Category: General Interest

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Cowardice, Confront, Communication and Courage

Cowardice is not so much a label as it is an operating basis. One of not looking and not saying.

There are a thousand levels of cowardice. It’s probably accurate, if unpalatable, to say the vast majority of us lack courage to some degree in some area.

The descent down the scale from courage to cowardice started the first time we decided something was too horrible to be faced.

So we looked away.

We did not fully confront it.

Not being able to face it, we fell out of communication with it.

Do that enough times over enough areas and we fall well and truly out of communication with life generally and, as a result, have more and more problems.

Welcome to the human condition.

Is there a road back from this?

Yes, there is.

The first step is to recognise that there is something that could be improved and that improvement is desirable. To what end?

Well, let’s look at the most desirable condition. That would be where we are willing to look at anything, observe it fully enough to see it accurately for what it is, correctly label it and, if appropriate, to communicate honestly to it or about it, regardless of vested interest, potential gain or loss.

That’s a pretty star high level of confront, courage and personal integrity.

So how do we move from where we are towards that star high level we identified?

The cheaper, potentially easier beginning, is to start noticing the things that we formerly did not confront and start looking at those things more fully. Then do this more and more, to a deeper degree over a wider range of activities.

An easy selector for something to confront is to make a list of areas where you are having trouble. If you are having trouble with an area that is the clearest sign possible that the area is not being confronted and you are, to a greater or lessor degree, out of communication with it.

For that with which you fully confront you perceive accurately.

Perceiving it accurately, you are in communication with it.

Being in communication with it means you can solve problems associated with it.

The other, more complete handling, is to do a course that teaches the theory of communication then do the practical drills that:
-improve your ability to be here, in present time,
-enable you to confront the environment without discomfort,
-enable you to confront the person in front of you,
-enable you to confront anything the person in front of you says to break your confront.

The subsequent practical drills then ratchet up your skill in the various parts of the communication formula.

The end result of the course is a person much better in communication with their environment and the people in it.

My eldest grandson did it in grade school and by the time he was half way through high scool he was the leader of his high school debating team.

If you would like an increase in your confront, courage or communication skill, let me know. Happy to point you in the right direction.

Tom Grimshaw
tom@tomgrimshaw.com

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Grace Slick

Grace Slick

She was Grace Barnett Wing — a name that sounds like it belongs on a society page, not a rock concert stage.

In 1961, it did. She grew up the daughter of an investment banker and a former singer, raised in the comfortable suburbs of Northern California in a household she later described, with characteristic bluntness, as straight out of a television sitcom. She attended Finch College in New York — a finishing school — studied art briefly at the University of Miami, married a filmmaker named Jerry Slick, and settled into the life that had been implied by her upbringing: a model in San Francisco, representing designers wearing beautiful clothes for people who could afford them.

It was not interesting to her.

In August 1965, she read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about a local band called Jefferson Airplane. She went to see them play. Standing in a small club on a weeknight, watching this group of musicians from the same city she lived in, she decided — in the way people only occasionally do — that she could do that.

Not might. Not wanted to. Could.

She formed her own band, The Great Society, with her husband and a small group of musicians. This was 1965 — the year Bob Dylan went electric at Newport, the year the Rolling Stones released Satisfaction, the year American music was being taken apart by people who had decided the old arrangements were not going to hold.

Grace Slick was one of those people. And she had a song.

She wrote “White Rabbit” in approximately one sitting — a psychedelic piece built on a bolero rhythm and the internal logic of Lewis Carroll, in which the events of Alice in Wonderland became a map for a generation that had decided to follow the rabbit wherever it led. The song builds from a whisper to a command. When she sang it, her voice did something that very few voices in rock history have managed — it didn’t just carry the melody, it embodied the menace and the invitation at the same time.

When Jefferson Airplane’s original female vocalist, Signe Anderson, left the band in 1966 to start a family, they invited Grace Slick to join them. She brought two songs with her: “White Rabbit,” which she had written, and “Somebody to Love,” written by her brother-in-law Darby Slick, which she had already been performing.

