8/30/2020

Covid : les appels à la raison se mutiplient...


Covid : les appels à la raison se mutiplient...

Or donc, les appels se multiplient appelant les autorités sanitaires et politiques à revenir à la raison -ce qui signifie pour parler français d'oser s'extraire de l'influence délétère des comités d'experts à la botte des pharmas, comme le concept de "corruption systémique" (abondamment documenté sur ces pages comme dans mon livre "Covid : anatomie d'une crise sanitaire") la met en lumière.
C'est tout le drame de nos autorités : de ne s'être appuyés que sur des groupes à la logique dévoyée (sans intention malfaisante), devenus par la force des choses les petites mains des intérêts crapuleux qui dominent le monde de la santé depuis plusieurs décennies.
Des collectifs de vrais experts au moins aussi qualifiés que ceux qui trônent dans les Task Force diverses et variée de nos pauvres démocraties font enfin entendre leur voix de manière sonore. Les parlements tentent aussi, même si un peu timidement, de reprendre la main. Et le peuple (vous savez, ce soi-disant souverain que le fantasme des puissants espère réduire depuis la nuit des temps à une simple passivité servile) se mobilise aussi enfin en nombre.
Cent mille personnes sont attendues à Zürich ce jour, un million en demi à Berlin, avec une prise de parole fort attendue de l'avocat américain Robert Kennedy Jr -grand défenseur des droits des patients et de la démocratie sanitaire- à l'endroit même où son oncle prononça son fameux "Ich bin ein Berliner" !
Comptons sur notre presse pour prétendre qu'ils auront en fait été 5'000 et 10'000, constitués bien sûr et uniquement de complotistes d'extrême droite (what else...) ! Ce genre de ficelles odieuses prend heureusement de moins en moins.
A Genève, Mauro Poggia continue de se féliciter que le gouvernement se soit attribué les pleins pouvoirs et ait agi avec la diligence requise. M. Poggia est un homme pour qui j'ai de l'estime, arrivé à la tête du département de la santé comme une bouffée d'air frais et de bonne volonté sincère après les années d'obscurantisme médical des magistratures Unger.
S'il continue à se défendre en visant ces "experts auto-proclamés" qui contredisent les cercles sous influence auxquels il a prêté foi -me visant sans doute au passage puisque c'est le costard qui m'a été taillé dans ma notoriété nouvelle- il lui restera le chemin de Canossa à parcourir de comprendre à un moment donné à quel point il s'est trompé -certes avec la circonstance atténuante d'avoir été manipulé.
Nos autorités finalement auront fait aussi faux qu'en France, tout en ayant eu le bon goût de le faire de manière moins autoritaire. Nous pouvons leur être gré de cette nuance et de cette retenue, qui aura rendu l'aventure moins invivable pour nous. Mais ne les exonérera pas d'un bilan redoutable.
Qui s'en rend déjà compte - à part les milieux économiques, avec leur pragmatisme ? Nous nous dirigeons du fait de la gestion insensée du Covid vers ni plus ni moins qu'une destruction massive de nos sociétés.
Un million de chômeurs supplémentaires auront été produits en France depuis le début de l'épidémie - et ce n'est qu'un début. On estime qu'un tiers au moins des PME, des commerces, des bars et restaurants, des hôtels vont disparaître, avec une augmentation massive du nombre de personnes précarisées et nécessiteuses accompagnée d'une réduction tout aussi drastique des recettes publiques et donc des moyens d'aider la population.
Sans compter l'explosion de la détresse et même du désespoir ainsi qu'un effondrement de la santé psychique.
Tout ceci à cause d'une épidémie qui n'aura été que la dixième plus grave (en termes de surmortalité) depuis l'après-guerre et dont la courbe épidémique s'est effondrée dès avril pour disparaître en mai !!!
J'invite les lectrices et lecteurs qui l'osent à lire le texte proposé ici. Il s'agit de l'appel international lancé par un autre panel de professionnels de la santé (professeurs, médecins, épidémiologistes, infirmiers, chercheurs, etc.) au nombre desquels figurent la biologiste Hélène Bannon, ancienne directrice de recherches à l'INSERM, dont nous avons accueilli à deux reprises les analyses passionnantes sur ce blog. Puis éventuellement de relire les textes que j'ai produits ici dès le 12 mars pour apprécier que tout ce que j'avais indiqué d'emblée est bel et bien aujourd'hui vérifié.
MM. Berset et Poggia auraient été autrement inspirés de m'écouter et d'écouter les meilleurs spécialistes vers lesquels je me suis tourné dans mon effort documentaire. Le monde est ainsi fait que les tout meilleurs (comme les Pr Ioannidis, Gotzsche, Giesecke ou Raoult) sont vilipendés et dénigrés par des quart de pointure qui beuglent des vérités qui n'en sont pas et auront précipité nos sociétés dans l'abîme.
Oui, l'analyse qui viendra forcément en son temps sera implacable pour beaucoup. Mais comme souvent, si elle fera (un peu) de bien, elle arrivera surtout TROP TARD.
Ouvrir les yeux, comme aurait dit ce pauvre Hollande, c'est maintenant !


“STOP ! Manipulations, masques, mensonges, peur…”
Un collectif international de professionnels de santé dénonce
des “mesures folles et disproportionnées”

Un collectif de professionnels de santé a lancé ce jour un “Message d’alerte international” adressé aux gouvernements et citoyens du monde entier. Parmi les signataires, des médecins de nombreux pays et plusieurs professeurs en médecine dont le microbiologiste Martin Haditsh.
Le collectif revient sur la dangerosité réelle du virus, la manipulation des chiffres, le rôle de l’OMS, les conséquences du confinement ou du port du masque, et demande notamment aux gouvernements de “lever toutes les restrictions et les obligations sur les citoyens”. Vous pouvez télécharger l’intégralité de cette lettre ici en français, ou ici en anglais.
Les professionnels de santé qui le souhaitent sont invités à rejoindre le collectif “United Health Professionnals” à l’adresse join.unitedhealthprofessionals@gmail.com
Nous, professionnels de santé, à travers plusieurs pays au monde :

1. Nous disons : STOP à toutes les mesures folles et disproportionnées qui ont été prises depuis le début pour lutter contre le SARS-CoV-2 (confinement, blocage de l’économie et de l’éducation, distanciation sociale, port de masques pour tous, etc) car elles sont totalement injustifiées, elles ne sont basées sur aucune preuve scientifique et elles violent les principes de base de la médecine basée sur les preuves. Par contre, nous soutenons bien sûr les mesures raisonnables comme les recommandations de lavage des mains, d’éternuer ou de tousser dans son coude, utiliser un mouchoir à usage unique, etc.
Ce n’est pas la première fois que l’humanité fait face à un nouveau virus : elle a connu le H2N2 en 1957, le H3N2 en 1968, le SARS-CoV en 2003, le H5N1 en 2004, le H1N1 en 2009, le MERS-CoV en 2012 et fait face tous les ans au virus de la grippe saisonnière. Pourtant, aucune des mesures prises pour le SARS-CoV-2 n’a été prise pour ces virus-là.

