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by Brian Shilhavy
July 02, 2020
from
VaccineImpact Website
California Civil Rights Attorney Leigh Dundas published a video on
Facebook this week to show the devastating consequences of isolating
children and forcing them to practice "social distancing" at places
like school.
Here are some lesser known facts about social distancing and
isolation:
-
It was developed 70 years ago by the CIA to break down enemies of
state.
-
It is the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day AND being an
alcoholic.
-
It doubles the risk of death, and destroys the part of the brain
responsible for learning.
She pointed out that according to the statistics and the CDC:
-
A child's risk of dying from COVID is 0.0%, per the CDC.
-
No child has passed on COVID to a family member or third party
(they do not transmit).
She goes on to explain the historical origins of practicing Social
Distancing, and how the technique was developed by the CIA to
torture "enemies of the state."
Watch the video:
Here is a summary of her research designed to educate school
'administrators' so that,
they abolish social distancing rules in
schools....
Sample Letter to School on Harms from Social Distancing
Legal-Medical Opinion On Possible Changes to 2020-2021 School Year
due to COVID
by Attorney Leigh Dundas
I write today to highlight certain factors that will hopefully serve
to inform what are likely ongoing embryonic conversations at the
District level, relating to COVID and the 2020-21 school year - and
further - to urge a particular path of restraint during such
conversations based on abundant scientific, medical, neuro-cognitive
and legal considerations which have now emerged.
At the beginning of this letter, I want to acknowledge that it is
quite obvious that there is a virus, which can be sometimes fatal,
particularly to certain demographics.
That said, there are also a
federal and state constitution - which have been to some degree
overlooked by certain states in their rush to contain the virus - as
well as data in the form of hard math and hard science, which is now
emerging in the context of COVID, and which bears review.
Math on COVID was Wrong
The study that precipitated the lockdown of more than 95% of
America's population (and indeed, the planet's population) was
authored by Neil Ferguson, out of the UK. It predicted deaths in the
millions.
This alarming conclusion was taken into account by leaders
of most nations, and acted on accordingly. America acted by
quarantining - not the sick - but the approximately 311 million
Americans who were not sick, and putting them under the functional
equivalent of house arrest, for an indefinite period of time.
Interestingly, after a mere one day of himself being under lockdown
in the UK, the study's author walked back his math a shocking
ninety-six percent (96%): his revision of deaths in his own country
went from a predicted 500,000 down to 20,000.
At this juncture, allow me to point out the obvious, using an
analogy involving my daughter:
if my daughter Katya routinely said
the answer to a math problem this year was 100, when it was indeed
only 4 - and Katya continued to get her math problems wrong by 96% - she would receive a failing grade in math from Foothill High.
And
rightly so:
with such incompetence in basic arithmetic reflected on
her transcript, I would hope that she not be hired by anyone,
anywhere, in any serious job that required basic math, as such
degree of error - in engineering, statistics, or any job - would
have fatal consequences (imagine if the degree of slope in a freeway
overpass were 96% wrong).
Why Neil Ferguson's model was adopted in the first place is curious,
as this was not his first such major error:
witness Ferguson's 2001
model of mad cow disease - which predicted horrible fatalities
including up to 150,000 deaths in England - which was subsequently
deemed "not fit for purpose" when in fact only 177 people died (and
that's through 2020). [1]
Indeed, what current actual data evinces is that the mortality rate
is nowhere near the initial projections, as concluded by a study out
of Stanford on Sunday, followed by one out of USC yesterday.
The Stanford study, led by Professor
Eran Bendavid,
"concluded that
the mortality rate in Santa Clara County is between 0.12% and 0.2%."
Less than 1% fatal.
And 50 to 85 times more people had been infected
than originally thought in northern California (2.5%-4.2%), while in
southern California - where most flights from Asia land into LAX - the infection rate was found to range from 2.8%-5.6% (which experts
believe is due to earlier-than-thought exposure to COVID dating back
to last Fall).
ZERO Children Dying
In addition to having a LESS THAN ONE PERCENT fatality rate overall,
the fatality rate for children - who appear to be essentially immune
(likely due to their contraction of endless common colds most of
which are from Corona virus strains) - is ZERO.
You read that right:
worldwide, ZERO children under 10 have died.
And in the US? Zero individual under age 20 have died. [3]
Yet further, the number of deaths for all people in the US to date
is proving this virus to be no more deadly than a bad flu.[4]
And that is even with the number of deaths being radically
over-inflated due to the CDC's order that all deaths be counted as COVID deaths
- including e.g., a man who dies by crashing his
motorcycle or heart attack, if he tests positive for COVID (even
though he was not SICK from COVID at the time of his death, and the
actual proximal cause of his fatal injury was vehicular fatality or
heart attack).