Both became top-ten hits. Jefferson Airplane’s 1967 album Surrealistic Pillow put the band at the center of the San Francisco psychedelic scene and made Grace Slick one of the most recognizable voices in American music.

This was the Summer of Love. San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district had become the center of a generational shift that had no single name but enormous momentum — a renegotiation of how young people understood authority, identity, and what a life was supposed to look like. Grace Slick, who had attended finishing school and modeled designer clothes for wealthy shoppers not three years before, was now its voice.

She performed at Woodstock in August 1969 — not at a sensible hour but in the early hours of a Sunday morning, after rain and chaos had pushed the schedule overnight. Jefferson Airplane took the stage as dawn broke over nearly half a million people, and she sang “White Rabbit” to the largest audience any of them had ever seen.

The song had been written in a single hour, in 1965, by a former department store model.

For three decades, Grace Slick remained one of the most distinctive figures in rock — through Jefferson Airplane, Jefferson Starship, and Starship, across bands that changed their names and sounds as the decades turned but always kept her voice at the center. When she finally retired from music in 1990, she was fifty years old.

She picked up a paintbrush.

Her painting career began in the mid-1990s — portraits of the musicians she had shared stages with: Jerry Garcia, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix. Scenes from Woodstock. White rabbits. The imagery that had defined her music found a new form on canvas. She has said painting and music come from the same part of the brain. Only painting, she noted, is quieter.

In 1996, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Jefferson Airplane.

She turned 87 yesterday.

She started as Grace Barnett Wing — a finishing-school girl with a modelling job she found boring. She became Grace Slick, a voice that helped define one of the most turbulent and creative decades in American cultural history. And then, quietly, she became a painter.

She wrote her most famous song in an hour. She spent the rest of her life proving that the rabbit hole goes far deeper than any single song.

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Alexey and the Routers

Alexey and the Routers

In 2018, MikroTik, a Latvian maker of networking gear, was dealing with a serious security flaw in its routers. A fix existed, but tens of thousands of devices around the world were still running old software, and criminal botnets were scanning the internet for them.

Once inside, the attackers put the routers to work mining cryptocurrency and joining coordinated attacks, often without the owners having any idea. A security expert who used the name Alexey watched this happen and decided the owners weren’t going to patch the problem fast enough on their own.

So he wrote an automated script that went looking for the same vulnerable routers, logged into them through the same weakness and changed each one’s firewall rules to block the ports the attackers were using. He didn’t look at anyone’s data, harvest passwords or install software of his own. Before leaving each device he left a brief note explaining the change and urging the owner to update.

Alexey said his only goal was to protect ordinary internet users, but what he’d done was still unauthorized access to other people’s equipment. The episode split the security world, with some praising him as a digital vigilante and others arguing that breaking into someone’s device without permission is wrong whatever the motive.

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Confirmation of My Finding from Five Years Ago: Repeated Spike Exposure Induces a Restrictive Fibrosing Microangiopathy

Please read and share.

(Definition: Microangiopathy (also known as microvascular disease, small vessel disease (SVD) or microvascular dysfunction) is a disease of the microvessels, small blood vessels in the microcirculation.

Small vessel diseases (SVDs) affect primarily organs that receive significant portions of cardiac output such as the brain, the kidney, and the retina. Thus, SVDs are a major etiologic cause in debilitating conditions such as renal failure, blindness, strokes from brain clots, and dementia.)

Executive Summary:
…repeated exposure to the Spike Protein causes small blood vessels to be scarred and damaged resulting in fibrosis.

It is being so injured that it is repairing repairs. Layer upon layer of non-functioning fibrous tissue.

Why is this so important? Perhaps the most urgent reason:
Microvasculature collagen I deposition was only evident in fatal COVID-19, long COVID, and in the mice exposed to the S1 subunit for 1.5 months.

Please reread that carefully. Several times, if need be. The deposition of collagen was evident not only in those who died or had Long COVID, but ALSO IN THOSE MICE WHO WERE EXPOSED TO THE SPIKE PROTEIN FOR 1.5 MONTHS.

What does this tell us?