On nous dit :
«Mais, le SARS-CoV-2 est très contagieux» et nous répondons : C’EST FAUX. Cette affirmation est d’ailleurs rejetée par des experts de renommée internationale. Une simple comparaison avec les autres virus permet de constater que la contagiosité du SARS-CoV-2 est modérée. Ce sont des maladies comme la rougeole qui peuvent être qualifiées de très contagieuses. Par exemple, une personne atteinte de rougeole peut infecter jusqu’à 20 personnes alors qu’une personne infectée par ce coronavirus n’en contamine que 2 ou 3, soit : 10 fois moins que la rougeole.
– «Mais, c’est un virus nouveau» et nous répondons : H1N1 et les autres virus qu’on a cités étaient aussi des virus nouveaux. Pourtant : on n’a pas confiné les pays, on n’a pas bloqué l’économie mondiale, on n’a pas paralysé le système éducatif, on n’a pas fait de distanciation sociale et on n’a pas dit aux gens sains de porter des masques. De plus, certains experts disent qu’il est possible que ce virus circulait déjà avant mais qu’on s’en est pas rendu compte.
– «Mais, on n’a pas de vaccin» et nous répondons : au début de l’H1N1 on n’avait pas non plus de vaccin, comme à l’époque du SARS-CoV. Pourtant : on n’a pas confiné les pays, on n’a pas bloqué l’économie mondiale, on n’a pas paralysé le système éducatif, on n’a pas fait de distanciation sociale et on n’a pas dit aux gens sains de porter des masques.
– «Mais, ce virus est beaucoup plus mortel» et nous répondons : C’EST FAUX. Car rien que comparé à la grippe et si on prend en compte la période entre le 1er Novembre et le 31 Mars, il y a eu au niveau mondial -lorsque ces mesures ont été prises- : 860,000 cas et 40,000 morts alors que la grippe dans la même période de 5 mois infecte, en moyenne, 420 millions de personnes et en tue 270,000. De plus, le taux de létalité annoncé par l’OMS (3,4%) était largement surestimé et était rejeté dès le début par d’éminents experts en épidémiologie. Mais, même en prenant ce taux de létalité, on constate que ce coronavirus est trois fois moins mortel que celui de 2003 (10%) et 10 fois moins mortel que celui de 2012 (35%).
– «Mais, la COVID-19 est une maladie grave» et nous répondons : C’EST FAUX. Le SARS-CoV-2 est un virus bénin pour la population générale car il donne 85% de formes bénignes, 99% des sujets infectés guérissent, il ne constitue pas un danger pour les femmes enceintes ainsi que les enfants (contrairement à la grippe), il se propage moins rapidement que la grippe et 90% des personnes décédées sont des personnes âgées (qui doivent, bien sûr, être protégées comme les autres populations à risque). C’est pour cela que des experts ont qualifié de «délire» l’affirmation que c’est une maladie grave et ont affirmé, le 19 Août dernier, que «ce n’est pas pire que la grippe».
– «Mais, il y a des personnes asymptomatiques» et nous répondons : dans la grippe aussi, 77% des sujets infectés sont asymptomatiques et ils peuvent aussi transmettre le virus. Pourtant : on ne dit pas, chaque année, aux sujets sains de porter des masques et on ne fait pas de distanciation sociale malgré que le grippe infecte 1 milliard de personnes et en tue 650,000.
– «Mais, ce virus entraîne une saturation des hôpitaux» et nous répondons : C’EST FAUX. La saturation ne concerne que quelques hôpitaux mais on fait croire aux gens que tout le système hospitalier est saturé ou que la saturation est imminente alors qu’il y a des milliers d’hôpitaux dans certains pays. Est-il raisonnable et vrai d’attribuer, par exemple, à 1000 ou 2000 hôpitaux une situation qui ne concerne que 4 ou 5 hôpitaux ? Rien d’étonnant, aussi, au fait que certains hôpitaux soient saturés car il s’agissait de foyers épidémiques (comme la Lombardie en Italie ou New-York aux USA). Il ne faut pas oublier que les hôpitaux de beaucoup de pays ont été submergés (y compris les soins intensifs) lors de précédentes épidémies de grippe et qu’à cette époque, on parlait même de : “tsunami” de patients dans les hôpitaux, “d’hôpitaux saturés”, de tentes érigées à l’extérieur des hôpitaux, de “zones de guerre”, “d’hôpitaux effondrés” et d’un “état d’urgence”. […]

2. Nous disons : STOP à ces mesures folles à cause, aussi, de leurs conséquences catastrophiques qui ont déjà commencé à apparaître : suicide de gens angoissés comme ça été rapporté en Chine, développement de pathologies psychiatriques, paralysie du parcours éducatif des élèves et des étudiants à l’université, impacts négatifs et dangers sur les animaux, négligence des autres maladies (surtout chroniques) et augmentation de leur mortalité, augmentation des violences conjugales, pertes économiques, chômage, crise économique majeure […], graves conséquences sur l’agriculture, déstabilisation des pays et de la paix sociale et risque de déclenchement de guerres. […]

3. Nous REFUSONS l’obligation des applications de traçage des contacts comme c’est le cas dans certains pays car le SARS-CoV-2 est un virus bénin qui ne justifie pas une telle mesure. D’ailleurs, selon les recommandations internationales et quelle que soit la sévérité d’une pandémie (modérée, élevée, très élevée), le traçage des contacts n’est pas recommandé. Lors des épidémies de grippe, faisons-nous un traçage des contacts ? Pourtant, le virus de la grippe infecte beaucoup plus de gens et comporte plus de populations à risque que ce coronavirus.

4. Nous disons : STOP à la censure des experts et des professionnels de santé pour leur empêcher de dire la vérité (surtout dans les pays qui se disent démocratiques).

5. Nous partageons l’avis des experts qui dénoncent l’inclusion des dépistages dans le comptage des cas, même si les sujets sont bien portants et asymptomatiques.
Ceci a abouti à une surestimation des cas. On rappelle que la définition d’un cas en épidémiologie est : «la survenue de nombreuses issues possibles : maladies, complications, séquelles, décès. Dans la surveillance dite syndromique, on définit comme cas la survenue d’évènements non spécifiques tels que des groupements de symptômes ou des motifs de recours aux soins, hospitalisations, appels de services d’urgence». Nous disons donc : il faut séparer les dépistages des cas et il faut arrêter de les mélanger.

