TOM WOODS: The inexcusable Bill Crystal was on the take on this thing. He was in a tizzy about this not because [he] believes in some idealistic devotion to helping [his] fellow man. That never enters their calculus

USAID has been a boondoggle like all development-aid programs (Peter Bauer tried to warn us), but it's far more sinister, as people are figuring out.

(The Bill Kristol connection is indirect, but it's there) pic.twitter.com/kCYo8XsPJG

— Tom Woods (@ThomasEWoods) February 6, 2025

ERIC HUNLEY: From 1948 to today, governments learned that controlling information meant controlling minds

From 1948 to today, governments learned that controlling information meant controlling minds. --Eric Hunley

Operation Mockingbird's playbook was simple:

• Recruit journalists
• Infiltrate newsrooms
• Shape public opinion
• Control the narrative

But in 2024, they didn't need to recruit anyone.

The pressure came from above, and the platforms complied. pic.twitter.com/EkexdsZF9i

— Eric Hunley (@hunleyeric) February 6, 2025 

Wholesale Arabica coffee prices are now above $4 per lb, an all-time high and more than double last year’s level

Wholesale Arabica coffee prices are now above $4 per lb, an all-time high and more than double last year’s level.

— unusual_whales (@unusual_whales) February 6, 2025

WHAT STORE-BOUGHT COFFEE BRANDS USE ARABICA BEANS?

Yuban, Seattle’s Best, Green Mountain, Caribou, Peet’s, Café du Monde, Gevalia, and New England Coffee all use 100% arabica beans in most of their store-bought coffee. Maxwell House, Folgers, Death Wish Coffee and most Lavazza coffee are blends of arabica and robusta.  

Thanks to EasyHomeCoffee.

Exiting from the Cult

This scene was exquisitely filmed.  Truman is alone on a boat out in the middle of beautiful nowhere, farther out than he'd ever been previously, when the bowsprit of his boat ruptures a beautiful sky that turns out to be a painting on a back panel of a movie set that literally forms the wall between reality and fiction.  Truman can't believe it yet knows it to so. He touches the wall and the crack to confirm the truth that viscerally begins to move into his conscience.  The crack doesn't mean he's free; the crack shifts the light.  A new world opens, and the old one is cracking.  The camera then pans out to a distant shot to capture the fact--that his world was just a painting, one of many to create his world.  

He tries hitting the wall, angry that he volunteered for its deceit, trying to break through to know how hollow the world he's been living in is.  He lets out a sigh upon that knowledge as if he'd known its emptiness, the vacuousness of it all along but never confirmed because everyone else's living in the Truman Show.  As his hand goes searching for confirmation the look on his face is "I knew it all along," and he did.  But that knowledge barely pierced his conscience.  He just didn't have a critical mind.  He was raised on innocence, reaffirmed by loving, doting parents who wanted to extend their parenting years of a child for as long as they could, so he had no reason to believe that innocence inspired by parental love wasn't the best model.

He slumps at the total losses in his investment in it and momentarily despairs.  The fight for truth has just begun and it is too much.  Everything that he's believed in has collapsed.  It's the bitter taste of being a fool.  

He gathers himself and begins walking away from the puncture along a plank at the foot of the wall.  From a distance, it looks like he's walking on water, an apt Christian figure to say that he has become his own savior by shedding the deceit.  Some say the best choice is to stay and fight, but visually this works.

Next, he finds a staircase and he climbs it without a rail, elevating his status to hero when he finds a door with the word "Exit" printed on it, an exit from the Milligram Experiment.  Still no joy from leaving a prefabricated world.  In fact, on the other side of the door, it's pitch black.  He can't see anything in the new, unknown world.  Could this new world be a repeat of the old world he's leaving, or could it be worse? Trading a known world where agency is controlled by others for him is worth it because a world where everybody is controlling him is a betrayal of his intelligence and light.

The show's creator, whose own existence is absent of genuine relationships and lived vicariously through Truman, tries to entice him with more psychopathic love to stay.  "You were real, which made you so good to watch."

The Truman Show, 1998.  There was another great movie that year, 1998, named Enemy of the State, starring Gene Hackman and Will Smith.

Inside Big Pharma with @hedleyrees - @JohnnyVedmore Live https://t.co/oNwWb7QS3F

— Johnny Vedmore (@JohnnyVedmore) February 6, 2025

Hedley Rees' Substack.  

Compliance Online explains that,

Hedley Rees is the author of "Supply Chain Management in the Drug Industry" and is a practicing consultant, coach and trainer, operating through his company Biotech PharmaFlow. He helps companies build, manage and improve their clinical trial and commercial supply chains.  

Prior to his time at Biotech Pharmaflow, Hedley held senior supply chain management positions at Bayer, British Biotech, Vernalis, Johnson & Johnson and OSI Pharmaceuticals. He holds an Executive MBA from Cranfield University School of Management and is a corporate member of the UK's Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (MCIPS). He is also a member of the UK BioIndustry Association's Manufacturing Advisory Committee, regularly speaks at international conferences and is co-chair of this year's FDA/Xavier University sponsored Global Outsourcing Conference in Cincinnati. His specific interest is in helping drive industry improvements through the regulatory modernization frameworks of FDA and ICH Q8 - Q10. He believes that along with the regulatory guidelines, it is imperative that companies developing and selling drugs make a massive cultural and mindset shift to enable improvements to stick.

03:00.  Johnny Vedmore from Wales will be talking about Big Pharma today with Hedley Rees whom he has spoken to a fair few times before and who is a fellow Welshman.  

05:27.  REES. Learned his skills outside of Pharma in electronics, automotive, and steel basic operations.  He's a production engineer and joined a company in Bridgend, Wales in 1979 at Miles Laboratories, which was manufacturing Alka-Seltzer for Europe.  We also made sterile injectables which are exactly what these injections are, these vaccines, and we made topical ointments in cream.  We really were in the day when the factory made everything from start to finish.  We'd buy the raw materials and then you convert them into the finished product and then you'd actually ship them to the pharmacies and clinics and even GP surgeries, so it's fully integrated.  I'd spent 16 years there.  I left in 1996 to join the biotech industry, British Biotech, and British biotech nearly brought the biotech industry to its knees because when I joined the share price was 27lb.  They were bigger than rail track and W.H. Smith, and when I left the share price was about 12 piece