This tells us that the Spike Protein may damage us EVEN IF IT DOES NOT CAUSE APPARENT DISEASE. Therefore, you could seem to be completely healthy, without experiencing a case of severe COVID or Long COVID, yet the Spike Protein, if present (repeatedly being injected/produced), may be slowly erasing your microvasculature. This could result in a whole host of deleterious conditions, including sudden cardiac death. And have we seen sudden cardiac death, unfortunately.

Of course, the list goes on, and virtually every major organ could have its functionality severely impaired over time. Yet without the appearance of any major symptoms while the devastation grows.

It was precisely this disease process that I predicted the Spike Protein would induce in the microvasculature.

Article:
Five years ago, I wrote a post wherein I warned that repeated exposure to the Spike Protein would result in a systemic microangiopathy resulting in fibrosis.

The microvasculature is being lacerated and scarred. It is being so injured that it is repairing repairs. Layer upon layer of non-functioning fibrous tissue. This unfortunately hearkens back to my hypothesis that the Spike Protein of SARS-CoV-2 is turning us into masses of living cartilage.

COVID-19 LOOKS LIKE RADIATION POISONING: NOT JUST A VASCULAR DISEASE BUT A DISEASE OF SYSTEMIC MICROANGIOPATHY FOLLOWED BY SYSTEMIC FIBROSIS

Walter M Chesnut

1) MY MOST IMPORTANT FINDING TO DATE – WHY COVID-19 LOOKS LIKE RADIATION POISONING COVID-19: NOT JUST A VASCULAR DISEASE BUT A DISEASE OF SYSTEMIC MICROANGIOPATHY FOLLOWED BY SYSTEMIC FIBROSIS, ALMOST CERTAINLY INDUCED BY THE TISSUE-DAMAGING EFFECTS OF THE SPIKE

The date of that post? 9:16 PM · Nov 29, 2021!!!

Just last week a major study was published confirming this exact hypothesis of mine. And due to the exact same mechanism – repeated exposure to the Spike Protein.

The question of whether the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) spike protein persists in angiotensin converting-enzyme 2–positive (ACE2+) endothelia in the central nervous system (CNS)/other sites and induces a prolonged microvasculature injury syndrome was addressed. People who died of COVID-19, with age-matched controls, and people with long COVID with symptoms persisting from 1 to 5 years, with controls of people who had recovered from COVID-19, were studied. Also compared were wild-type mice injected with the spike protein euthanized at day 5 versus 1.5 months. The ACE2+ microvasculature density in the CNS increased 19-fold in the mice exposed to spike protein for 1.5 months. Human fatal COVID-19 cases exhibited an ACE2+ CNS density of 13.2/3.9 versus 2.1/0.9 for the controls. Long COVID cases showed an ACE2 microvasculature density of 11.9/3.0 versus 3.5/0.9 for the people who recovered from COVID. Viral spike microvasculature density in the CNS was similar in the fatal COVID-19 cases (6.9/2.1) and mice (7.0/4.0) and in the skin of long COVID cases (6.0/1.9) and less in people who recovered from COVID-19 (0.9/0.3). Microvasculature collagen I deposition was only evident in fatal COVID-19, long COVID, and in the mice exposed to the S1 subunit for 1.5 months. Thus, SARS-CoV-2 spike (S1) protein can persist for months to years with an associated microvasculature pro-inflammatory state and a restrictive fibrosing microangiopathy, and exposure to high-dose S1 markedly increases ACE2 endothelial density.

Effects of Prolonged SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Exposure in Long COVID and a Mouse Model of the Disease
https://ajp.amjpathol.org/article/S0002-9440(26)00296-8/abstract

Why is this so important? Perhaps the most urgent reason:

Microvasculature collagen I deposition was only evident in fatal COVID-19, long COVID, and in the mice exposed to the S1 subunit for 1.5 months.

Please reread that carefully. Several times, if need be. The deposition of collagen was evident not only in those who died or had Long COVID, but ALSO IN THOSE MICE WHO WERE EXPOSED TO THE SPIKE PROTEIN FOR 1.5 MONTHS.

What does this tell us?