6. Nous partageons l’avis des experts qui dénoncent le fait qu’aucune distinction n’est faite entre les personnes mortes du virus et les personnes mortes avec le virus (avec des co-morbidités), le fait que la cause du décès soit imputée au SARS-CoV-2 sans test ni autopsie et que des médecins soit mis sous pression pour que la COVID- 19 soit marquée comme cause de décès, même si le patient est décédé d’autre chose. Ceci aboutit à une surestimation du nombre de morts et constitue une manipulation scandaleuse des chiffres car au cours des épidémies de grippe saisonnière par exemple, on ne travaille pas de cette façon. D’autant plus que 20% des patients COVID sont co-infectés par d’autres virus respiratoires aussi. Après réévaluation, seuls 12% des certificats de décès dans un pays européen ont montré une causalité directe du coronavirus. Dans un autre pays européen, les professeurs Yoon Loke et Carl Heneghan ont montré qu’un patient qui a été testé positif mais traité avec succès puis sorti de l’hôpital, sera toujours compté comme un décès COVID même s’il a eu une crise cardiaque ou a été fauché par un bus trois mois plus tard. Le directeur du CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) d’un pays en Amérique du Nord a reconnu, le 31 Juillet, que des hôpitaux avaient bien une incitation financière perverse à gonfler les chiffres de décès dus au coronavirus.

7. Nous partageons l’avis des experts qui ont mis en garde contre l’intubation quasi- systématique de certains patients, due à la peur folle du virus. Il faut que les protocoles soient modifiés car ils ont abouti à un nombre élevé de morts.

8. Nous disons qu’il est important qu’une révision des performances analytiques et cliniques des tests mis sur le marché soit faite, y compris les tests virologiques. Beaucoup de kits sont utilisés actuellement alors qu’une partie importante de leurs performances (par exemple : la spécificité analytique, surtout pour les quatres coronavirus saisonniers) n’a pas été évaluée, ce qui est grave car en plus des cas de faux négatifs, la littérature rapporte des faux positifs inquiétants, ce qui peut surestimer le nombre de cas et de morts. Selon un professeur de microbiologie, le taux de faux positifs peut atteindre 20%. Certains articles scientifiques qui rapportent ces cas de faux positifs ont été censurés. Nous disons donc : STOP à l’obligation des tests de dépistage à cause de ce manque de fiabilité et du manque de vérification de leurs performances et parce que rien dans ce coronavirus (qui est un virus bénin et avec un taux de létalité faible) ne le justifie. Comme nous l’avons dit : la grippe infecte chaque année 1 milliard de personnes, soit : 30 fois plus que le SARS-CoV-2 et pourtant, aucun test n’est exigé pour les voyages.

9. Nous disons aux citoyens : n’ayez pas peur, ce virus est bénin sauf si vous faites partie des populations à risque. Si les chaînes de télévision font la même chose avec la grippe, les chiffres seront beaucoup plus élevés que pour le coronavirus ! La télévision vous rapportera chaque jour en moyenne : 3 millions de cas et 2,000 morts de grippe. Et pour la tuberculose, la télévision vous rapportera chaque jour en moyenne : 30,000 cas et 5,000 morts. En effet, le virus de la grippe infecte chaque année 1 milliard de personnes et en tue 650,000 et la tuberculose infecte chaque année 10,4 millions et tue 1,8 million de personnes. De plus, à la TV on vous parle de « cas » alors qu’il s’agit de dépistages et non pas de cas. […]

10. Nous disons aux citoyens : le lavage des mains est un réflexe qu’on doit avoir tout au long de notre vie, qu’il y ait le coronavirus ou pas, car c’est la mesure d’hygiène la plus efficace. Mais, porter un masque lorsqu’on n’est pas malade et pratiquer la distanciation sociale, ça ne fait pas partie de l’hygiène ou de la préservation de la santé publique mais c’est de la folie. Porter un masque longtemps comporte plusieurs effets indésirables pour votre santé et le transforme en nid à microbes. “Le virus peut se concentrer dans le masque et lorsque vous l’enlevez, le virus peut être transféré dans vos mains et ainsi se propager”, a déclaré le Docteur Anders Tegnell, épidémiologiste. Lorsqu’on lui a demandé si les gens se mettaient plus en danger en portant des masques, le Docteur Jenny Harries a répondu : «En raison de ces problèmes de manipulation [des masques], les gens peuvent se mettre plus en danger». […] Vous devez savoir que la bouche et le nez ne sont pas faits pour être obstrués. Ce que vous portez est un masque, en apparence mais une muselière de votre liberté, en réalité. D’autant plus que, comme le disent plusieurs experts dont le Professeur Yoram Lass, l’épidémie est terminée dans la majorité des pays et ceux qui vous disent le contraire sont des MENTEURS. En vous disant que l’épidémie n’est pas terminée, en brandissant la menace d’une 2e vague (qui ne repose sur aucune preuve), en vous demandant de porter un masque et de faire de la distanciation sociale, le but est, en fait, de prolonger la peur jusqu’à la fabrication d’un vaccin et pour qu’il soit mieux accepté par vous.

11. Nous disons aux compagnies aériennes : plusieurs études scientifiques ont montré un lien entre l’excès d’hygiène et le développement de maladies comme les maladies allergiques, les maladies auto-immunes, les maladies inflammatoires ou certains cancers. C’est ce que l’on appelle en médecine : l’hypothèse hygiéniste. Donc, arrêtez les opérations de désinfection et enlevez les masques ainsi que les combinaisons protectrices ridicules de vos employés qu’on a vues dans les médias. Faire cela relève de la folie. Les aéroports doivent aussi arrêter la prise de température ainsi que les quarantaines. Le SARS-CoV-2 n’est pas la peste noire. Vous aussi, comme les citoyens, vous avez été manipulés.

