K M Bowman 🦅🇺🇸🌟

Everyone has the internet (Starlink) and knows about Christianity. Why are you going to Nicaragua? Have you sent your respectful modestly dressed youth to walk through neighborhoods and knock on doors? Or are you raising $35k so you can escape to South America for a quarter?

My maternal grandfather, a T4 cook, was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge and flown back to the UK and then to the US. He had night terrors and horrible headaches (later figured out they were migraines, a legacy passed on to me). They gave him shock treatment and pulled all his teeth. He only got relief with chiropractic care. Part of my dad ultimately becoming one. He was a farmer and rural postman. He ran a mule team in his garden for years.

Imagine holding this after 70 AD. Vespasian just put down the First Jewish Revolt. Judaea had fallen and the Second Temple was gone. Rome minted this to make sure everyone knew. IVDAEA CAPTA. Judaea Captured.

hm maybe he grew up out west or in a big east coast city? old dudes like us got exposed to classic Harmony Gold anime on Asian-language UHF television stations that ran them on weekday afternoons used to run home after school to catch the latest episode of Robotech that way

Today I learned that there's a specific tactic in information warfare known as "firehosing" or "firehose of falsehoods." It involves a constant, high-pace delivery of falsehoods or, especially, deliberate and malicious misinterpretation of people's words and actions. The strategy works by making the volume of falsehoods and malicious mischaracterization too high for targets and their associates to answer or refute. Have you seen this in action lately?

So, I was severely bullied by a friend group / cult in my early twenties. Two years ago I read the book Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, by Rachel Simmons, and it felt incredibly familiar. She explores the covert forms of bullying often employed by girls, but not only girls, in school—shunning, the silent treatment, gossip, ganging up on a single person. Simmons interviewed dozens of kids. She found that bullying is pervasive in the school system but tends to pass unnoticed by adults. Surprisingly, the bullies tend to be one’s best friends. Most bullying is inflicted by friend groups who turn on the victim suddenly. Thus the experience of being bullied is deeply scarring for many kids because the abuse was inflicted by their most intimate companions. It’s disorienting, and leaves us feeling that we must have done something to merit the abuse. We drive ourselves crazy with worry. Even more shockingly, Simmons found that the bullies often claimed not to have known that they were doing anything wrong. They seemed genuinely attached to their victims and thought they were being helpful. They view the hazing, shunning and slander as a form of tough love. In several of the cases Simmons studied, the bullying began when the victim learned a sexual secret about the bully—who is often a popular, charismatic ringleader, a Queen Bee. The bully then goes to extreme lengths to isolate and defame the secret-keeper so the secret remains hidden, which makes the bullying feel warranted. Bullying tends to manifest in communities where kids are socialized to be “nice” and polite. Not having an outlet for their feelings of anger and frustration, they end up unleashing them, collectively, on a group scapegoat—someone who is, often, too meek to resist. This is important, because people ask, “Why didn’t you defend yourself?” But in communities of toxic niceness, kids can’t protest mistreatment because they’ve been led to believe that even mild pushback will result in the loss of the friendship. Thus they keep silent. And make no mistake, emotional bullying can be just as devastating as physical bullying. For a period of two years I was severely bullied by a group of university friends who had formed their own religious sect. They accused me of doing witchcraft and collectively shunned me for nearly a year (we lived in the same house). Malicious lies were spread about me. I became so depressed that I stopped eating. One of my best friends, also abused and shunned by them, took her own life. These same patterns recur in the girls Simmons interviewed. One girl made the mistake of flirting with the “wrong” boy. Her friend group turned on her, telling teachers that she cheated on tests, threatening to kill her, writing sexually explicit letters to her crush signed with her name. But being a member of a friend group that bullies? It feels AMAZING. There’s a sense of righteousness at being in the inner circle, a collective exhilaration at hurting someone. One girl described it to Simmons as “a sense of power that I’d never felt before.” Being the scapegoat changes people in ways that are pretty consistent. We become chronically anxious that people hate us and that we’re accidentally upsetting them. We become terrified that folk are talking about us behind our backs. We don’t know who to trust. As Simmons writes: “Many survivors of bullying described feeling unfamiliar with the most basic rules of relationships … They no longer feel certain of what makes people angry or upset … This can turn a girl into a cautious ghost of her former self, stifled and silenced by fear.” In the book Simmons interviews a girl named Erin who was savagely mistreated in middle school. When it ended, Erin decided that she talked too much and had too much personality. She tried to disappear. She had recurring anxiety attacks and found it difficult to sleep. I was angry with my bullies for a long time. Distance and contemplation have given me a bit more perspective. “Forgiveness” is a loaded word in these contexts, but I no longer resent them for mistreating me. I realize they were young and dumb and wanted to be helpful. And letting go of past grievances has been good for my heart. I believe the goal of life is to become more compassionate the older we get, and for me that means being kind to those who have wronged me in the past—and being kind towards my younger self. Some of you may be reading this and realizing for the first time that you were bullied. Don’t make my mistake of spending years thinking you deserved abuse. Don’t shrink or diminish yourself because of long-ago voices. Don’t cower any longer in fear of the axe. And I’ll say this: I think former bullying victims can be some of the most beautiful people. You have an empathy and wisdom that is hard-won. I hope in time you’ll come to appreciate what has bloomed out of the foul dust of the past.