This tells us that the Spike Protein may damage us EVEN IF IT DOES NOT CAUSE APPARENT DISEASE. Precisely as I predicted it may. Therefore, you could seem to be completely healthy, without experiencing a case of severe COVID or Long COVID, yet the Spike Protein, if present (repeatedly being injected/produced), may be slowly erasing your microvasculature. This could result in a whole host of deleterious conditions, including sudden cardiac death. And have we seen sudden cardiac death, unfortunately.

The coronary vascular system has a unique structure and function that is adaptive to myocardial demand. It is composed of a continuous network of vessels receding in size from epicardial arteries to the microvascular circulation. Failure to meet myocardial demand results in ischemia, angina, and adverse myocardial outcomes. It is evident that 50 % of patients with angina have a non-obstructive coronary disease and 66 % of these patients have coronary microvascular dysfunction (CMD). The impact of CMD on the atria and ventricles is exhibited through its association with atrial fibrillation and distortion of ventricular repolarization. Ultimately, this influence increases the risk of mortality, morbidity, and sudden cardiac arrest. CMD serves as an independent risk for atrial fibrillation, increases ventricular electrical inhomogeneity, and contributes to the progression of cardiac disease. The underlying pathogenesis may be attributed to oxidative stress evident through reactive oxygen species, impaired vasoactive function, and structural disorders such as fibrotic changes. Myocardial ischemia, brought about by a demand-supply mismatch in CMD, may create a milieu for ventricular arrythmia and sudden cardiac arrest through distortion of ventricular repolarization parameters such as QT dispersion and corrected QT dispersion.

Coronary microvascular dysfunction, arrythmias, and sudden cardiac death: A literature review
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10998042/

Of course, the list goes on, and virtually every major organ could have its functionality severely impaired over time. Yet without the appearance of any major symptoms while the devastation grows.

We need to have studies on the microvasculature of the general population by COVID infection history, COVID vaccination history and to see if Spike is circulating in those who have neither had COVID nor a COVID vaccine. And yes, this is extremely important and urgent. Clearly, I wish my warnings had been heeded half a decade ago. We will fight on.

Finish reading: https://wmcresearch.substack.com/p/confirmation-of-my-finding-from-five

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A new AI-driven medical danger

Critical skills testing is under threat
Alex Berenson
Nov 2
(Note: the email that’s posted below arrived over the weekend. I am keeping the author anonymous, per her request. But the problem of artifical-intelligence-powered cheating on tests she highlights is real and growing. For jobs like nursing, this is not just an academic problem. It’s a threat to patient safety.
Companies and boards that administer critical licensing tests probably need to end any remote, at-home exams. Instead, they should offer tests only at centralized proctored locations on laptops without ANY Internet connections that they control and store themselves. Even then they face the risk of AI-powered glasses, though those should be more easily detectable.
It’s sad that we’ve reached this pass, but the reality is what it is.)
Hi Alex,
I’m glad you are covering healthcare right now….keep going with that, please!
You have also talked about AI in general and cheating in higher education. I am a nurse educator, a Clinical Assistant Professor at a well-respected university in the XXX. Note the “clinical” in my job title – it means I do not have tenure. That means I have to watch what I do and say.
I just became aware of a new way that our nursing students have found to cheat. Our students take their exams on a computer that uses a lockdown browser to make sure they cannot access their computer or the internet as a way to cheat during the exam.
[Note: a lockdown browser is essentially what it sounds like — it bars a student from any connection to the Internet or opening other tabs or programs on a computer while she’s taking a test. Some lockdown browsers include software (yes, inevitably, it’s AI-powered) designed to catch students taking tests remotely who use a second computer or their phones to connect to AI engines.]
Well, we have now learned that students can use AI to get past that lockdown. A colleague tested it out. She was able to ask ChatGPT to set up an “overlay” on her -computer. (I don’t know the technical terms or how it works at that level).
She then went into the lockdown browser, and while taking an exam, she could highlight the text of the question and then, through this overlay, ChatGPT would send her a message that would appear on the computer screen with the answer to the question. This essentially means the student doesn’t have to know the content at all. In nursing education, we have always counted on the fact that even if a student graduates by cheating, they would never make it to be a practicing RN because they still have to pass the NCLEX [National Council Licensure Examination, the basic professional nursing test] to get their license.
Well… guess what? The NCSBN [National Council of State Boards of Nursing] (they make the NCLEX exam) is actively planning for nursing graduates to be able to take their exams at home. This would likely mean they would be using a lockdown browser and remote proctor of some sort. This is frightening to me.
The pace of AI being used for cheating is faster than the pace of developing ways to combat it. Many faculty where I work are switching to paper exams to avoid this type of cheating. That mode of testing is time-consuming for faculty, so I doubt that everyone will care enough to do it. I also doubt my school would require it.
I am hoping someone like you can get the word out about this. In addition to the total mess that is going on with the regulation and cost of healthcare, we are about to have nurses (and probably doctors) enter the healthcare workforce after cheating their way through school. I am telling my family to stay as healthy as possible so you don’t have to trust your life to an unknown nurse or doctor.
Feel free to use this information as you see fit, but please keep my name and location confidential. I cannot afford to get fired.
Thanks,
XXX
(August’s piece about AI and cheating in higher education)
On diversity, equity, AI cheating, and the cynicism destroying higher education (from students, professors, and administrators alike)
Alex Berenson
© 2026 Alex Berenson
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104
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Two Simple Food Hacks That May Help Ease Inflammation and Pain