12. Nous disons aux gouvernements : levez toutes les restrictions et les obligations sur les citoyens (état d’urgence, port de masque obligatoire, distanciation sociale, etc.) car elles sont stupides et purement dictatoriales et n’ont rien à voir avec la médecine ou l’hygiène ou la préservation de la santé publique. Il n’y a aucune raison scientifique ou médicale pour que des citoyens non malades portent un masque. Le Docteur Pascal Sacré, anesthésiste-réanimateur, a dit : «Obliger tout le monde à les porter tout le temps, alors que l’épidémie disparaît, est une aberration scientifique et médicale». Le Professeur Didier Raoult dit : «La décision du confinement comme la décision des masques…ne reposent pas sur des données scientifiques…». […]. Le Professeur Maël Lemoine a précisé aussi que le changement de discours sur les masques est : «politique, pas scientifique». Dans certains pays asiatiques, les gens portent des masques toute l’année (pour se protéger, entre autres, de la pollution). Est-ce que ce port généralisé des masques dans ces pays leur a évité d’avoir des épidémies de coronavirus ? Est-ce que ce port généralisé des masques dans ces pays leur évite d’avoir chaque année des épidémies de grippe ou d’autres virus respiratoires ? La réponse est bien sûr : non. […]

13. Nous disons aux forces de l’ordre : les citoyens vous doivent beaucoup car vous êtes tous les jours les garants de leur sécurité et du respect de l’ordre et de loi. Mais, faire respecter la loi ne veux pas dire se soumettre de manière aveugle à des ordres injustes. C’est cette erreur qui a conduit à la seconde guerre mondiale et à la mort de 50 millions de personnes. Nous vous disons donc : faites respecter la loi mais pas l’injustice et la dictature, refusez d’imposer ces mesures, refusez de verbaliser vos concitoyens (lorsqu’ils ne portent pas un masque par exemple), ne les frappez pas, ne les emprisonnez pas. Ne soyez pas les instruments de la dictature. […]

14. Nous disons aux citoyens : il faut respecter la loi. Mais, ceci ne veux pas dire la soumission aveugle à la folie, à l’injustice ou à la dictature. C’est cette soumission aveugle des citoyens aux lois injustes qui a conduit à la seconde guerre mondiale avec la mort de 50 millions de personnes. Vous êtes nés libres et vous devez vivre libres, donc : n’ayez pas peur et si vous n’êtes pas malades : enlevez les masques, sortez de chez vous comme vous le souhaitez et sans distanciation sociale, mais faites-le pacifiquement et sans aucune violence. Les professeurs Carl Heneghan et Tom Jefferson, épidémiologistes avec une grande expertise dans la médecine basée sur les preuves, disent : «Il n’y a aucune preuve scientifique pour soutenir la règle désastreuse de deux mètres. Des recherches de mauvaise qualité sont utilisées pour justifier une politique aux conséquences énormes pour nous tous».

15. Nous disons qu’il faut une réforme totale de l’OMS.
Les succès de l’OMS sont incontestables : des millions de vies ont été sauvées grâce aux programmes de vaccination contre la variole et la consommation de tabac a été réduite dans le monde. Mais, le problème majeur de l’OMS est qu’elle est depuis plusieurs années financée à 80% par des entreprises (notamment des laboratoires pharmaceutiques) et des donateurs privés (dont une fondation très connue) et les faits s’accumulent : fausse alerte sur l’H1N1 sous l’influence des lobbies pharmaceutiques, complaisance troublante envers le glyphosate que l’OMS avait déclaré sans danger en dépit des victimes de l’herbicide, aveuglement face aux conséquences de la pollution liée aux compagnies pétrolières en Afrique, minoration des bilans humains des catastrophes nucléaires de Tchernobyl à Fukushima et des désastres de l’utilisation de munitions à uranium appauvri en Irak ou dans les Balkans, non-reconnaissance de l’Artemisia pour protéger les intérêts des entreprises pharmaceutiques malgré qu’elle a prouvé son efficacité dans le traitement du paludisme.
L’indépendance de l’organisation est compromise tout à la fois par l’influence des lobbies industriels -surtout pharmaceutiques- et par les intérêts de ses États membres, en particulier : la Chine. Le président d’un pays a dit : «Je pense que l’Organisation Mondiale de la Santé devrait avoir honte parce qu’ils sont devenus les porte-paroles de la Chine». L’institution de Genève, qui avait sous- estimé la menace Ebola (plus de onze mille morts) est de surcroît accusée de négligence vis-à-vis des maladies tropicales, au profit de marchés plus juteux. Une enquête réalisée en 2016 (l’OMS dans les griffes des lobbyistes) a livré une édifiante radiographie de l’OMS en dressant le portrait d’une structure fragilisée, soumise à de multiples conflits d’intérêts. Cette investigation a montré combien, à l’OMS, les intérêts privés dominent les enjeux de santé publique. Il n’est pas acceptable que l’argent qui la finance vienne principalement d’une seule personne et qu’elle soit infiltrée par des lobbies. Récemment, l’OMS s’est décrédibilisée encore plus en tombant dans le piège du Lancet Gate alors qu’un simple étudiant aurait découvert la fraude.
À l’époque de la grippe H1N1 : le Docteur Wolfgang Wodarg, président de la commission santé de l’Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe, a critiqué l’influence de l’industrie pharmaceutique sur les scientifiques et les fonctionnaires de l’OMS, déclarant qu’elle a conduit à la situation où “inutilement des millions de personnes en bonne santé étaient exposées au risque de vaccins mal testés” et que, pour une souche de grippe, elle était “beaucoup moins nocive” que toutes les épidémies de grippe précédentes. Il a eu totalement raison puisque, plus tard, le vaccin a fait 1,500 victimes de narcolepsie dont 80% des enfants, comme on va le voir. Il a aussi reproché à l’OMS d’avoir alimenté la crainte d’une “fausse pandémie”, l’a qualifiée de “l’un des plus grands scandales médicaux de ce siècle” et a demandé l’ouverture d’une enquête.
En effet, les critères pour déclarer une pandémie (comme la sévérité) ont été modifiés par l’OMS sous l’influence des lobbies pharmaceutiques afin qu’ils puissent vendre les vaccins aux pays du monde. Selon un rapport de l’Assemblée parlementaire du Conseil de l’Europe sur le gestion de la grippe H1N1, y compris par l’OMS : «gaspillage de fonds publics importants et existence de peurs injustifiées relatives aux risques de santé…De graves lacunes ont été identifiées en ce qui concerne la transparence des processus de décision liés à la pandémie, ce qui soulève des préoccupations sur l’éventuelle influence que l’industrie pharmaceutique aurait pu exercer aux égards des principales décisions relatives à la pandémie. L’Assemblée craint que ce manque de transparence et de responsabilité ne fasse chuter la confiance des citoyens dans les avis des grands organismes de santé publique». L’histoire se répète aujourd’hui avec exactement les mêmes acteurs et la même compagne de peur. L’ancien secrétaire général du département de santé publique de l’OMS a révélé dans une autre enquête (TrustWHO) qu’à l’époque de H1N1, personne n’avait peur à l’OMS et qu’il ne connaît personne à l’OMS qui s’est fait vacciner, y compris l’ancienne directrice générale : la Chinoise Margaret Chan. Bien qu’il soit un haut responsable à l’OMS, il a été exclu ainsi que la plupart de ses collègues d’une réunion entre la directrice générale et les entreprises pharmaceutiques fabricatrices de vaccin avec comme motif : «c’est une réunion privée»…

