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Dr. Fauci’s challenge—to prove that HCQ is dangerous—was daunting because hydroxychloroquine is a 65-year-old formula that regulators around the globe long ago approved as both safe and effective against a variety of illnesses. HCQ is an analog of the quinine found in the bark of the cinchona tree that George Washington used to protect his troops from malaria. For decades, WHO has listed HCQ as an “essential medicine,” proven effective against a long list of ailments.
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The statistics on post-traumatic-stress-related suicides, violence, addiction, and risk-taking all point to this haunting truth: For soldiers serving in Afghanistan and Iraq, coming home is more lethal than being in combat. From the invasion of Afghanistan to the summer of 2009, the US military lost 761 soldiers in combat in that country. Compare that to the 817 who took their own lives over the same period.
Lawyers—an example of a profession largely trained in win or lose, succeed or fail—have outcomes that aren’t much better. The American Bar Association reports that suicides among lawyers are close to four times greater than the rate of the general population.
When we teach or model to our children that vulnerability is dangerous and should be pushed away, we lead them directly into danger and disconnection.
DARING GREATLY: REDEFINING SUCCESS, REINTEGRATING VULNERABILITY, AND SEEKING SUPPORT
Love and belonging are irreducible needs of men, women, and children, and love and belonging are impossible to experience without vulnerability. Living without connection—without knowing love and belonging—is not victory.
Dare greatly and take actions that communicate to veterans or military families that they are not alone. Actions that communicate, “Your struggle is my struggle. Your trauma is my trauma. Your healing is my healing.”
If we’re forced into seeing the world through the Viking-or-Victim lens as a survival mechanism, then it can feel impossible or even deadly to let go of that worldview. How can we expect someone to give up a way of seeing and understanding the world that has physically, cognitively, or emotionally kept them alive? None of us is ever able to part with our survival strategies without significant support and the cultivation of replacement strategies. Putting down the Viking-or-Victim shield often requires help from a professional—someone who understands trauma.
You can’t use vulnerability to discharge your own discomfort, or as a tolerance barometer in a relationship.
Ordinarily, when we reach out and share ourselves—our fears, hopes, struggles, and joy—we create small sparks of connection. Our shared vulnerability creates light in normally dark places.
When it comes to vulnerability, connectivity means sharing our stories with people who have earned the right to hear them—people with whom we’ve cultivated relationships that can bear the weight of our story. Is there trust? Is there mutual empathy? Is there reciprocal sharing? Can we ask for what we need? These are the crucial connection questions.
When we share vulnerability, especially shame stories, with someone with whom there is no connectivity, their emotional (and sometimes physical) response is often to wince, as if we have shone a floodlight in their eyes. Instead of a strand of delicate lights, our shared vulnerability is blinding, harsh, and unbearable. If we are on the receiving end, our hands fly up and cover our faces, we squeeze our entire faces (not just our eyes) shut, and we look away. When it’s over, we feel depleted, confused, and sometimes even manipulated. Not exactly the empathic response that those telling the story were hoping for.
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THE CARE AND FEEDING OF OUR SPIRITS
When we’re anxious, disconnected, vulnerable, alone, and feeling helpless, the booze and food and work and endless hours online feel like comfort, but in reality they’re only casting their long shadows over our lives. “Shadow comforts can take any form. It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference. You can eat a piece of chocolate as a holy wafer of sweetness—a real comfort—or you can cram an entire chocolate bar into your mouth without even tasting it in a frantic attempt to soothe yourself—a shadow comfort. You can chat on message boards for half an hour and be energized by community and ready to go back to work, or you can chat on message boards because you’re avoiding talking to your partner about how angry he or she made you last night.”
“It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference.”
Are my choices comforting and nourishing my spirit, or are they temporary reprieves from vulnerability and difficult emotions ultimately diminishing my spirit? Are my choices leading to my Wholeheartedness, or do they leave me feeling empty and searching?
As we think about nourishing or diminishing our spirit, we have to consider how our numbing behaviors affect the people around us—even strangers.
When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.
Martin Buber, an Austrian-born philosopher, wrote about the differences between an I-it relationship and an I-you relationship. An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects—people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy. Buber wrote, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”
Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves—a force grounded in love and compassion.