Sweden is actually doing the math correctly: counting people who die
with COVID separately from people who die from COVID.
But the U.S. to date is refusing to do correct math, and thus it
must be noted that even the math showing COVID to be no worse than
the flu is likely still artificially north of where it should be
- COVID may well be far less fatal than the flu (and we know it is
less fatal than SARS or MERS). [5]
Finally, it should be noted that countries and states who've gone
into lockdown actually have no better outcomes, and in some cases,
MORE fatalities than those who did not employ lockdown. [6]
Frankly, this is not shocking: in the 1918 flu pandemic, it was
rapidly discovered that outdoor hospitals with no roofs - where
patients were exposed to sunlight and fresh air - had lower death
rates and better recovery rates (due to the incontrovertible science
that shows better immune response with Vitamin D, and of course, the
ability to breathe non-contaminated air that is not re-circulating
with a heavy virus load). [7]
Governors are not Kings
Now that we have reviewed the math, I want to turn to a governmental
analysis, followed by a review of legal points.
Governors are not kings. While they can issue orders, those orders
are not always constitutional.
Courts - which are currently closed state-wide
- are the final
arbiter of whether any decree, order, or law is actually lawful.
As educators, I doubt I have to point out here the rather obvious
fact that we have three branches of government, precisely to avoid
the end that is occurring right now: the three branches are to act
as a system of checks and balances on each other.
Currently, in California and most states, only one branch of
government is in session. This is a set-up for abuse, and something
our forefathers took great pains to avoid.
There is a name for countries whose countries function with only one
branch in session: they are called dictatorships.
Put simply: due to the current closure of the courts, many executive
branches are accomplishing by fiat what would never be allowed in
any other setting, and which decrees are likely exceedingly
unconstitutional.
Constitutional Rights
And turning to the legal analysis:
governments may, in times of
crises, curtail First Amendment rights, as well as other rights
guaranteed by our Constitution. Phrased differently, our right to
speech, to assemble, to pray, our freedom of movement (a derivative
First Amendment right) may be encroached upon and are not absolute.
That said, any order that burdens a First Amendment right must pass
strict scrutiny: it must be "narrowly tailored" to achieving a
"compelling state interest."
Applying this standard in reverse to the facts at hand, safeguarding
public health is likely going to be considered a compelling state
interest - although that prong is harder to meet with every passing
day that yields a new study showing COVID to be no more fatal than
the flu.
But more to the point, an order that indefinitely prevents normal
assembly or speech - as many governors' orders do - is never going
to be able to be shown to be "narrowly tailored" to addressing the
problem of the virus.
An example of a "narrowly tailored" solution designed to achieving
virus containment and public health concerns would be confining sick
people to home or hospital - which is a true quarantine - as opposed
to locking down 95% of Americans who are neither sick nor carriers
and putting us under house arrest for an indefinite period of time.
Moreover, what may - at one very discrete point in time - be a
prudent action that errs on the side of caution (ordering people to
stay home during the first 4-6 weeks of the virus) - and which many
would concede appears narrowly enough tailored at the front side - will NOT continue to be deemed narrowly tailored if said solution is
applied indefinitely.
Stated differently: house arrest to control a pandemic spread for
one month seems narrowly tailored and justified, but house arrest
forever - particularly when the facts show that the virus is NOT a
pandemic and is no more fatal than the annual flu - cannot be
justified in a free society, and would never meet the legal
standard. [8]
California's recent order has major other issues which I won't
belabor here, as they are not particularly relevant, other than to
point out the rather obvious fact that if a person can be trusted to
stand six feet apart from his neighbor while buying marijuana (pot
stores are considered "essential" under California's current order),
then it begs the question of why Ma and Pa Smith cannot be trusted
to remain six feet apart from their neighbors while praying in the
pews of their local church this Sunday.
While the governor has to my knowledge issued no official guidance
to educational institutions of which I'm aware (other than shutting
everything down through the end of this particular school year), he
has been loudly telegraphing in interviews that he believes there
will be no mass gatherings and no sports for at least 18-24 months,
and that schools should endeavor to engage in some costly and
scientifically unsound re-arrangements prior to Fall 2020.
Lawsuits Coming and the State will Lose
On that front:
the State is about to be hit with a deluge of
lawsuits, as both the existing stay-at-home order is
unconstitutional (not just from a First Amendment standpoint, but
from a 13th Amendment/slavery standpoint, and from a Takings Clause
standpoint re small businesses), as are the verbalized but
not-yet-written statements about California's future (should they be
enacted).