The year is 1873. Your wife tires easily and reads too much. The doctor prescribes the rest cure: six weeks flat in bed, no books, no visitors, fed on milk, forbidden to sit up without his permission. The man who devised it is the most famous nerve specialist in America, and the women come out of it quieter, which is taken as the cure. The year is 1915. The hospital has a new way of delivering your child. Morphine, then scopolamine, and the mother wakes two days later with a baby she cannot remember having. They call it twilight sleep. The women are strapped into padded cots so they do not hurt themselves while they scream, and the straps are the modern part. The babies arrive blue and slow to breathe. The year is 1945. The truck comes down your street fogging DDT, and the children run behind it in the white cloud because the man on the back says it is harmless. At the beach it is sprayed over the bathers on their towels. It goes on the cattle, over the barn, and across the kitchen table. The year is 1948. Your son has trouble with his ears. The doctor slides a rod tipped with radium up each nostril and holds it there for the best part of ten minutes, and you bring him back three more times. Hundreds of thousands of American children get the same treatment. The cancers arrive in their fifties. The year is 1962. The health visitor tells you breastfeeding is old-fashioned and the formula is scientific. By 1972 fewer than one American baby in four is breastfed at all. The formula is skimmed milk and sugar, with the milk fat taken out and vegetable oil put in. The year is 1971. The family planning clinic fits a small plastic crab called the Dalkon Shield. Its tail is a bundle of fibres that wicks bacteria up into the womb. 2.8 million are fitted in America before it is withdrawn, and the company goes bankrupt under the claims. It had been sold as safe and superior. The year is 1983. The doctor says your arteries are the butter's fault. The dripping tin goes in the bin, the yolks go to the dog, the margarine goes in the fridge, and you have the heart attack anyway, on skimmed milk, having done everything right. The year is 2001. Your 15-year-old is low, and the doctor prescribes Paxil, because the trial in the journal says it is effective and well tolerated in adolescents. The raw data, reanalysed 14 years later, shows more suicidal thinking on the drug than on the sugar pill. The company pays $3 billion to settle. Nobody rings the house. The year is 2009. The government has spent around £500 million stockpiling Tamiflu for the pandemic, on the strength of the manufacturer's trials. When the trials are finally prised loose five years later, the drug shortens flu by about half a day and nothing shows it keeps anyone out of hospital. The stockpile goes out of date in a warehouse. The year is 2026. The doctor has ten minutes and a screen. The number is high, so the tablet is for life. The weight is high, so the injection is for life. The meat is bad for the planet and the oil is good for the heart, and the person in the chair is as certain as everyone who ever sat in it. Every one of those was settled, by a committee, in a journal, with a doubter somewhere being laughed at. The rest cure, the straps, the fog, the rod, the formula, the crab, the margarine, the trial, the stockpile. All of it certain, all of it printed, all of it done to somebody who had asked for help. You were never the one who was wrong. You were the one it was done to, and the only person in the story who did as they were told every single time. The apology comes a generation late, in a footnote, addressed to nobody. The next one is being drafted now.

"Post-Heideggerian" theology is rich and interesting -- and it does depend on serious study of Heidegger. The work I regard as most important after Being and Time is Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event).