THE SHIELD: VIKING OR VICTIM
Either you’re a Victim in life—a sucker or a loser who’s always being taken advantage of and can’t hold your own—or you’re a Viking—someone who sees the threat of being victimized as a constant, so you stay in control, you dominate, you exert power over things, and you never show vulnerability.
“The world is divided into assholes and suckers. It’s that simple.”
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Repurposed medicines, the record shows, could also have drastically reduced death among hospitalized patients. Using ivermectin and a cocktail of anti-inflammatories, steroids, and anticoagulants since Spring 2020, Dr. Varon lowered hospital mortality among ICU COVID patients to about 4.1 percent, compared to well over 23 percent nationally. “Even in the ICUs where patients were coming in undertreated, we were able to dramatically reduce mortality,” says Dr. Kory. “Almost anything you do in the nursing homes—basically, any combination of the various components of these protocols—reduces mortalities by at least 60 percent,”
The study concludes that even the most modest early medical therapy combinations were associated with 60 percent reductions in mortality. Says Dr. McCullough, “Therapeutic nihilism was the real killer of America’s seniors.”
Early in the pandemic, two Spanish nursing homes simultaneously experimented with early treatment with cheap, available repurposed drugs and achieved 100 percent survival among infected residents and staff.
Not a single medical center set up even a tent to try to treat patients and prevent hospitalization and death. There wasn’t an ounce of original research coming out of America available to fight COVID—other than vaccines.” All of these universities (Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Duke) are deeply dependent on billions of dollars that they receive from NIH. These institutions live in terror of offending Anthony Fauci, and that fear paralyzed them in the midst of the pandemic.
Instead of supporting McCullough’s work, NIH and the other federal regulators began actively censoring information on this range of effective remedies. Doctors who attempted merely to open discussion about the potential benefits of early treatments for COVID found themselves heavily and inexplicably censored. Dr. Fauci worked with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and other social media sites to muzzle discussion of any remedies. FDA sent a letter of warning that N-acetyle-L-cysteine (NAC) cannot be lawfully marketed as a dietary supplement, after decades of free access on health food shelves, and suppressed IV vitamin C, which the Chinese were using with extreme effectiveness.
Dr. McCullough used his own money to create a YouTube video showing four slides from his peer-reviewed American Medical Association articles to teach doctors the miraculous benefits of early treatment with HCQ and other remedies. His video went viral, with hundreds of thousands of downloads; YouTube pulled it two days later.
The relentless malpractice of deliberately withholding early effective COVID treatments, of forcing the use of toxic remdesivir, may have unnecessarily killed up to 500,000 Americans in hospitals. ⚰️🏥
“Dr. Fauci’s suppression of early treatments will go down in history as having caused the death of a half a million Americans in the ICU.”
“Never in the history of medicine,” says Dr. Cole, “has early treatment, of any patient with any disease, been so overtly neglected by the medical profession on such a massive scale.” “To not treat, especially in the midst of a highly transmissible, deadly disease, is to do harm.”
“If you are under 70 years of age and have no severe preexisting illness, you can hardly die [from SARS-CoV-2 infection]. So, there is no fatality rate that can be reduced. . . . And for people who are elderly and have preexisting illness,” he adds, “as we know from Dr. Peter McCullough and his colleagues’ work, there are miraculously effective medicines to treat this virus so that the fatality rates go down another 70 to 80 percent, which means there is no ground for emergency use whatsoever. That’s a huge threat to the vaccine cartel and to remdesivir.”
“A swell movie adaptation always sends me to the source material, so Arrival had me pick up Ted Chiang’s Stories of Your Life and Others: lean, relentless, and incandescent.” —Colson Whitehead, GQ
Ted Chiang has long been known as one of the most powerful science fiction writers working today. Offering readers the dual delights of the very strange and the heartbreakingly familiar, Arrival presents characters who must confront sudden change. In “Story of Your Life,” which provides the basis for the film Arrival, alien lifeforms suddenly appear on Earth. When a linguist is brought in to help communicate with them and discern their intentions, her new knowledge of their language and its nonlinear structure allows her to see future events and all the joy and pain they may bring. In each story of this incredible collection, with sharp intelligence and humor, Ted Chiang examines what it means to be alive in a world marked by uncertainty, but also by wonder.