Glycine In Water

Glycine, a simple amino acid, and cutting linoleic acid (LA) to less than 2% of your daily calories share an overlapping list of reported benefits, including less inflammation and pain, with plausible links to fewer migraines and better tolerance to the sun.

In animal studies, glycine opens a chloride channel on immune cells that blocks the calcium surge they need to launch an inflammatory attack. Oxidized LA byproducts do the opposite, triggering calcium signals in pain nerves and immune cells. The same calcium-blocking mechanism may also help protect against electromagnetic fields from wireless devices.

Research in mice suggests that a glycine receptor in the spinal cord works as a brake on pain. Prostaglandin E2, made from arachidonic acid, which your body makes from LA, can switch that brake off.

Two recent animal studies also suggest LA can drive a destructive type of cell death in joint cartilage, and glycine can block that type of cell death in rat cartilage.

A randomized trial that cut LA to 1.8% of calories or less, while adding omega-3 fats, reduced headache days by four a month, twice the benefit of adding omega-3s alone.

Your body makes only about 3 grams of glycine a day and may fall roughly 10 grams short of what it needs. The two hacks: take about 10 grams of glycine daily, and keep LA under 2% of your calories.

Finish reading:  https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2026/11/01/glycine-linoleic-acid-inflammation-pain.aspx

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Three Days of Darkness

Three Days of Darkness

Nation First looks into the unsettling resemblance between modern emergency checklists and an old Catholic prophecy.

Britain wants three days of water in every cupboard: three litres a person a day, three days of food, a torch, a wind-up radio. Japan’s disaster minister asks for three. France’s Normandy prefecture has published a 72-hour kit list. Belgium, the Netherlands, Latvia, Lithuania and Ireland say 72 hours. The European Commission has made 72-hour household self-sufficiency an official goal, and 33 governments now sit on a map of the advice.

Planners call the number practical. It is the window before organised help can be expected to arrive.

It is also the length of a Catholic prophecy two centuries old.

Governments are telling households to prepare for three days of disruption, echoing an old Catholic warning.

The Three Days of Darkness prophecy describes a world plunged into darkness, with the faithful sheltering indoors.

The resemblance invites two readings: independent practical planning or the exploitation of an inherited religious story.

A familiar script could encourage obedience and lead people to interpret a blackout as fulfilment, leaving its causes unquestioned.

The mystics promise renewal, while governments offer a timetable that depends on their ability to deliver.

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Quote of the Day

“A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.”
Lucius Annaeus Seneca – Philosopher, Statesman, Dramatist (5 BC – 65 AD)

Just because someone invited you to an argument doesn’t mean you have to attend.