These lawsuits the State will lose: it is not constitutional to
continue house arrest indefinitely, nor to require masks on healthy
people at all (let alone indefinitely), nor to prohibit adults or
children from gathering normally at church, work, sports, or school
for 1-2 years.
Moreover, the Department of Justice has clearly and correctly
indicated it will be intervening as a party of interest in such
federal court lawsuits, and siding with the people and against the
State.
To wit, as reported by both NPR and Bloomberg
[9] yesterday:
Attorney General Barr called some current stay-at-home orders
"burdens on civil liberties" and said that if they continued and
lawsuits were brought, his department would side against the state.
"The idea that you have to stay in your house is disturbingly close
to house arrest. I'm not saying it wasn't justified.
I'm not saying
in some places it might still be justified. But it's very onerous,
as is shutting down your livelihood," Barr said.
***
Barr was asked what he would do with any governors who are
"indifferent" to easing restrictions in their states.
"We're looking
carefully at a number of these rules that are being put into place,"
Barr said.
"And if we think one goes too far, we initially try to
jawbone the governors into rolling them back or adjusting them.
And
if they're not and people bring lawsuits, we file a statement of
interest and side with the plaintiffs."
***
"These are very, very burdensome impingements on liberty.
And we
adopted them, we have to remember, for the limited purpose of
slowing down the spread, that is bending the curve. We didn't adopt
them as the comprehensive way of dealing with this disease."
"You can't just keep on feeding the patient chemotherapy and say
'Well, we're killing the cancer, because we were getting to the
point where we're killing the patient,'" Barr said.
"Now is
the time that we have to start looking ahead and adjusting
to more targeted therapies."
Before I turn to the issue of schools in the time of COVID, a brief
recap of the points in this letter thus far:
the mathematical
predictions on which 95% of the planet's population was placed under
house arrest were flawed by 96%, the death rate from COVID is on par
with a bad flu season, the mortality rate is way less than 1% for
all people while the death rate for children under age 20 in the US
is zero percent, some governors' actions in continuing the draconian
restrictions and lockdowns are unconstitutional, lawsuits are
commencing, the Department of Justice has indicated it will
intervene and side against the state and against municipal
authorities (translation: school districts) which are executing
these unconstitutional orders, I have been approached by a
cross-section of individuals who are committed to funding and
commencing such legal challenges, I have the track record and skill
and desire to succeed in this area, and school districts NOT in
Orange County have as of yesterday begun releasing unscientific and
unconstitutional proposed changes to their education programs for
2020-21 (bootstrapped to, or otherwise derivative of, State orders
or insinuations which are themselves unconstitutional).
Social Distancing is a Euphemism that Hides a More Pernicious Truth
On the point of school alterations, let me preface the discussion
with a scientific review of
social distancing.
Social distancing is a euphemism which is not only inaccurate, but
like many euphemisms, hides a more pernicious truth.
Social distancing is, in fact, social isolation. One can argue that
distance is not the same as isolation, and only becomes isolation
after a certain yardstick of measurement has been reached between
persons, but the reality is that such is not the case.
If you doubt this, take a walk down the aisle at Vons, and try to
initiate a smile or simple "hello" to someone six feet away.
Though
this is theoretically possible, as voices and visual cues carry
across a distance of six feet, nine out of ten people will not
respond (and yes, I conducted this little test just last week - I
studied psych/soc before becoming an attorney).
Medical journals agree:
social distance is social isolation. And
social isolation is thus the term I will use for the duration.
Social Isolation is a Human Rights Violation on par with Torture and
Other War Crimes
To lead with the conclusion: social isolation is a human rights
violation - which is on par with torture and other war crimes.
Indeed, social isolation is the primary protocol deployed against
enemies in times of war, regardless of time period or country in
question.
This is due in large part to the fact that it is so successful in
psychologically destroying the individual, without need of more
bloody and difficult physical interventions.
The studies of social isolation against enemies of state began in
the 1950's and 1960's by the CIA:
"In 1960, one of the agency's most active contractors, Lawrence
Hinkle of Cornell, confirmed the significance of Hebb's research for
the CIA mind-control effort. Through a comprehensive review
... 'for
the purposes of intelligence,' Hinkle found Hebb's work [on social
isolation], in light of the neurological literature, the
most promising of all known techniques."
To wit:
It has long been the custom of captors, police, and inquisitors, to
isolate their prisoners. But which of these methods, Hinkle asked,
is most effective? All the standard interrogation techniques have
varying... impacts on the brain's functioning... [But] of all the
possible techniques, isolation is the ideal way of "breaking down" a
prisoner...