16. Nous disons qu’il faut qu’une enquête soit ouverte et que certains responsables de l’OMS soient interrogés en particulier celui qui a fait la promotion internationale du confinement, qui est une hérésie d’un point de vue médical et une arnaque qui a égaré le monde. En effet, le 25 Février 2020 : le chef de la mission d’observation internationale du coronavirus en Chine a loué la réponse apportée par Pékin à l’épidémie. Il a dit que la Chine a réussi par des méthodes «à l’ancienne», a souligné que «le monde avait besoin des leçons de la Chine», qu’il faudrait s’en inspirer et que s’il avait la COVID-19, il aimerait se faire soigner en Chine !
Une fois, il a aussi qualifié la Chine de «très ouverte» et «très transparente». Comment peut-on croire à ces déclarations ? Comment peut-on croire que s’il avait la COVID-19, il irait se soigner en Chine ? Comment peut-on croire que le monde doit s’inspirer de la Chine et que la lutte de l’épidémie doit se faire avec des “méthodes à l’ancienne” ?
Ce qui est hallucinant, c’est qu’il a réussi à faire avaler ses salades au monde entier. Car malheureusement : depuis ses déclarations et le rapport qu’il a supervisé (où on peut lire que les méthodes chinoises sont : “agiles et ambitieuses”), les pays du monde ont mis en place des mesures disproportionnées et ont suivi aveuglément l’OMS en confinant leurs populations. La peur et la psychose ont été propagées en présentant le SARS-CoV-2 comme un virus très dangereux ou à mortalité massive alors que ce n’est absolument pas le cas.
[…] Des élus Canadiens de la Chambre des communes ont même sommé ce responsable de l’OMS à comparaître après qu’il eut refusé des invitations à témoigner devant le comité permanent de la santé. Même, le chef intérimaire du Parti conservateur Canadien a mis en doute l’exactitude des données de l’OMS sur la COVID-19. En effet, dire que la Chine a diminué le nombre de cas ou a bien géré l’épidémie et a aplani la courbe grâce au confinement est un pur mensonge et n’est basé sur aucune preuve car personne n’est capable de donner le chiffre du nombre de cas ou de morts en Chine si elle n’avait pas appliqué le confinement. […]
La folie a atteint le point où dans certains pays : des plages ont été désinfectées avec de l’eau de javel, des pompiers moustachus et barbus interdits de travail, des plexiglas ont été installés partout (même dans les classes des écoles) comme si c’était la peste noire, un train a été arrêté parce qu’une personne ne portait pas le masque, des familles privées de voir leurs morts (comme si le virus allait sauter du corps et les mordre), des septuagénaires verbalisées pour être sorties jeter les poubelles et même des pièces de monnaie et des billets de banque provenant de l’étranger ont été “isolés” !
Comment les pays ont-ils pu accepter de tomber dans ce niveau de folie, de stupidité et de dictature ? Surtout ceux qui se disent démocratiques. Tout ça pour un virus qui entraîne 85% de formes bénignes et pour lequel 99% des gens infectés guérissent. L’OMS a exhorté le monde à copier la réponse de la Chine à la COVID-19 et elle a réussi ; chaque pays du monde, en suivant aveuglément l’OMS, est devenu une copie conforme de la Chine. Quelques pays seulement ont refusé d’imiter bêtement les autres, comme la Suède ou la Biélorussie qui peuvent être félicités. […]

17. Nous disons qu’il faut arrêter de suivre aveuglément l’OMS car elle n’est pas une société savante et loin d’être indépendante, comme on l’a vu. Interrogée sur la raison de la décision de rendre 11 vaccins obligatoires, une ancienne ministre de la santé d’un pays européen a répondu : «C’est une décision de santé publique qui répond, en fait, à un objectif mondial de l’OMS qui demande aujourd’hui à tous les pays du monde d’obtenir 95% d’enfants vaccinés pour les vaccins nécessaires».
Nous recommandons, aussi, aux gouvernements de bien choisir les experts qui les conseillent et d’éviter ceux qui ont des liens avec les laboratoires pharmaceutiques ; Un grand professeur en infectiologie a fait cette remarque sur certains experts d’un pays européen : «Un membre éminent de la commission Maladies transmissibles de ce Haut Conseil a ainsi touché 90,741 euros de l’industrie pharmaceutique, dont 16,563 euros de [un laboratoire pharmaceutique qui produit une molécule concurrente de l’hydroxychloroquine]. Or c’est ce Haut Conseil qui a rendu le fameux avis interdisant l’hydroxychloroquine, sauf aux mourants…je ne vois pas de trace dans cet avis du respect de la procédure de gestion des conflits d’intérêts…Si un membre présente un conflit d’intérêts majeur, il doit quitter la séance et ne pas participer aux débats ni à la rédaction de l’avis…Or en bas de cet avis, on ne mentionne pas les conflits d’intérêts ni le nombre de membres qualifiés ayant participé au vote. C’est un grave manquement au règlement». […]

18. Nous disons aux gouvernements : ne suivez plus -dans les épidémies- les modélisations mathématiques qui sont des choses virtuelles sans lien avec la réalité et qui ont égaré le monde à plusieurs reprises et ont servi de justification aux politiques folles de confinement. En effet, une université européenne qui a des liens forts avec l’OMS avait dit que :
– 50,000 britanniques seront morts de la maladie de la vache folle alors qu’au final seulement 177 sont décédés.
– la grippe aviaire allait tuer 200 millions de personnes alors que 282 seulement sont décédés.
– la grippe H1N1 allait tuer 65,000 britanniques alors que 457 seulement sont décédés. Le taux de mortalité a été aussi exagéré alors que la grippe H1N1 s’est révélée finalement beaucoup moins dangereuse, ce qui a incité beaucoup de gens à dénoncer l’argent, le temps et les ressources considérables déployés pour une grippe bénigne. À l’époque, la presse a découvert que le recteur de cette université, qui a conseillé l’OMS et les gouvernements, a reçu un salaire de 116,000 £ par an du fabricant de vaccin contre l’H1N1.
Et aujourd’hui, c’est sur la base du même modèle défectueux, développé pour la planification de la pandémie de grippe, qu’ils ont donné leurs prévisions astrologiques sur la COVID-19 ; ils ont dit que 500,000 mourront au Royaume-Uni, 2,2 millions aux Etats-Unis, 70,000 en Suède et entre 300,000 et 500,000 en France ! Qui peut croire ces chiffres fous ? C’est pour cela que le Professeur Didier Raoult qualifie ces modélisations de : «forme moderne des divinations».
Le Professeur John Ashton a également dénoncé ces prédictions astrologiques et le fait qu’elles aient une sorte de statut religieux. De plus, la presse a découvert que celui qui, dans cette université, a incité les gouvernements au confinement ne respecte même pas ce qui leur préconisait. Là aussi, une enquête mérite, d’être menée auprès de certains responsables de cette université européenne. Le Professeur Jean-François Toussaint a dit à propos du confinement : «Il faut à tout prix éviter qu’un quelconque gouvernement ne reprenne un jour une telle décision. D’autant que l’instrumentalisation de la pandémie avec des confinements généralisés pour la moitié de l’humanité n’aura abouti qu’à renforcer les régimes autoritaires et à suspendre les campagnes de prévention des grandes maladies mortelles. En France, les simulations estimant que 60,000 vies ont été sauvées sont de pures fantaisies». Le fameux slogan international : «Restez chez vous, sauvez des vies» était une affirmation tout simplement mensongère. Au contraire, le confinement a tué beaucoup de gens.

