m simply not seeing? Am I myopic? Dyslexic? Why am I getting an F in Critical Race Theory?

Sometimes I find myself wondering how Vladimir Putin — architect of a “conventional,” old-fashioned invasion — sees our world. Is it philosophical astigmatism or cataracts that cloud his perception of the virtues of a modernist, globalist, partially Islamized, de-Christianized, Green-New-Dealized, sexually “liberated,” homogenized Europe?

What could this former Communist KGB operator possibly find distasteful about a leadership class that has successfully installed Pope Francis to destroy what’s left of The Catholic Church and a Puppet President to destroy what’s left of America’s Constitutional Republic?

Whatever it is, clearly something there is in Putin’s mind that doesn’t love the New World Order. Could it be that he sees Europe more as a cultural threat to his vision of a revitalized Russian society than as a military threat standing in the way of world domination? Is he entirely disingenuous when indicating that he covets Kiev as the cradle of Christianity in Russia, which he seeks to re-embrace in the face of Western decadence?

But so much for him — it’s enough of a challenge to figure out our own leadership class.

Who are these people? Who’s waging this soft war on our traditional populations and values? Who’s funding it? — and don’t tell me that all these “caravans” moving up through South America, across the Darien Gap, and into Mexico aren’t being funded. Who’s paying for all their clean, brand-name athletic gear, food and water, and intermittent bus and truck travel? How do these desperate migrants come up with $20,000 each with which to pay the cartels that blaze their trails? Don’t tell me that there isn’t as much logistical planning for all this as there was for Operation Overlord.

It’s a shadow government, and all it needed was for the Biden Regime to open the gates. D-Day has come and gone, and now the “allied forces” from across the world are pouring over the border and into the heartland, heading for “Berlin” and opposed only by a few remaining crack regiments in a Republican Party that doesn’t fully support them. In the UK the Tory Party has been routed altogether, and in the UK there is no Donald Trump — the last remaining “field marshall” who might rally a dispirited people.

On the calendar the Fourth of July has also come and gone. Mine was happy only because Trump has not yet been fully vanquished.

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Finding Alien Earths

Today's selection-- from Alien Earths by Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger. Discovering planets in other parts of the galaxy is hard:


“The discovery of new worlds outside our solar system started with a mystery: a tiny wobble. In 1995 two Swiss astronomers, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz, whom we met earlier, detected a weird signal from the star 51 Pegasi. The star, a near twin to our own Sun, about fifty light-years away from Earth, unexpectedly wobbled back and forth on its stellar journey. And stars don't wobble for no reason. 


“Majestic Jupiter, the biggest planet in our solar system, contains the vast majority of the material left over from our Sun's creation and provided the first clues as to what afflicted 51 Pegasi. Jupiter makes our Sun wobble just a tiny bit. Jupiter is a humongous ball of swirling gas around a rocky core a dozen Earths big. This colossal gas giant, the fifth planet from the Sun, out beyond Mars, is a sight to behold: stunning patterns of storms cover the whole planet. Monstrous weather systems stir and twist the gases and paint the planet in patterns that look like van Gogh's The Starry Night. 


“If Jupiter were an empty box, all the other planets could fit into it and there'd still be room to spare. Jupiter dwarfs the Earth; you would need to put seventy Earths, one next to the other, to make a belt for Jupiter's middle (a fresh idea for a Halloween costume!). Powerful wind speeds exceeding 400 miles ( ~ 600 km) per hour create some of the largest storms in the solar system. One of them, Jupiter's Great Red Spot, has been observed for over a century—and is large enough to easily engulf Earth. Voyager 1—the spacecraft carrying the Golden Record out of the solar system-sent back the first detailed images of this gigantic storm in 1979. 


“But compared to the Sun, Jupiter is a lightweight. If Jupiter were a tablespoon of water, the Sun would be a four-gallon jug. If you had a cosmic set of scales, you would need about a thousand tablespoons of water on one side (a pile of Jupiters) to balance the Sun on the other side. In this comparison, Earth would be the size of a waterdrop. To balance the Sun on these cosmic scales, you'd need to place about three hundred thousand waterdrops (a humongous amount of Earths) on the other side. All the planets in our solar system together would make the cosmic scale tilt only a minuscule bit. The Sun is just so massive. The disk surrounding a nascent star contains only a tiny part of the material that creates the star at its center, and that disk forms all of its planets. 

“It would take about a hundred Earths to span the diameter of the Sun. To imagine this, line up one hundred peppercorns on the floor. (Pro tip: it is extremely helpful if the peppercorns are not the same color as the floor. In my first trial, I used black peppercorns on a dark floor, which, in hindsight, was not the smartest choice.) The one-hundred-peppercorn line shows the vast size of the Sun compared to our Pale Blue Dot. You would need more than one million Earths to fill the inside of the Sun ( volume is proportional to radius cubed). 

Sunset studies on Titan by Cassini help understand exoplanet atmospheres (artist's concept).


“So finding an exoplanet in the vast cosmos is extremely hard. If you wanted to find a planet circling another star, what kind would be the easiest to locate? Astronomers looked around our solar system and chose as their prototype the biggest, most massive planet to look for somewhere else: Jupiter. 


“The Sun's gravity loses some of its pull at the colossal giant planet's distance, so Jupiter does not need to travel as fast as the Earth to counter its gravitational pull. The balance between gravity and speed determines how long it takes for a planet to complete a circle around its star. While Earth does it in one year, Jupiter takes a leisurely eleven Earth years to circle the Sun. Knowing they would have a slightly easier time finding massive planets like Jupiter than finding tiny Earths, astronomers settled in for a decade-long search. 


Like the other giant planets in our solar system, Jupiter consists mostly of gas and ice because it formed far enough away from the hot Sun that ice and gas did not evaporate, leaving massive amounts of planet-building material as we have seen. It's cold beyond the ice line. Jupiter receives only one photon for every twenty-five photons Earth gets. 


“Planets are different than stars in more ways than just their size. They do not have nuclear-fusion reactors in their cores, so they do not produce energy and they do not shine. Like our Moon, they just reflect the starlight that hits them. That makes planets tiny, dim objects, incredibly hard to spot beside a huge, illuminating star. Seen from space, the Sun is more than one billion times brighter than Earth to our eyes. Think of it this way: one billion seconds is about thirty-one and a half years. If we compare the numbers not in brightness but in time, you would have to wait more than thirty-one and a half years of starlight to get one second of light from the planet. The light of an Earth is drowned out by the light of its host star. 


“But planet hunters have clever ways of finding their quarry. When you look up at night, you can see thousands of stars moving across the sky. In most cases, what appears to be the motion of the stars is actually the result of the Earth rotating around its axis and circling the Sun. But sometimes, there is an additional, unexpected motion, an indication that we’ve spotted something truly spectacular. Because even lightweight planets tug—just a little—on their heavyweight hosts. Both the star and its planet counter the other's gravitational pull by adding a little extra to their movements. Because the star is so much more massive, it wobbles only slightly if a planetary companion tugs on it. But that tiny wobble makes all the difference. It led astronomers to discover the first new worlds on our cosmic shore.”

Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos
 
author: Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger  
title: Alien Earths: The New Science of Planet Hunting in the Cosmos  
publisher: St. Martin's Press  
date:  
page(s): 159-163