Hebb's work found that,
"the effect of
isolation on the brain function of the prisoner is much like
that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of
sleep."
A Question of Torture - CIA
Interrogation -
From the Cold War to the War on Terror
by
Alfred McCoy
p. 41-42
-
Source
The power of social
isolation in contexts of war and hostage-taking was reviewed in an
earth-shaking expose released by the New Yorker some years back.
In
the article, the author reviewed journalist Terry Lyons' ordeal, who
was held hostage back in the 1980's, in Lebanon, over a period of
years:
Anderson was
the chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press
when, on March 16, 1985, three bearded men forced him from his
car in Beirut at gunpoint.
He was pushed into a Mercedes sedan,
covered head to toe with a heavy blanket, and made to crouch
head down in the footwell behind the front seat.
***
A month into
his confinement, he recalled in his memoir, "The mind is a
blank. Jesus, I always thought I was smart. Where are all the
things I learned, the books I read, the poems I memorized?
There's nothing there, just a formless, gray-black misery. My
mind's gone dead. God, help me."
He dozed off
and on constantly, sleeping twelve hours a day. He craved
activity of almost any kind...
He had a Bible and tried to read,
but he often found that he lacked the concentration to do so. He
observed himself becoming neurotically possessive... flying into
a rage at guards...
He brooded incessantly, thinking back on all
the mistakes he'd made in life, his regrets, his offenses
against God and family. [10]
Anderson was given
a reprieve from social isolation in the middle of 1986, but then
made to return to full-time social isolation in September of that
year.
After a few weeks of isolation, he again felt his mind
slipping away:
"I find myself
trembling sometimes for no reason," he wrote. "I'm afraid I'm
beginning to lose my mind, to lose control completely."
One day, he
snapped.
He walked over to a wall and began
beating his forehead against it, dozens of times. His head was
smashed and bleeding before the guards were able to stop him.
Some hostages fared
worse.
Frank Reed was - like those reading my letter
- an educator:
a fifty-four-year-old American private-school director,
who was taken hostage at the same time as journalist Anderson, and
also socially isolated.
He lay
motionless for hours facing a wall, semi-catatonic. He could not
follow the guards' simplest instructions.
This invited abuse
from them. Released after three and a half years,
Reed ultimately required admission to a psychiatric hospital.
Before the New
Yorker author went on to describe the experience of Senator John
McCain, he took pains to describe both why and how social isolation
is so devastatingly effective, noting that,
"human beings are social
creatures" and that we are social "not just in the trivial sense
that we like company, and not just in the obvious sense that we
each depend on others [but that we] are social in a more
elemental way: simply to exist as a normal human being requires
interaction with other people."
The author noted
that,
"children provide the clearest demonstration of this fact [that
we are social creatures], although it was slow to be accepted" as - well into the 1950's
- psychologists were "encouraging parents to
give children less attention and affection, in order to
encourage independence."
That was before the
discoveries made by Harry Harlow, a professor of psychology
at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who produced a series of
influential studies involving baby rhesus monkeys.
Harlow was using
monkeys for other research, but because Harlow
didn't know how
to raise infant monkeys, he cared for them the way hospitals of
the era cared for human infants - in nurseries, with plenty of
food, warm blankets, some toys, and in isolation from other
infants to prevent the spread of infection. The monkeys grew up
sturdy, disease-free, and larger than those from the wild.
Yet they were also profoundly
disturbed, given to staring blankly and rocking in place for
long periods, circling their cages repetitively, and mutilating
themselves.
Harlow and his
graduate students could not at first discern what the problem was.
They considered and eventually ruled out factors such as diet,
patterns of light exposure, and even the antibiotics used. But then
one of Harlow's researchers noticed how tightly the monkeys clung to
their soft blankets.
Harlow wondered whether what the monkeys were
missing in their Isolettes was a mother.
So, in an odd experiment,
he gave them an artificial mother:
In the studies,
one artificial mother was a doll made of terry cloth; the other
was made of wire. He placed a warming device inside the dolls to
make them seem more comforting.
The babies, Harlow discovered,
largely ignored the wire mother. But they became deeply attached
to the cloth mother.
They caressed it. They slept curled up on
it. They ran to it when frightened. They refused replacements:
they wanted only "their" mother.
So starved for
social interaction were these babies, that when,
"sharp spikes were made to randomly
thrust out of the mother's body when the rhesus babies held it,
they waited patiently for the spikes to recede,
and returned to clutching it."
Such is the
powerful - and indefatigable - need for social interaction and
bonding.