19. Nous REFUSONS l’obligation vaccinale et nous REFUSONS l’obligation d’un certificat de vaccination contre le coronavirus pour voyager, pour les raisons suivantes :
– Le vaccin n’est pas indispensable car 85% des formes sont bénignes, 99% des sujets infectés guérissent et les enfants ainsi que les femmes enceintes ne sont pas des sujets à risque. De plus, une grande partie de la population est déjà protégée contre le SARS-CoV-2 grâce à l’immunité croisée acquise avec les coronavirus saisonniers. Dire qu’on n’en est pas sûr est UN MENSONGE et émettre des doutes sur la durée ou l’efficacité de cette protection est une manipulation visant à protéger le business plan du vaccin.
– C’est un virus à ARN, donc plus propice à des mutations et le vaccin risque d’être inefficace.
– Des essais de vaccin sont réalisés dans la précipitation et certains appellent à accélérer les procédures de tests et à se passer des habituels essais sur les comprendre les risques pour la sécurité pourrait entraîner des revers injustifiés pendant la pandémie et à l’avenir.
– Les précédents essais de vaccins contre les coronavirus sont inquiétants :
en 2004, l’un des vaccins mis au point contre le SRAS avait provoqué une hépatite chez les animaux sur lesquels il avait été testé. Un autre vaccin en phase de test avait causé de graves lésions pulmonaires aux animaux de laboratoire, les rendant plus fragiles à de futures infections. Des vaccins développés contre un autre coronavirus, le virus de la péritonite infectieuse féline, augmentaient le risque pour les chats de développer la maladie causée par le virus. Des phénomènes similaires ont été observés dans des études animales pour d’autres virus, y compris le coronavirus qui cause le SRAS.
– Certains vaccins sont testés par des entreprises qui n’ont aucune expérience dans la fabrication et la commercialisation des vaccins et qui utilisent des technologies nouvelles en médecine dont on ne connaît ni les bénéfices ni les risques pour la santé.
– La recherche de profit financier de nombreuses entreprises pharmaceutiques aux dépens de la santé des populations (sans généraliser bien sûr sur la totalité).
Le patron d’une entreprise pharmaceutique a dit devant ses actionnaires lors de la grippe H1N1 : «Ce vaccin, ça sera une opportunité significative en termes de revenus. C’est un joli coup de fouet pour nous, pour le chiffre d’affaires et pour le cash flow».
L’ancien ministre de la santé d’un pays européen a déclaré le 23 Mai 2020 : «Quand il y a une épidémie comme le COVID, nous on voit : mortalité, quand on est médecin,…ou on voit : souffrance. Et il y a des gens qui voient : dollars…vous avez des grands laboratoires qui disent : c’est le moment ou jamais de gagner des milliards».
Le 16 Juin 2020, le Professeur Christian Perronne, spécialiste des maladies infectieuses, a dit sur Sud Radio à propos du vaccin contre le coronavirus : «On n’en a aucun besoin…Tout ça, c’est une histoire purement commerciale». Le site internet du magazine Nexus a publié le 07 Août l’avis du Docteur Pierre Cave qui dit : «L’épidémie est terminée en France…en tant que médecin, je n’hésite pas à anticiper les décisions du gouvernement : Il faut non seulement refuser ces vaccins [contre la COVID-19], mais dénoncer et condamner la démarche purement mercantile et le cynisme abject qui ont guidé leur production».
– Les violations éthiques scandaleuses dans de nombreux essais cliniques :
comme les pays occidentaux ne leur permettent pas de violer les principes éthiques, de nombreux laboratoires pharmaceutiques (sans généraliser sur la totalité) réalisent leurs essais cliniques de médicaments et de vaccins dans les pays en développement ou pauvres où des expériences sont menées sur des gens sans qu’ils en aient la moindre connaissance et sans leur consentement. Le rapport rédigé par Irene Schipper (SOMO briefing paper on ethics in clinical trials) a montré des manquements éthiques choquants et très graves ; dans un essai clinique, par exemple, des femmes Africaines ont contracté le VIH et sont devenues ensuite malades du SIDA. Cet essai clinique a été financé par une fondation ainsi qu’un laboratoire très connus. Dans certains pays, ces essais cliniques scandaleux ont été accomplis avec la complicité des autorités locales sur fond de conflits d’intérêts.
– Une entreprise pharmaceutique : AstraZeneca a conclu un accord avec plusieurs pays qui lui permet d’obtenir l’immunité de toute plainte légale, au cas où le vaccin devait finalement montrer des effets secondaires nocifs. En d’autres termes, ce sont les états et pas AstraZeneca qui indemniseront les victimes, c’est-à-dire avec l’argent des citoyens ! À ce propos, nous disons aux citoyens : Protestez MASSIVEMENT contre cet accord scandaleux, honteux et profondément injuste jusqu’à ce qu’il soit supprimé. Il faut refuser cette utilisation IRRESPONSABLE de votre argent. Même des experts Belges ont été «choqués» par cet accord.
– Les scandales des vaccins dangereux voire mortels élaborés en période d’épidémie et on va citer deux exemples (nous ne sommes, évidemment, pas des anti-vaccins puisque ça signifie remettre en cause les découvertes d’Edward Jenner) :
Le scandale du vaccin contre l’H1N1 : il a été testé sur un faible nombre de personnes et malgré cela, il a été commercialisé comme étant sûr en 2009. Mais, un an après, des inquiétudes ont été exprimées en Finlande et en Suède concernant une éventuelle association entre la narcolepsie et le vaccin. Une étude de cohorte ultérieure en Finlande a signalé un risque 13 fois plus élevé de narcolepsie après la vaccination chez les enfants et les jeunes âgés de 4 à 19 ans, dont la plupart des cas étaient apparus dans les trois mois suivant la vaccination et presque tous dans les six mois. Il a fallu attendre 2013 pour qu’une étude publiée dans le British Medical Journal confirme ces résultats pour la Grande Bretagne, aussi37. Au total, ce vaccin dangereux a entraîné 1,500 cas de narcolepsie rien qu’en Europe et 80% des victimes sont des enfants. Une partie du personnel médical du NHS vacciné a été touchée aussi par la narcolepsie.
[…] Peter Todd, un avocat qui représentait bon nombre des plaignants, déclarait au Sunday Times: “Il n’y a jamais eu de cas comme celui-là auparavant. Les victimes de ce vaccin sont incurables et à vie et auront besoin de nombreux médicaments”. Parmi les enfants victimes du vaccin : Josh Hadfield (huit ans), qui prend des médicaments anti- narcolepsie coûtant 15,000 £ par an pour l’aider à rester éveillé pendant la journée à l’école. […] Les familles ont subi un calvaire qui a duré 7 ans pour obtenir gain de cause en justice. Et au lieu que ça soit le laboratoire pharmaceutique qui les indemnise, c’est les états qui l’ont fait, c’est-à-dire avec l’argent du citoyen ! […]

