Month: June 2023

The Great Reset and the War for the World by Alex Jones – Book

From a Google Image Search – Current Affairs

I made a new friend who said that he liked Alex Jones and thought that everyone should listen to what he has to say. I wanted to say a few choice words about Mr. Jones but when I searched my Alex Jones schema in my old gray matter, I found that my scaffolding was shockingly full of holes. What I did know is that he claimed on his media platforms that the Sandy Hook massacre of twenty-six school children, teachers, and staff never happened, that it was “fake news.” He was convicted in a civil suit of defamation and ordered to pay a very large financial penalty ($473M). This factoid certainly doesn’t work in favor of Jones in my estimation, but my friend is, in fact, a genius, and he thinks this guy is brilliant so, in an attempt to fill in the holes in my brain, I decided to read Alex Jones’ book The Great Reset and the War for the World.

It turns out that Alex Jones is either very paranoid and is offering us a timely warning, or has been misguided by his right-wing leanings (or both). His book is written in the style used in Bible studies as an exegesis of books by other authors. He begins with a detailed discussion of Klaus Schwab’s book, The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Klaus Schwab is the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum which sponsors the annual meeting of the wealthy and powerful from around the world in Davos, Switzerland. Jones quotes a section of Schwab’s text and then reacts to it. His theory is that these world leaders are up to no good in Switzerland, or whenever they speak together. He sees “globalization” as a danger to ordinary humans. He is talking about global government rather than global trade although he does address global trade later in his book. Jones warns us that world leaders plan to rule over all nations and will destroy all national governments, economies and cultures replacing individuals with essentially human clones. They will do this through surveillance, fear, threats, whatever it takes. They will be free, we won’t. 

Jones’ paranoia extends to the area of vaccines. Vaccines could be used for nefarious purposes. They could be used for mind control. They could be used to control overpopulation. They could just be toxins that are slowly killing us on behalf of the rich and powerful.

He expresses the right-wing paranoia about strategies that are supposed to be designed to improve livability factors that are being challenged by climate change. If climate change is made up or if, as right-wingers contend, humans didn’t cause it and nothing we can do will fix it, then perhaps the issue is simply being used, he suggests, as more tactical ammunition for globalists who want to corral us all into cities where we will be easy to spy on and where we can be put to work at menial tasks which limit any time we might have to exercise freedom of thought or action. 

Another chapter is dedicated to the messages that environmentalists are putting out about our food. Without nitrogen-based fertilizers, the manufacture of which releases lots of CO2, we will not be able to grow enough food to feed the growing earth population. Bill Gates, for example, has a factory/research center to design plant-based meats that can replace beef, chicken, and pork because all of these animals are sources of methane emission, and contribute more to global warming than things that release CO2 directly. “What if,” asks Alex Jones, “even what is going on with our food is part of the global takeover by the wealthy class?” (Not a direct quote). He asks the same question about the supply chain.

We can all tap into this paranoia about what the rich and powerful are up to. We all would like to believe that climate change is a made-up crisis. We may not make millions or billions from fossil fuels as many of the rich and powerful have, but we have kept warm in winter and cool in summer fairly predictably with fossil fuels and we’re not sure that alternative energies are up to the job or will offer the same comfort. But we suspect that we cannot trust people in the oil and gas industries to speak the truth in these matters. Those who argue about changing our habits to lessen our CO2 emissions do not seem to have a dog in the fight as the oil and gas people do. 

How paranoid should we be? Can we stop these guys from world domination? How would we go about that? Would we be willing to give up our freedom if our creature comforts were protected? Would we be willing to fight for our freedom when we have such a nebulous grasp of what freedom means that we think wearing a mask to protect us from disease is a true risk to our freedom? 

Whether you believe Alex Jones’s paranoia is justified and an important forewarning of a future we always hoped to defend against or not, this man, with only an associate degree from a community college in Austin, Texas has managed to make a fortune on social media and podcasts and radio, etc., preaching the gospel against globalism and blaming everything bad on the left, while the right-wing chooses dictators as cohorts, dictators like Orbán in Hungary and Putin in Russia.

Is he a “shock jock” with a suitably raspy voice and the disheveled grooming of a modern philosopher, is he a true philosopher, or is he just a guy who knew how to exploit the gifts life gave him. I find him confusing. He says things we have all thought about the rich and powerful but attributes the policies that will help the globalists win to the Left, while we can clearly see that it is the Right protecting the hoarding of money with tax cuts, giving money human rights as in Citizens United v the FEC, and thus growing the power of the wealthy.