Recently I was talking with a guy from the bourgeoisie. Good schools, good job, good manners. I asked him: "Do you think there are too many people on Earth?" He said yes. Without a second of hesitation. I asked him why. He gave me two reasons. First: there aren't enough resources. Second, and I'm quoting him word for word: "I'm afraid of the masses." That second sentence chilled me. Because it admits what the first one disguises. This guy didn't come up with that opinion on his own. Nobody is born a Malthusian. You become one. And this belief has a history, authors, institutions, and funders. It starts with Thomas Malthus, an English clergyman who argued at the end of the 18th century that population would always grow faster than food, and that famine would take care of the surplus. There were 1 billion of us. Today there are more than 8 billion, and humanity has never eaten better in its entire history. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich publishes The Population Bomb. He predicts that hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in the 1970s. It doesn't happen. Norman Borlaug and the Green Revolution feed the world. Ehrlich never apologizes, and gets invited on every show for the next fifty years. In 1972, the Club of Rome, founded by an Italian industrialist and a Scottish scientist, commissions a report from MIT: The Limits to Growth. Computer models, collapse scenarios, resource depletion. The book becomes the bible of an entire generation. Degrowth is its direct descendant. In 1980, economist Julian Simon makes a bet with Ehrlich: the price of five metals, chosen by Ehrlich himself, will fall within ten years. By 1990, all five had fallen. Simon wins. Why? Because a human being is not a mouth to feed. A human being is a brain that solves problems. The ultimate resource is us. Fifty years later, the story hasn't changed. It just changed outfits. It's no longer "there won't be enough wheat," it's "your child has a carbon footprint." Studies get published explaining that not having children is the most ecological thing you can do. People discuss it at Davos, between two private jets. Bill Gates said it himself on the TED stage in 2010. He presents an equation to bring CO2 emissions down to zero, and the first term of that equation is P. People. He then explains that with vaccines, healthcare, and reproductive health, we could lower population projections by 10 to 15%. Nobody is talking about killing anyone. It's more subtle, and in my view more disturbing: a large part of the elite sincerely sees human beings as a variable to be reduced in an equation. And what happens when a technocratic elite actually takes this dogma all the way? You get China. In the late 1970s, Song Jian, a missile engineer for the regime, discovers the Club of Rome's work, runs his own projections, and convinces the Communist Party. The result: the one-child policy. Hundreds of millions of abortions and sterilizations, many of them forced. Today China sits around 1 child per woman and is set to lose a massive share of its population by the end of the century. Meanwhile, look at the numbers. South Korea: 0.8 children per woman. Taiwan: 0.7. Spain: 1.1. Japan: 1.14. And France, long the champion of Europe, has dropped to 1.56. In 2025, for the first time since World War II, my country recorded more deaths than births. Elon Musk has been saying it for years: population collapse is a far bigger danger to civilization than climate change. If people don't have more children, civilization will crumble. Japan will eventually cease to exist if nothing changes. And just yesterday: so many cultures are dying out. People call him alarmist. The curves prove him right. Now do a simple exercise. Take all 8 billion humans and pack them into a cube. It would be less than a kilometer on each side. All of humanity, in a volume smaller than a single neighborhood. Even better: if all of humanity lived at the density of Paris, it would fit in an area smaller than France. The rest of the planet would be empty. And the next time you fly, look out the window. Paris to San Francisco is hours over Greenland, the Canadian Arctic, deserts, forests, mountains. Emptiness. Thousands of miles without a single light. Cities cover roughly 1% of the Earth's land. We are not too many. We are tiny. And above all, we are far too few for what lies ahead. If we want to leave this cradle, build cities on Mars, mine asteroids, build orbital habitats, and then head for the stars, we won't need 8 billion humans. We'll need a trillion. Just to get started. Every human is a genetic and cultural lottery ticket. The more humans there are, the more Newtons, Pasteurs, and Von Neumanns. The more engineers, builders, artists, and explorers. Genius is a law of large numbers. So let me be clear. Everything you think you know about overpopulation is dogma. A dogma born with an English clergyman, turned into equations by the Club of Rome, enforced with a truncheon by the Chinese Communist Party, and recycled today by the degrowth left and the salons of Davos. It's not science. It's a worldview in which humans are a problem rather than a solution. And behind the resources argument, there is almost always what the guy I was talking to was honest enough to say out loud. Fear of the masses. The problem was never that there are too many of us. The problem is that soon there will be too few.

Well, since clotting events require players to sit out, and potentially extended periods they are out, professional sports are among the better settings to have accurate ascertainment. Ascertainment in the general population is much more challenging, but the fact these players have games it is clearly known they are out, and they are public figures whose time missing is clearly documented and reported, makes them an excellent group for this type of summary. And bottom line is we are comparing the same group from two time periods, and any bias you are insinuating would have to have substantially changed by a large magnitude between those time periods to affect these conclusions. I don't see how that would be the case, but am open to this idea if you want to suggest and substantiate a hypothesis about this bias occurring, and explaining how it would change the conclusions of no increase.

Are you suggesting that athletes are experiencing major clotting events serious enough to require placement on injured reserve, but that teams are routinely misrepresenting the reasons for their absences? Why would they do that? And is there any actual evidence that teams are concealing clotting events as the reason athletes are sidelined? Moreover, for this argument to have any relevance to our discussion, you would need to demonstrate that such underreporting disproportionately affected the 2020–2026 period compared with 2013–2019. After all, if the degree of underreporting were comparable across the two periods, it would not explain any apparent increase or decrease between them. Do you have any evidence of differential reporting or concealment between these periods? I haven't seen evidence supporting either claim, but I'm certainly open to considering any you can provide.