What happens when America’s First Son falls in love with the Prince of Wales?
When his mother became President, Alex Claremont-Diaz was promptly cast as the American equivalent of a young royal. Handsome, charismatic, genius—his image is pure millennial-marketing gold for the White House. There’s only one problem: Alex has a beef with the actual prince, Henry, across the pond. And when the tabloids get hold of a photo involving an Alex-Henry altercation, U.S./British relations take a turn for the worse.
Heads of family, state, and other handlers devise a plan for damage control: staging a truce between the two rivals. What at first begins as a fake, Instragramable friendship grows deeper, and more dangerous, than either Alex or Henry could have imagined. Soon Alex finds himself hurtling into a secret romance with a surprisingly unstuffy Henry that could derail the campaign and upend two nations and begs the question: Can love save the world after all? Where do we find the courage, and the power, to be the people we are meant to be? And how can we learn to let our true colors shine through? Casey McQuiston’s Red, White & Royal Blue proves: true love isn’t always diplomatic. “I took this with me wherever I went and stole every second I had to read! Absorbing, hilarious, tender, sexy—this book had everything I crave. I’m jealous of all the readers out there who still get to experience Red, White & Royal Blue for the first time!” – Christina Lauren, New York Times bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners
From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb combines the global vision of the best historical scholarship with the immediacy of eyewitness journalism. Remnick takes us through the tumultuous 75-year period of Communist rule leading up to the collapse and gives us the voices of those who lived through it, from democratic activists to Party members, from anti-Semites to Holocaust survivors, from Gorbachev to Yeltsin to Sakharov. An extraordinary history of an empire undone, Lenin’s Tomb stands as essential reading for our times.
The entire course of history is revisited in this unique and unforgettable visual guide.
The most memorable moments and significant events of each year are charted in a definitive timeline that runs throughout the book. From the ancient origins of our earliest African ancestors right up to our modern world today, Timelines of History includes a diverse range of people, cultures, and countries. Ideas, inventions, and innovations come together to provide a truly global view of history. ??
Dramatic photography, eye-catching maps, and supporting graphics bring history to life as never before. The instantly accessible, multi-layered timeline enables you to move effortlessly through the ages. This essential reference strikes a balance between being completely comprehensive, but also ideal for browsing, thanks to the organized structure, chronological order, and bitesize information.??
This celebratory compendium makes an outstanding addition to any family library, enabling you to dip into the past any time you like.
“A lot of fascinating insights . . . an eye-opener worth reading.”—Parents
Highlighting the fascinating link between a child’s neurological development and the way a parent reacts to misbehavior, No-Drama Discipline provides an effective, compassionate road map for dealing with tantrums, tensions, and tears—without causing a scene.
Defining the true meaning of the “d” word (to instruct, not to shout or reprimand), the authors explain how to reach your child, redirect emotions, and turn a meltdown into an opportunity for growth. By doing so, the cycle of negative behavior (and punishment) is essentially brought to a halt, as problem solving becomes a win/win situation. Inside this sanity-saving guide you’ll discover
• strategies that help parents identify their own discipline philosophy—and master the best methods to communicate the lessons they are trying to impart • facts on child brain development—and what kind of discipline is most appropriate and constructive at all ages and stages • the way to calmly and lovingly connect with a child—no matter how extreme the behavior—while still setting clear and consistent limits • tips for navigating your child through a tantrum to achieve insight, empathy, and repair • twenty discipline mistakes even the best parents make—and how to stay focused on the principles of whole-brain parenting and discipline techniques
Complete with candid stories and playful illustrations that bring the authors’ suggestions to life, No-Drama Discipline shows you how to work with your child’s developing mind, peacefully resolve conflicts, and inspire happiness and strengthen resilience in everyone in the family.
From Leviathan Wakes to Leviathan Falls, James S. A. Corey’s Hugo Award-winning Expanse series has redefined modern space opera. Now, available in print for the first time comes the complete collection of short fiction set in the Expanse universe, including both a brand-new novella set after the events of Leviathan Falls and author’s notes on each story.
On Mars, a scientist experiments with a new engine that will one day become the drive that fuels humanity’s journey into the stars.
