The Roundup: Week Ending September 24, 2022

The RoundUp collects the most recent news, listens and observations that caught my attention. Here’s a few things that happened. I’ll comment on some of them below.

• An Enneagram Podcast (For those of you know me, I’m sure you’re shocked that I listened to something about the Enneagram. Read on, and you may understand why.)
• A Tribute to Frederick Buechner
• Lockdown investigations
• More on Alex Berenson’s lawsuit with Twitter
• “The pandemic is over.” – Joe Biden (woot! or not?)
• Real scientists searching for Bigfoot on the down-low

A tribute to Frederick Buechner

In my post, Learning from Yearning, I wrote:

Prolific author and Presbyterian minister Frederick Buechner died last month at the age of 96 (the same age that Queen Elizabeth died). More will be written about the queen than Buechner, but he most definitely wrote more than the queen.

I haven’t ever read anything by Buechner, so I’ve added Telling the Truth to my reading list.

I was delighted to discover Jason Gray’s tribute to Buechner. I encourage you to read it and see if you don’t also find yourself adding one of Buechner’s books to your to-read list.

Buechner’s faith was colorful and rich with darkness and light, belief and doubt, childlike wonder, and raw, earthy humanity. It wasn’t polite. It wasn’t safe. It was beautiful. It was ugly. He quoted Shakespeare as much as he quoted the Bible. He heeded the words of Edgar from Shakespeare’s King Lear: “…speak the truth, not what we ought to say…” It all felt real. It felt human. And for those reasons it felt holy. …The words he wrote became a trail of crumbs that not only led me back to the heart of God, but also back to my own heart.¹

Investigating the reasons behind COVID lockdowns

This week, Michael Senger posted a summation of what we are now learning about lockdowns and their damaging impacts. He is the author of Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.

If you’re still scratching your head about the lockdowns and the causes and reasons behind them, his article is well worth digesting. A few bullet points:

• “Former UN Assistant Secretary-General Ramesh Thakur documented in scrupulous detail, the harms that lockdowns would cause. They were all well-known and reported at the time they were first adopted as policy in early 2020.”²

• “For reasons we’re still only beginning to understand, some key scientists, health officials, national security officials, media entities, international organizations, billionaires and influencers advocated the broad imposition of these unprecedented, devastating policies from the earliest possible date.”
• “The lockdowns [that were] advocated were deliberately intended to overturn existing public health practices. [Leaders] instructed the public to “follow the science,” leading the public to believe that their policies were grounded in established scientific practice.”
• “Ultimately, these lockdowns failed to meaningfully slow the spread of the coronavirus and killed tens of thousands of young people in every country in which they were tried. We now know the virus had already begun spreadingundetected all over the world by fall 2019 at the latest and had an infection fatality rate under 0.2%.”

A podcast about the Enneagam

I recently took the Hogan Assessment for a leadership group I’m in. It produced more than 20 pages of details. It was honestly overwhelming. I’m still not sure how accurate it is. However, it got me thinking about the simplicity of the Enneagram (which I’ve poopooed for a long time due to its almost cult-like following). I took the time to listen to this podcast about Typ1 1 (my type), and I was pleasantly surprised.

More on the Alex Berenson vs Twitter front

The Federalist reported that Twitter was pushed (perhaps instructed) to ban Berenson and others, which obviously represents a dangerous state of government-sponsored censorship.

Pot, meet kettle. Those words accurately describe reactions to the recent publication of documents indicating that former Biden COVID advisor Andy Slavitt worked to have writer Alex Berenson banned from Twitter last year… Slavitt pushed for action against Berenson, because the latter represented an “epicenter of disinfo[rmation] that radiated outwards to the persuadable public” regarding covid vaccines.³

“The pandemic is over.”

So declared President Biden last Sunday night on his interview with 60 Minutes.

“We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,” said Mr Biden in a television interview.⁴

Real scientists are searching for Bigfoot… sssshhhh

Imagine my delight when I found out from the Wall Street Journal that there is indeed legit searching for our friend Squatchy. Scientists keep it on the down-low, because they don’t want their reputations besmirched by Bigfoot-deniers.

“…a growing number of sober-minded researchers have been dipping their toes into the Bigfoot world… ‘The number of academic individuals that are interested’ is ‘exploding,’ said Shane Corson, who helps run a Bigfoot research effort in Washington state called the Olympic Project. ‘But they’re kind of in the Sasquatch closet.’”⁵

1. Frederick Buechner, God’s Handkerchief (Part 1) by Jason Gray on The Rabbit Room, September 13, 2022[↩]
2. No, Lockdown Instigators Do Not Deserve the Benefit of the Doubt by Michael Senger, The New Normal, September 20, 2022The article references a news item in the National Post on September 27, 2022 titled “Military leaders saw pandemic as unique opportunity to test propaganda on Canadians: report.”
   

   “The plan devised by the Canadian Joint Operations Command, also known as CJOC, relied on propaganda techniques similar to those employed during the Afghanistan war. The campaign called for “shaping” and “exploiting” information. CJOC claimed the information operations scheme was needed to head off civil disobedience by Canadians during the coronavirus pandemic and to bolster government messages about the pandemic.”[↩]

3. Biden Official Who Got Twitter To Censor Alex Berenson Has History Of Publishing Misinformation by Christopher Jacobs, National Review, September 21, 2022

   Berenson spoke at Hillsdale College in October 2021, prior to publication of his book, Pandemia: How Coronavirus Hysteria Took Over Our Government, Rights, and Lives. You can find the article/speech at Hillsdale College’s student newspaper.[↩]

4. Covid-19 pandemic is over in the US – Joe Biden by Bernd Debusmann Jr, BBC News, Washington, September 20, 2022[↩]
5. Some Researchers Are Looking for Bigfoot—Just Don’t Tell Anyone by Kris Maher, Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2022[↩]