But sadly, because
cloth mothers are no substitute for the real thing - and even with
the baby rhesus monkeys clinging wildly to the cloth surrogates,
"no matter how tightly they clung to the surrogate mothers, the
monkeys
remained psychologically abnormal":
In a later
study on the effect of total isolation from birth, the
researchers found that the test monkeys, upon being released
into a group of ordinary monkeys, "usually go into a state of
emotional shock, characterized by . . . autistic self-clutching
and rocking."
Social isolation
was so devastating that some monkeys began refusing food, and even
after release,
"died five days later."
While any social
isolation had profound consequences, a year of social isolation had
irretrievable and abominable effects:
"Twelve months of isolation almost
obliterated the animals socially."
"They
became permanently withdrawn...
They lived as outcasts - regularly set upon, as if
inviting abuse."
I would pray that a
review of such basic psychological effects by the reader would give
pause to any educator considering adopting a program that socially
distances children during their formative years.
To the extent my
point has not yet been well-made, let me drive it home further with
the words of Senator John McCain:
"It's an awful thing," John McCain
wrote of his five
and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam - more than two
years of it spent in social isolation...
"It crushes your spirit more effectively than any other form of
mistreatment."
Mind you, this
statement comes from a man who was beaten regularly, denied adequate
medical treatment for two broken arms and a broken leg, who endured
chronic dysentery, and who - in the final days - was further
tortured by having more limbs broken.
According to McCain, social
isolation was worse than ALL of that.
A U.S. military
study of almost 150 naval aviators returning from Vietnam where they
had endured weeks or more of social deprivation and distancing -
"many of whom were treated even worse than McCain" - reported
that they too found social isolation,
"to be as torturous and agonizing
as any physical abuse they suffered."
Indeed, so barbaric
is the simple act of social isolation that even our US Supreme Court
has analogized it to a severe human rights violation - given its
propensity to put prisoners who are socially isolated into a,
"condition, from which it was next to impossible to arouse them" and
from which they often then become "violently insane" or "commit
suicide... while [even] those who stood the ordeal better... did not
recover sufficient mental activity to be of any subsequent service
to the community." [11]
The always
devastating and often fatal effects of social isolation - which bode
well for its use as a war-time technique against enemies of State,
but which poses grave concerns that invite thorough review before
deploying on America's schoolchildren - are not simply subjective:
social isolation affects organic brain development, and the human
body, length of life, cardiovascular health, and so on.
Indeed, so bad is
social isolation that it doubles
the risk of death in Blacks while increasing the risk of early death
in Caucasians by 60-84%, while other studies show that it
is
safer to smoke 15 cigarettes a day - or be an alcoholic
- than to be socially isolated:
"Meta-analysis
co-authored by Julianne Holt-Lunstad, PhD, a professor of
psychology and neuroscience at Brigham Young University, [found
that] lack of social connection
heightens health risks as much as smoking 15 cigarettes a day or
having alcohol use disorder. [Holt-Lunstandt] also
found that social isolation is
twice as harmful to physical and mental health as obesity...
'There is robust evidence that social isolation
significantly increases risk for premature mortality, and the
magnitude of the risk exceeds that of many leading health
indicators.'"
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
"As
demonstrated by a review of the effects of social isolation
across the life span, [social isolation] ... can wreak havoc on an
individual's physical, mental and cognitive health. Hawkley
points to evidence linking social isolation with adverse health
consequences including
depression, poor sleep quality, impaired executive function,
accelerated cognitive decline, poor cardiovascular function and
impaired immunity at every stage of life."
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 370,
No. 1669, 2015.
"A 2019 study
led by Kassandra Alcaraz, PhD, MPH, a public health researcher
with the American Cancer Society, analyzed data from more than
580,000 adults and found that social isolation increases the
risk of premature death from every cause for every race.
According to Alcaraz, among black participants,
social isolation doubled the
risk of early death, while it increased the risk among white
participants by 60 to 84 percent.
'Our research really
shows that the magnitude of risk presented by social isolation
is very similar in magnitude to that of obesity, smoking, lack
of access to care and physical inactivity,' she says.
American
Journal of Epidemiology, Vol. 188, No. 1, 2019.
JAMA study
finding poor cardiovascular, obesity and other health results
among populations of youth who experienced social isolation:
"First, whereas clinical and research interest in the
association between social isolation and poor health has been
generated by studies of adults, the findings from this study
provide, to our knowledge, the first evidence linking childhood
social isolation to poor adult health. Our findings are
consistent with a handful of retrospective studies."