Perhaps the rich and powerful do not divide the world into left and right; rather simply by rich and not rich. I have not become an Alex Jones devotee, but I have learned more about him. If making a fortune is the test of brilliance, then well-done Alex. However, simply accruing wealth does not offer absolute proof of genius, or at least it didn’t used to. Perhaps we no longer know what true genius is. None of our heroes seem able to pass the tests of a divided nation/world.

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese – Book

From a Google Image Search – Chicago Review of Books

There have been two books by beloved fiction authors published recently that are set in the same area in India, along the southwestern coast. Salman Rushdie’s offering, Victory City, is a mythic fantasy that is inspired by the site of an ancient and fallen civilization. The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese is set in the years from 1900 – 1977 as a family saga and an exploration of how the effects of a hereditary condition affect the fortunes of the family. Verghese, who also wrote the best-selling novel Cutting for Stone, is known for the medical stories he tells. 

The Covenant of Water takes place in the watery landscape that is known today as the state of Kerala. We begin in the years of British occupation, although this is not a story about imperialism and winning independence. India does win free of Britain during this period, but the novel is the story of a family living on a property known as Parambil. A very young woman is contracted to wed the owner of Parambil and we share her trepidation as she travels along the waterways that provide transportation throughout the area. She is a Christian woman and is marrying a man who belongs to the same church of St. Thomas. Her husband lost his wife to childbirth and the child lived. He gives his twelve-year-old wife time to grow into the relationship. 

Big Ammachi is the name that this child-woman becomes known by as she becomes the stable and enduring center of the family. She discovers that many of the members of this family she has married into suffer from an aversion to water. This is a big deal in the watery world they occupy. When those who are afflicted get into water they become disoriented, and grievous accidents and drownings cause beloved family members to die early. The family keeps a family tree that records the tragic path of destruction that “the Condition” has left behind. There is no science to explain this type of hereditary situation in 1900, and in fact the physical basis for this condition is not known until we arrive in 1977 near the end of this book. 

In a parallel story we have the promising doctor, Digby Kilgore, in India but from Scotland, who is beginning a career in surgery. He is partnered with a doctor addicted to alcohol who leaves all the Indian patients to Digby while he treats the very few white patients who are admitted into a separate ward. Digby falls in love with Celeste, the talented wife of this addicted surgeon who should have already lost his right to practice medicine. Their passion leads to a fire that changes Digby’s life forever. With his burned hands he knows his time as a surgeon is over. Connections he has made as a surgeon lead to the next chapter of his life which becomes intwined in the life of a man who builds a compound for lepers. He falls in love again with Elsiamma the beautiful wife of Philipose, Big Ammachi’s grandson. Eventually this connection leads to finding the cause of “the Condition.” Mariamma, who believes she is the child of Philipose and Elsie, learns about her true parentage when her life crosses the life of Digby Kilgore.

Besides offering glimpses into a part of the world we were basically unacquainted with, we get a sense of the slow development of our store of information about disease and the hereditary roots of it. Science cannot offer insight until the tools that allow observations inside the body have been invented. And the brain is almost impossible to study humanely while we are alive, at least this was true before modern imaging and is still true to some extent. It took three-quarters of a century to trace the origins of this one disease, which affected so few people that the discovery of its roots was almost stumbled upon by accident. If Mariamma had not decided to become a doctor the discovery may have been delayed even longer. 

There is an aspect of both Rushdie’s Victory City and Verghese’s The Covenant of Water that gives them common cause besides geography and that is the focus given to women, their victories, and their heartbreaks. Pampa Kampana, the woman who creates Victory City, ironically never gets to rule it. She does, however, establish that women will one day give up entering the fire, as her mother did, when their husband dies. Since the women in The Covenant of Water are rarely affected by “the Condition” and since Big Ammachi did not have this genetic defect she forms the backbone of her family and her village, offering warmth and love to all who inhabit her world including “Damo” the elephant who often visits and who Big Ammachi once caught looking into her kitchen with his big old elephant eye. Romance is also a part of Verghese’s story, although even the happiest of unions face tragic circumstances. Even the lepers are treated lovingly and the research on leprosy makes possible the research on “the Condition.” This is a long novel, but following at least three, possibly four generations of one family takes time and we learn that, simple or fancy, life makes unsung heroes and heroines irrespective of economics.