On an asteroid station, a group of prisoners are oblivious to the catastrophe that awaits them.
On a future Earth beset by overpopulation, pollution, and poverty, a crime boss desperately seeks to find a way off planet.
On an alien world, a human family struggles to establish a colony and make a new home.
All these stories and more are featured in this unmissable collection of short fiction set in the hardscrabble world of The Expanse.
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Crises are such valuable opportunities that a wise leader often prolongs a sense of emergency on purpose.
By hiring psychologists who peddled vaguely scientific tactics they claimed could make customers spend more. Some of those methods are still in use today. If you walk into a Walmart, Home Depot, or your local shopping center and look closely, you’ll see retailing tricks that have been around for decades, each designed to exploit your shopping subconscious.
Take, for instance, how you buy food. Chances are, the first things you see upon entering your grocery store are fruits and vegetables arranged in attractive, bountiful piles. If you think about it, positioning produce at the front of a store doesn’t make much sense, because fruits and vegetables bruise easily at the bottom of a shopping cart; logically, they should be situated by the registers, so they come at the end of a trip. But as marketers and psychologists figured out long ago, if we start our shopping sprees by loading up on healthy stuff, we’re much more likely to buy Doritos, Oreos, and frozen pizza when we encounter them later on. The burst of subconscious virtuousness that comes from first buying butternut squash makes it easier to later put a pint of ice cream in the cart.
Take the way most of us turn to the right after entering a store. (Did you know you turn right? It’s almost certain you do. There are thousands of hours of videotapes showing shoppers turning right once they clear the front doors.) As a result of this tendency, retailers fill the right side of the stores with the most profitable products they’re hoping you’ll buy right off the bat.
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Just as choosing the right keystone habits can create amazing change, the wrong ones can create disasters.
even destructive habits can be transformed by leaders who know how to seize the right opportunities. Sometimes, in the heat of a crisis, the right habits emerge.
Companies aren’t families. They’re battlefields in a civil war. Yet despite this capacity for internecine warfare, most companies roll along relatively peacefully, year after year, because they have routines— habits— that create truces that allow everyone to set aside their rivalries long enough to get a day’s work done. Organizational habits offer a basic promise: If you follow the established patterns and abide by the truce, then rivalries won’t destroy the company, the profits will roll in, and, eventually, everyone will get rich.
The problem with sabotage is that even if it’s good for you, it’s usually bad for the fi rm. So at most companies, an unspoken compact emerges: It’s okay to be ambitious, but if you play too rough, your peers will unite against you. On the other hand, if you focus on boosting your own department, rather than undermining your rival, you’ll probably get taken care of over time.
Most of the time, routines and truces work perfectly. Rivalries still exist, of course, but because of institutional habits, they’re kept within bounds and the business thrives. However, sometimes even a truce proves insufficient. Sometimes, an unstable peace can be as destructive as any civil war.
Truces are only durable when they create real justice. If a truce is unbalanced— if the peace isn’t real— then the routines often fail when they are needed most.
Creating successful organizations isn’t just a matter of balancing authority. For an organization to work, leaders must cultivate habits that both create a real and balanced peace and, paradoxically, make it absolutely clear who’s in charge.
Sometimes, one priority— or one department or one person or one goal— needs to overshadow everything else, though it might be unpopular or threaten the balance of power. Sometimes, a truce can create dangers that outweigh any peace.
During turmoil, organizational habits become malleable enough to both assign responsibility and create a more equitable balance of power. Crises are so valuable, in fact, that sometimes it’s worth stirring up a sense of looming catastrophe rather than letting it die down.
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Early Treatment
“The Best Practices for defeating an infectious disease epidemic,” says Yale epidemiologist Harvey Risch, “dictate that you quarantine and treat the sick, protect the most vulnerable, and aggressively develop repurposed therapeutic drugs, and use early treatment protocols to avoid hospitalizations.” Our objective should have been to devise treatments that would reduce hospitalization and death. We could have easily defanged COVID-19 so that it was less lethal than a seasonal flu. We could have done this very quickly. We could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Dr. Peter McCullough concurs: “Once a highly transmissible virus like COVID has a beachhead in a population, it is inevitable that it will spread to every individual who lacks immunity. You can slow the spread, but you cannot prevent it—any more than you can prevent the tide from rising.”