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/205331
In addition to
social isolation shortening life span and more than doubling the
risk of early death, while also creating obesity, cardiovascular and
other major physical impairments - which to point a very fine point
on it,
prove that TUSD would be better off
feeding their school children.
15 cigarettes a day or handing them a
shot of vodka at the start of each period than attempting to keep
them socially distanced
- there are also profound,
debilitating and often fatal psychological effects from attempting
to keep developing children distant from each other.
In terms of
psychological effects: schoolchildren exposed to social isolation
and distance learning as a result of severe health conditions such a
e.g., a cancer diagnosis that requires such draconian restrictions,
end up having such "social isolation... often correlate[] with mental
disorders, including depressive disorders." [12]
Yet worse, the
psychological effects of isolation do not appear to wear off after
the period of isolation ends, as studies with prisoners who
underwent brief periods of solitary confinement elucidate.
One
researcher explains his work with such individuals:
Some people
make it out, and if they're fortunate enough to get into a warm
and caring environment [with significant human interaction] they
begin to regain their social skills. Even then I've had
conversations with people who take me aside and tell me,
"You
know, I may look like I'm doing OK but I'm really not. I have
problems all the time. I'm anxious, I don't feel comfortable
around people."
I've had more
extreme cases.
A couple years ago, a former prisoner's wife
called me, she was crying, she said,
"My husband just got out of
prison and won't come out of the bathroom. Every day he gets up
in the morning and locks himself in the bathroom. Sometimes he
won't even sleep in the bed."
So I went to see him
- he doesn't
live far from here - and he told me,
"I never told my wife this,
but I'm not just locked in the bathroom,
I sit in the bathtub... It's the
only place I feel comfortable.
My wife wants me to
sleep in the big bedroom we have, but [it's] ... disorienting. So
I go in the bathroom and it calms me down." [13]
Effects of Social Isolation on Students
Already, we are
seeing the effect of just a few weeks of social isolation on
students:
teen suicides have risen, and last week, OC Sheriff's
reported a 25% increase in domestic violence calls, a 24% increase
in family disputes, and a 30% increase in child custody calls. [14]
So deleterious are
these effects that in recent years the United Nations promulgated
what have come to be called the Mandela rules.
These rules prohibit
social isolation for longer than 15 days,
noting that any longer period of
social isolation,
"constitutes cruel, degrading
and inhumane treatment, or torture."
Other organizations, like the
American Psychiatric Association, have held similarly. Id.
Perhaps most
ironic, what cold hard science shows is that social isolation
employed continuously - as California is suggesting doing - will
actually undermine the alleged health goals because such
isolation depresses the immune system.
A 2015 study led by
Steven Cole, M.D. and professor of medicine at UCLA, yielded hard
data in the form of how social isolation harms overall health.
Cole and his
colleagues examined gene expressions in leukocytes - which are the
white blood cells that play a pivotal role in the immune system's
response to infections.
What they found was startling:
The leukocytes
of socially isolated "participants - both humans and rhesus
macaques - showed an increased expression of genes involved in
inflammation and a decreased expression of genes involved in
antiviral responses...
[Social isolation] leads to long-term
'fight-or-flight' stress signaling, which negatively affects
immune system functioning.
Simply put, people who feel lonely have less immunity and more
inflammation than people who don't." [15]
Brainwashing and Mental Health
Historically
speaking, social isolation as a protocol got its start in June of
1951, when a,
"group of psychologists and doctors with ties to US, UK
and Canadian military forces held a secret meeting at the
Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal." [16]
The minutes from
the meeting revealed that the discussion centered on the question of
"brainwashing" and focused much on social deprivation and isolation
as means to achieving that end, or otherwise,
"elicit[ing] false
confession or manipulat[ing] behavior."
The doctors,
"considered
various artificial conditions that could be used to create
states of helplessness and extreme suggestibility" - of which social isolation
and permutations thereof topped the list.
Researcher Hebb was
given $30,000 - which was a tidy sum back in 1951 - to study,
"isolation and
solitary confinement, which can have acute and lasting effects
on mental health, and has a long history as a form of punishment
and as a mode of philosophical inquiry."
Social isolation
was found to be a quite promising technique for the military to
deploy, regardless of the fact that it was torture - or perhaps
because of the fact that it was torture - in terms of aiding
brainwashing.
The exact mechanics of which neuroscientist
John
Lilly explained thoroughly in a paper delivered to a group of
military and intelligence officials in the late 1950s:
When a person
is isolated for long enough, Lilly wrote, they tend to absorb
signal data on demand. Under these conditions there can be an
"injection of outside data" into the "inside generators," with
re-programming developing. [17]
Put simply?
