Vampirism, Venture Capital and Total Vapidity
Loomer is right. Casey Means is a quack. But is she useful?
Ah yes, here we are again. We’re promised all these innovations from health tech and health influencers but they never seem to show up, do they?
I’m referring, of course, to the wellness cult and its discontents. As so often happens the most culty people are drawn to it. We might ask ourselves: are their delusions a threat to the rest of us? When is the cult silly? And when do they force us to drink the Kool-Aid at Jonestown?
This past week brought word from The New York Times’s Robert Copeland that Billy Evans, the husband of convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes, has his own blood testing startup. Evans is the scion of the Mormon San Diego hotelier family — his relatives wrote something asking for leniency for Elizabeth Holmes based upon their Mormon faith. Apparently Evans, the single father of two, found time to start a startup in the same field as his now jailed wife. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery and the couple that crimes together, stays together.
This detail is a bit much even for me but it does suggest something that I’ve long believed — that Theranos was some sort of foreign-backed op in much the same way 23&Me was. We’ve addresses this health tech fraud elsewhere but it seems newly relevant once again. Can you even have market mechanisms in health care anyway? Discuss amongst yourselves.
One of the things we’ve probed elsewhere is how a lot of Mormon hoteliers are about extracting a vig from people transiting. Might blood testing be much the same? There’s something vampiric about all this but then again, maybe there’s something vampiric about venture capital generally. Peter Thiel would dress up as Dracula but, of course, there’s something dangerous about all that.
There should be a lot more attention here than there is. We should be more focused on say, the Mormon relationship with Iran Contra — which of course links to Elizabeth Holmes’s family member who was the ambassador to Iran and to that other family member who was a Hungarian Jewish fraudster.
To what extent is Brian Johnson’s obsession with living forever just warmed over Mormonism of his youth? Isn’t there something vampiric about this desire to live forever? What a terribly odd thing if heaven is going to be so great anyway.
How much is all of this a great delusion, how dangerous is it, I couldn’t say. There’s something deeply wrong here with this longevity nonsense and Elizabeth Holmes penetrated your local pharmacy before she was stopped. Let’s not forget that Walgreens invested some $140m into Theranos and ultimately paid a paltry $44m to settle a class action after it rolled out 40 blood-draw sites. Walgreens maintained that it was a victim of Theranos's fraud and did not know that Theranos's tests were not market-ready. Shouldn’t we be asking what else Walgreens is selling to the public without doing due diligence? And we haven’t even gone there with Walgreens considerable role in the opoid scandal for which the company agreed to pay at least $350m.
No, I’ve never really bought the official Theranos story — and I still don’t, if I’m honest.
I’ve come to believe a lot of these health care tech companies are something of a dodge. In point of fact I suspect a lot of the wellness obsession is to avoid the roll of Big Oil in poisoning the world with plastics. You think that affects fertility? Of course it does. But they have a solution there too — freeze your eggs and use their IVF clinics. Do you think that foreign-funded IVF clinics will select who and who can’t be a parent? Of course they will.
You can play games and tell everyone that the pollution is making the frogs gay and even get a crank like Alex Jones to say it but it’s very obvious that these forever chemicals are having a negative effect.
Americans are reportedly eating a credit card worth of plastic a month thanks to the drinking water, eating food and even breathing air.
You’d expect people to want to fix this fact of life but instead the focus is placed on the victims of the poisoning and what they can do rather than on the polluters themselves.
Oh yes, the focus is about obsessively working out — what’s Instagram for if not for flexing? — but not fixing the problems inherent in the food supply. Of course Big Agriculture is producing food without nutrients so people eat more—and give agribusinesses more money.
We should be asking not why people are getting fat but whether or not they are getting fat by design and who benefits from that fattening up.
Why is it that it is becoming seemingly harder to digest the foods our agribusinesses produce? Why are allergies on the rise? Instead, we get so-called health tech which grifts off of these increasingly sick people. You can kind of think of a lot of this stuff as just one great rip off.
And if you can make someone a diabetic, you can make them a prisoner for life. The hypochondriac’s desire to measure everything at all times becomes the means by which he snitches on himself to his health insurance company. Do we even have doctor patient confidentiality if everything the doctor writes down goes to the United Health Groups of the world?
How venture backable is all of this nonsense? Not very. But follow the logic. Are the venture funds which are so often backed by foreign governments a kind of attack on us? Or is the grift the attack or the attack the grift? Is the sheer carelessness of the thing worse than an outright malfeasance?
These are the thoughts that are running through my mind as we consider the elevation of Dr. Casey Means to be Surgeon General. We’re not supposed to talk about how her brother—and apparent business partner and coauthor—is a food lobbyist and what that portends. Their family enterprise is now a subject we have to contend with. This is what controlled opposition looks like, folks. The Means siblings continue to push the fraud that “gut health” drives a lot of “metabolic dysfunction” whatever that is. These quacks hide in their complicated speech.
Oh yes, there’s been too little focus on the quackery behind continuous glucose monitoring for healthy people which is, in fact, what Levels, the company Casey Means cofounded, is all about.
How much all this new age nonsense is but a cover for moving foreign money remains to be seen. Dr Means’s father worked for the very Russian-friendly Vice President Nelson Rockefeller. The elder Means went on to work in accounting, especially as a managing partner for PriceWaterhouseCoopers. How should we take that given how little accountability his children have shown?
Can we expect the same cavalier approach to personal identifiable information for your health as we got with 23 & Me which found itself the target of hacking?
How should we think of Means’s cofounder Levels CEO Sam Corcos and his Russian-Jewish wife’s connections to sanctioned Russian oligarchs? Might this be a threat?
If Levels is doing well why are two of its founders suddenly working in government? Does this not smack of an infiltration operation?
As Facebook — another Russian-Jewish and Likudnik enterprise — faces its day in court Levels is the logical extension of Mark Zuckerberg’s predatory behavior but with a twist: we’ll monetize your bloodstream rather than your clickstream.
I don’t think it’s that odd that Sheryl Sandberg wanted to use Facebook to push organ donation. Are we really supposed to ignore the ties of the Odessa mob to organ trafficking?
I suspect much of this effort is to identify the people who are prediabetic — and to push them into diabetes. This is absolutely a national security issue. We know, for example, that the Israelis recruit diabetics. In our own society David Frum — the disgraced Iraq war proponent — recruited diabetic Katie McHugh to lie about conservatives critical of the Zionist efforts.
Oh yes, control over life saving drugs is a national security issue.
Few understand that Trump gets this. Hence the necessity of lowering of drug prices. We love
To be sure there is plenty of quackery around “mental health.” Laura Loomer is often accused of being a bit loopy but then again, so am I.
And let’s be honest that much of the medical establishment has failed. But the answer to a weak medical establishment isn’t to jettison it all entirely in favor of con artists and podcasters.
That is, unless the real objective is to identify all of them and to watch them.
What’s that you say?
A government job is a punishment?
Oh well, in that case…
Interesting article.
One thing I have found however is Government jobs are to keep dangerous things on leashes instead of allowing them to run wild.
Perhaps it’s simply because no reputable businesses want to advertise on Rumble, but anyone that uses Rumble can testify to the fact that at least 70% of the advertisements on the platform are related to health quackery. A lot of ‘gut health fixes’ etc etc.