20. Nous disons : STOP à toutes ces mesures folles, dictatoriales et sûrement pas sanitaires et à cause desquelles des drames se produisent chaque jour, […] 60,000 patients cancéreux risquent de décéder en Angleterre à cause des retards de diagnostic et de traitement selon le Professeur Karol Sikora, 12,000 personnes dans le monde risquent de mourir chaque jour de la faim (selon Oxfam), le nombre d’arrêts cardiaques a été multiplié par deux dans certains pays, des entreprises tombent en faillite, 305 millions d’emplois à plein temps sont détruits – touchant particulièrement les femmes et les jeunes- selon l’organisation internationale du travail, un homme est mort à cause du masque aux Etats-Unis, etc. […]

21. Nous disons aux gouvernements : TOUT doit revenir immédiatement à l’état normal (y compris la ré-ouverture des services hospitaliers, du transport aérien, de l’économie, des écoles et des universités) et cette prise d’otages mondiale doit cesser car vous avez su, preuves à l’appui, que vous comme les citoyens, vous avez été victimes de la plus grande arnaque sanitaire du 21e siècle.
Le professeur Carl Heneghan a déclaré le 23 août que la peur qui empêche le pays de revenir à la normale n’est pas fondée, selon l’Express. Les Professeurs Karina Reiss et Sucharit Bhakdi ont sorti, en Juin, un livre appelé : «Corona : fausse alarme ?»45. Le maire d’une ville en Europe a déclaré : «Le climat diffusé sur [le sujet du coronavirus] est particulièrement lourd et devient suspect». Le Docteur Olivier Chailley a écrit un livre intitulé : «Le virus de la peur ou comment le monde entier est devenu fou». Le Professeur Sucharit Bhakdi (qui a écrit, aussi, une lettre à Angela Merkel) a dit à propos des mesures prises, y compris celles du confinement : “mesures grotesques, absurdes et très dangereuses…un impact horrible sur l’économie mondiale…auto- destruction et suicide collectif…”. Une enquête internationale et indépendante doit être ouverte et les responsables doivent être jugés.

22. Nous disons aux citoyens : pour vous maintenir dans le troupeau, il est possible que certains vont essayer de nous discréditer par tous les moyens, par exemple en nous accusant de conspirationnistes ou de complotistes, etc. Ne les écoutez pas, ce sont des MENTEURS car les informations qu’on vous a données sont : médicales, scientifiques et documentées.

23. Nous disons aux citoyens : cette lettre ne doit pas vous pousser à la violence envers qui que ce soit. Réagissez pacifiquement. Et si un professionnel de santé signataire de cette lettre sera attaqué ou diffamé ou menacé ou persécuté : soutenez-le MASSIVEMENT. Chers citoyens : beaucoup de scientifiques, d’éminents professeurs de médecine et de professionnels de santé à travers le monde ont dénoncé ce qui se passe et il est temps de vous réveiller ! Si vous ne dites rien, de nouvelles mesures dictatoriales «made in China» seront imposées. Vous devez REFUSER ça. Nous vous assurons que ces mesures n’ont rien à voir avec la médecine ou l’hygiène ou la préservation de la santé publique, c’est de la dictature et de la folie. Le Docteur Anders Tegnell a dit : «Le monde est devenu fou» en mettant en place les confinements qui «vont à l’encontre de ce que l’on sait sur la gestion des pandémies de virus».

24. Nous invitons les professionnels de santé du MONDE ENTIER à être forts et courageux et à faire leur devoir de dire la vérité, à nous rejoindre MASSIVEMENT dans le collectif : United Health Professionnals et à signer cette lettre en envoyant les 4 informations suivantes : prénom, nom, profession et pays à : join.unitedhealthprofessionals@gmail.com
La liste des signataires sera mise à jour régulièrement.

SIGNATAIRES :
Professor Martin Haditsh, microbiology, infectious disease and tropical medicine specialist, Austria
Ghislaine Gigot, general practitioner, France
François Pesty, pharmacist, France
Catherine Raulin, general practitioner, France
Laurent Hervieux, general practitioner, France
Geneviève Magnan, nurse, France
Jean-Pierre Eudier, dental surgeon, Luxembourg
Andrée Van Den Borre, dental surgeon, Belgium
Mauricio Castillo, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, Chile
Marie-Claude Luley-Leroide, general practitioner, France
Daniele Joulin, general practitioner, France
Mohamed Zelmat, clinical biologist, France
Nadine Blondel, nurse, France
Hélène Banoun, clinical biologist, France
Estelle Ammar, speech therapist, France
Caroline Durieu, general practitioner, Belgium
Doris Stucki, psychiatrist, Switzerland
Jessica Leddy, licensed acupuncturist, United States of America
Fabien Quedeville, general practitioner, France
Michel Angles, general practitioner, France
Dominique Carpentier, general practitioner, France
Christophe Cornil, plastic surgeon, France
Pierre Brihaye, ear, nose and throat specialist, Belgium
Elizabeth Luttrell, certified nursing assistant, United States of America
Tasha Clyde, nurse, United States of America
Walter Weber, internal medicine and oncology specialist, Germany
Professor Pierre-Francois Laterre, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, Belgium
Sylvie Lathoud, clinical psychologist, France
Karim Boudjedir, hematologist, France
Caroline Heisch, osteopath, France
Eric Blin, physiotherapist, France
Vincent Schmutz, dental surgeon, France
Zieciak WB, ears nose and throat surgeon, South Africa
Virginie Merlin, nurse, Belgium
Gabriel Brieuc, anesthesiologist, Belgium
Marie-José Eck, general practitioner, France
Patricia Grasteau, nursing assistive personnel, France
Christine Villeneuve, psychotherapist, France
Philippe Voche, plastic surgeon, France
Gérard Bossu, osteopath, France
Elaine Walker, emergency medicine physician, United States of America
Richard Amerling, nephrologist, United States of America
Phil Thomas, general practitioner, South Africa
Manfred Horst, allergologist and immunologist, France
Sybille Burtin, public health physician, France
Chantal Berge, nurse, France
Denis Agret, emergency medicine and public health physician, France
Mélanie Dechamps, intensive care physician, Belgium
Prosper Aimé Seme Ntomba, dental surgeon, Cameroon
Sandrine Lejong, pharmacist, Belgium
Professor Jan Zaloudik, surgical oncology, Czech Republic
Cerise Gaugain, midwife, France
Delphine Balique, midwife, France
Marion Campo, midwife, France
Olivier Chailley, cardiologist, France
Johan Sérot, physiotherapist, France
Arlette Fauvelle, pharmacist, Belgium
Farooq Salman, ear, nose and throat specialist, Irak
Olga Goodman, Rheumatologist, United States of America
Pascal Leblond, nurse, France
Sybille Morel, nurse, France
Marie-Thérèse Nizier, physiotherapist, France
Graziella Mercy, nurse, France
Pierre Maugeais, general practitioner, France
Carrie Madej, internal medicine specialist, United States of America
Victor Gomez Saviñon, cardiac surgeon, Mexico
Martin Boucher, nurse, Canada
Evelyne Nicolle, pharmacist, France
Agnès Dupond, general practitioner, France
Azad Mitha, general practitioner,
France Ines Heller, physiotherapist, France
Marie Laravine, nurse, France
Khaleel Kareem, anesthesiologist and intensive care physician, Irak
Tonya Davis, certified nursing assistant, United States of America
Mary Baty, dental hygienist, United States of America
Luis Angel Ponce Torres, physician, Peru
Texte complet en version pdf (français)