One can turn human beings into
brain-washed robots simply by socially isolating them for short
periods of time.
The mechanics
behind this are more well understood through today's world of
functional magnetic resonance imaging. Recent studies using fMRI
show that people who are shunted into social isolation have a less
active part of the brain known as the ventral striatum.
The ventral
striatum part of the brain - which is hurt by social isolation - is
absolutely "critical to learning"
and is a,
"key portion of the brain" that is
"activated through primary rewards such as food and secondary
rewards... Social rewards and feelings of love
also may activate the region." [18]
The researchers in this
study - like many above - concluded that social isolation is as
detrimental as smoking.
How Social Isolation Affects the Brain
Not only does
social distancing and social isolation - as visually proven by way
of MRI - shut off the very part of the brain children need in order
to learn while at school, another study shows that,
"social isolation
causes the build-up of a particular chemical in the brain."
While
the study was conducted on mice, humans have the same have an
analogous brain signaling structure.
The build-up of the protein in
the brains of mice exposed to social isolation was once again
devastating:
Confirming and
extending previous observations, the researchers showed that
social isolation leads to a broad array of behavioral changes in
mice.
These include increased
aggressiveness towards unfamiliar mice,
persistent fear, and
hypersensitivity to threatening
stimuli.
For example, when encountering a threatening
stimulus, mice that have been socially isolated remain frozen in
place long after the threat has passed, whereas normal mice stop
freezing soon after the threat is removed.
Unless we are
looking to create paranoid children living in an adrenalized PTSD
world that become prey for predators, or double their risk of death
while giving them the functional equivalent of a 15-cigarette-a-day
bad alky habit - we would do well to take heed of the vast amount of
medical studies on this point - before implementing
socially isolating or distancing protocols in the classrooms.
At this point, I'd
like to further examine the physical changes to the brain which
occur with social isolation by turning back to the New Yorker
article, and its examination of the physical reasons underlying why
John McCain and other POW's subjectively experienced social
isolation as identical to (or worse than) physical torture.
The
author of the New Yorker article aptly noted that "what happened to
them" in terms of social isolation actually
was "physical", as,
"EEG
studies going back to the nineteen-sixties have shown diffuse
slowing of brain waves in prisoners" who are socially isolated for
more than a week.
Indeed, as recently
as 1992, fifty-seven prisoners of war, released after an average of
six months in detention camps in the former Yugoslavia, were
examined using EEG-like tests.
What those
recordings revealed is,
"brain
abnormalities for months afterward."
The article went on
to note that the most severe EEG results were found in prisoners who
had endured either head trauma sufficient to render them unconscious
... or social isolation. It concluded:
Without sustained social
interaction, the human brain may become as impaired as one that
has incurred a traumatic injury.
To wrap up the
harmful neurological, cognitive, physical, emotional and social
fall-out from socially-isolating mechanisms, it is worth noting what
one author determined after concluding all of his POW interviews:
Whether in
Walpole or Beirut or Hanoi,
all human beings experienced isolation as torture.
We are Currently Undergoing the Single Largest Planetary-wide Social
Experiment ever Conducted on Human Beings
And now, to wrap
this letter up: we are currently undergoing the single largest
planetary-wide social experiment ever conducted on human beings. Social distancing is social isolation.
It is a
well-documented war-time technique deployed for the better part of
the last century by the CIA against our worst enemies.
For the
victims who have endured social isolation - to a man and to a woman
- they experience it as torture: a torture so inhumane that they
refuse to endorse its use against even their own enemies.
Id; see
also, New Yorker article which described a prisoner who was confined
to solitary for 8 years who - upon his release and finding out his
State Prison Director had been jailed - stated he would let the
Prison Director "out of solitary" as he wouldn't wish that social
isolation on anyone... "not even him."
Moreover, a
plethora of studies show that social distancing and isolation can be
fatal, and when not fatal, are yet still a fate from which people do
not EVER fully recover.
The brain is irretrievably structurally
altered, and the part that is most vulnerable and necessary to
learning - not only in children but in ourselves - is gutted beyond
repair.
I implore you to
take heed of these studies. And as educators yourselves, who are
not doubt familiar with genocides and atrocities of yesteryear, I
also implore you to not simply accept suggestions - or even
orders - which are unconstitutional.
I do much work in
countries where War Crimes Tribunals are active, and with lawyers
who prosecute crimes against humanity, and I tell you true:
it is
no defense to have taken part in even a minor human rights
violation, and then attempt to justify one's actions later on down
the line with the pablum that one was "required to do so" by virtue
of one's post, one's title, one's uniform, or one's orders.