Dr. McCullough: “We could have dramatically reduced COVID fatalities and hospitalizations using early treatment protocols and repurposed drugs including ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and many, many others.” “Using repurposed drugs, we could have ended this pandemic by May 2020 and saved 500,000 American lives, but for Dr. Fauci’s hard-headed, tunnel vision on new vaccines and remdesivir.”
The efficacy of some of these drugs as prophylaxis is almost miraculous, plus early intervention in the week after exposure stops viral replication and prevents development of cytokine storm and entrance into the pulmonary phase,” says Dr. Pierre Kory. “We could have stopped the pandemic in its tracks in the spring of 2020.”
They point out that natural immunity, in all known cases, is superior to vaccine-induced immunity, being both more durable (it often lasts a lifetime) and broader spectrum—meaning it provides a shield against subsequent variants. “Vaccinating citizens with natural immunity should never have been our public health policy,” says Dr. Kory.
“It is absolutely shocking that he recommended no outpatient care, not even Vitamin D despite the fact he takes it himself and much of the country is Vitamin D deficient.”
“The outcome we should have been trying to prevent is hospitalizations. You don’t just sit around and wait for an infected patient to become ill.
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THE VULNERABILITY
THE word persona is the Greek term for “stage mask.” In my work masks and armor are perfect metaphors for how we protect ourselves from the discomfort of vulnerability. Masks make us feel safer even when they become suffocating.
Vulnerability is the last thing I want you to see in me, but the first thing I look for in you.
Common vulnerability arsenal:
Foreboding joy: the paradoxical dread that clamps down on momentary joyfulness;
Perfectionism: believing that doing everything perfectly means you’ll never feel shame;
Numbing: the embrace of whatever deadens the pain of discomfort and pain.
THE COMMON VULNERABILITY SHIELDS
THE SHIELD: FOREBODING JOY
Joy is probably the most difficult emotion to really feel. 😎 Because when we lose the ability or willingness to be vulnerable, joy becomes something we approach with deep foreboding. We just know that we crave more joy in our lives, that we are joy starved.
What the perpetual-disappointment folks describe is this: “It’s easier to live disappointed than it is to feel disappointed. It feels more vulnerable to dip in and out of disappointment than to just set up camp there. You sacrifice joy, but you suffer less pain.”
Softening into the joyful moments of our lives requires vulnerability.
Once we make the connection between vulnerability and joy, the answer is pretty straightforward: We’re trying to beat vulnerability to the punch. We don’t want to be blindsided by hurt. We don’t want to be caught off-guard, so we literally practice being devastated or never move from self-elected disappointment.
We’re desperate for more joy, but at the same time we can’t tolerate the vulnerability.
We’re visual people. We trust, consume, and mentally store what we see. 👀
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research tells us that we judge people in areas where we’re vulnerable to shame, especially picking folks who are doing worse than we’re doing.
If I feel good about my parenting, I have no interest in judging other people’s choices. If I feel good about my body, I don’t go around making fun of other people’s weight or appearance.
children who are engaging in the bullying behaviors or vying for social ranking by putting down others have parents who engage in the same behaviors.
Cultivating intimacy—physical or emotional—is almost impossible when our shame triggers meet head-on and create the perfect shame storm.
We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness, and affection.
Love is not something we give or get; it is something that we nurture and grow, a connection that can only be cultivated between two people when it exists within each one of them—we can only love others as much as we love ourselves. 💖💖💖
Shame, blame, disrespect, betrayal, and the withholding of affection damage the roots from which love grows. Love can only survive these injuries if they are acknowledged and healed.
But in practicing self-love over the past couple of years, I can say that it has immeasurably deepened my relationships with the people I love.
Shame is universal, but the messages and expectations that drive shame are organized by gender.
The expectations and messages that fuel shame keep us from fully realizing who we are as people.
If we’re going to find our way out of shame and back to each other, vulnerability is the path and courage is the light. To set down those lists of what we’re supposed to be is brave. To love ourselves and support each other in the process of becoming real is perhaps the greatest single act of daring greatly.
Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real, you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