I further implore
you to reject - out of hand and without exception - any suggestions
that would force TUSD children to have classrooms requiring large
distances of physical space between students, to have schedules that
would reduce attendance by 20% or 50% on a rotating basis, that
would seek to carve up the student body so that only 1/2 or 1/3 were
present at any given time, that would enforce mask wearing (a
separate issue, which medical studies I won't cite here), and I
would ask you to reject as well any plans that would prohibit recess
and outdoor breaks or sunlight, or physical education.
Such plans are
neither required nor even logically related to containment of a
virus that is less fatal that SARS, MERS and the flu, and whose
mortality rate for children is non-existent.
Yet more striking,
such plans will make children (or anyone) less physically healthy
through immuno-suppression secondary to social isolation and lack of
physical activity/sunlight.
Yet further, such plans infringe on
many constitutional rights - not to mention literally tearing
at the very fibers of the minds of the children whose future you
hold in your hands.
I recognize that I
have given you an abundance of legal, scientific, and medical
information.
I did this because I firmly believe that people make
better decisions when they have the relevant facts at hand. And I
did this because - at base - I know what the end of the road looks
like, for those who embark on even the tiniest violations of civil
liberties, with the best of intentions.
I would not wish the things
I have seen in Cambodia, in Africa, in speaking to survivors of
social isolation, of war, of human rights atrocities - I would not
wish these ends on my worst enemy.
Because these
people? These people... do not EVER recover:
it is a harm from
which there is
NO ROAD BACK...
You are the
guardians of our children's minds, their hearts, their very
humanity. My child - and yours - they are not rhesus monkeys. They
are not hostages in Lebanon.
They are not POWs in Hanoi...!
But if we do
not do the right thing here? They will be...
References
[1]
https://principia-scientific.org/shock-israeli-study-reveals-covid19-lockdown-was-pointless/
[2]
https://paloaltoonline.com/news/2020/04/21/los-angeles-study-backs-stanford-researchers-conclusion-about-high-prevalence-of-covid-19
[3]
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/23/21190033/coronavirus-covid-19-deaths-by-age
[4]
https://reason.com/2020/04/17/covid-19-lethality-not-much-different-than-flu-says-new-study/. See also CDC website numbers comparing 61,000 flu deaths two
years ago to current number of deaths for COVID.
[5]
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/coronavirus-diseases-comparing-covid-19-sars-mers-numbers-n1150321
[6]
https://www.dailywire.com/news/israeli-study-suggests-lockdown-has-no-effect-on-coronavirus-timeline-say-israeli-space-agency-chair. See also Mark Meuser, Esq. analysis of five states with lockdown
compared to five states of comparable size with NO lockdown and
concluding locked down states have substantially worse mortality
rates.
[7]
https://medium.com/@ra.hobday/coronavirus-and-the-sun-a-lesson-from-the-1918-influenza-pandemic-509151dc8065 (noting that
"put simply, medics found that severely ill flu
patients nursed outdoors recovered better than those treated
indoors. A combination of fresh air and sunlight seems to have
prevented deaths among patients; and infections among medical
staff.[1] There is scientific support for this. Research shows
that outdoor air is a natural disinfectant. Fresh air can kill
the flu virus and other harmful germs. Equally, sunlight is
germicidal and there is now evidence it can kill the flu virus).
[8]
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-03-25/gavin-newsom-stay-at-home-order-quarantine-coronavirus-covid-19. See also
https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/04/15/barr-even-in-times-of-emergency-federal-law-prohibits-religious-discrimination/. See also
https://rewire.news/ablc/2016/04/01/boom-lawyered-levels-judicial-scrutiny-edition/
[9]
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/21/840262570/barr-open-to-legal-action-if-governors-restrictions-go-too-far and see also
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-21/barr-says-doj-may-act-against-governors-with-strict-virus-limits
[10]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole. Note all subsequent references are from this citation, unless
otherwise noted.
[11]
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/03/30/hellhole
[12]
https://www.noisolation.com/global/research/consequences-of-social-isolation-for-children-and-adolescents/
[13]
https://www.knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2018/hidden-damage-solitary-confinement
[14]
https://nypost.com/2020/04/12/teen-commits-suicide-likely-over-stress-from-coronavirus-lockdown,
and see also OC Register.com.
[15] (PNAS,
Vol. 112, No. 49, 2015).https://www.apa.org/monitor/2019/05/ce-corner-isolation
[16]
https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W1bwkyYAACUAqy10
[17]
https://wellcomecollection.org/articles/W1bwkyYAACUAqy10
[18]
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/02/090215151800.htm
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