Krazy Kriticism: The Tics of the Trade


Krazy Kriticism: The Tics of the Trade




WOOY!! After decades of attempts to publish all of George Herriman’s full-page Sunday Krazy Kat comics, Fantagraphics, the Seattle comics publisher, has done it. In 13 volumes, we get all the Krazy Kat comics, dating from April 23, 1916 (when they began) to June 25, 1944 (when Herriman died), plus some pre-Krazy strips thrown in for good measure. HOOROO!!
At last, every Krazy Sunday page is between covers: from the first, where the Kat steals away from a picnic to bring ice cream to some “poor li’l orphan ‘kitties'” in a coal chute, to the last, where a worried-looking Krazy floats to who-knows-where clutching a paper sail. And what covers, and spines, they are! The quirky volumes, designed by cartoonist Chris Ware and edited by Bill Blackbeard (with Derya Ataker, Jeet Heer, and Kim Thompson), are a shelf to behold.
It has been a long haul. The first book of selected Krazy Kat comics was published in 1946, just two years after Herriman’s death, with an introduction by e.e. cummings. It was followed, forty years later, by an excellent book, the volume that got me hooked: Krazy Kat: The Comic Art of George Herriman edited by Patrick McDonnell, Karen O’Connell, and Georgia Riley de Havenon. And that was followed in 2010 by Sunday Press’s grand, oversized book, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat: A Celebration of Sundays, edited by McDonnell and Peter Maresca. But all these were selections, not the full monty.
The idea of publishing the strip’s entire life was hatched in the late 1980s. By the early nineties, a couple volumes of The Komplete Kolor Krazy Kat, edited by Rick Marschall, had been published by Kitchen Sink Press, and “a consortium of comics lovers comprising Eclipse Comics, Turtle Island Press, and Bill Blackbeard” — as Kim Thompson, one of the publishers of Fantagraphics, remembers it — had begun publishing a 29-volume set of the Sunday Krazys. The main supplier of these comics was Blackbeard himself, one of the editors of The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics and, more recently, a hero of Nicholson Baker’s book Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. He had row upon row of old newspaper comics piled high in his garage and basement, which he called the “San Francisco Academy of Comic Art.” (I went to the “academy” myself in the eighties and bought a few black-and-white Krazys.) Alas, though, after only nine volumes (1916-1924) the project was ditched when, says Thompson, “intractable (and non-Kat-related) business problems sank the good ship Eclipse in 1992.”
Ten years passed. Finally, in 2002, Blackbeard joined with Fantagraphics to finish the job, picking up where the consortium left off, pushing on to the end of Herriman’s career, and then wrapping back to repeat the material already published. They finished up the series this year, just after Blackbeard died, but only in the middle part of Herriman’s career.
That was one Krazy plan, but it worked. As for the 32 years of daily Krazy Kat strips, they are, as Derya Ataker points out in the introduction to The Kat Who Walked in Beauty: The Panoramic Dailies of 1920, a more “elusive catch.” But that’s another story.
¤
The completion of Fantagraphics’s Krazy Sunday series also means, quite possibly, the end of Krazy Kriticism — a brand of writing that, as far as I can tell, only the Kat engenders. Critic Gilbert Seldes first articulated its credo in the 1924 article “The Krazy Kat That Walks by Himself.” After comparing Herriman to Dickens, Cervantes, and Charlie Chaplin, Seldes threw up his hands: “It isn’t possible to retell these pictures; but that is the only way, until they are collected and published, that I can give the impression of Herriman’s gentle irony, of his understanding of tragedy, of the sancta simplicitas, the innocent loveliness in the heart of a creature more like Pan than any other creation of our time.” Thus did the gates open to a flood of ecstatic, mimetic writing in which every critical impulse was mercilessly drowned in gushing praise and fervent prayers to put the comics between covers.
Here are the marks of Krazy Kriticism, a good sampling of which can be found in Craig Yoe’s Krazy Kat & The Art of George Herriman: A Celebration. The Kritics use Ks where Cs would normally go. They explore ad nauseam the love triangle between Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and Offissa Pupp. They marvel at, and occasionally copy, the Kat’s linguistic habbits: “werra” rather than “very,” “heppy” rather than “happy,” “ainjil” rather than “angel.” They pore over the scant crumbs of Herriman’s short life. (Did you know Herriman called himself “Garge” and cooked lamb legs for his Scottie dogs Angus, Ginsberg, Shantie, McTavish, and Macgregor?) They also love to compare the strip to literary classics: It’s “Don Quixote and Parsifal rolled into one,” wrote John Alden Carpenter, composer of the 1922 Krazy Kat ballet. And above all, they gush, gush, gush!
The earliest example of Krazy Kriticism comes from 1917. When the Sunday strip was only a year old, Summerfield Baldwin described its basic plot as “the perpetual chastisement of the Kat by the Mouse” (usually in the form of a hurled brick), followed by the Kat’s “delight in [this] forever recurring maltreatment.” He detailed the strip’s linguistic hijinks, in which wonderful becomes “wundafil” and a flying brick is “represented by the letters Z-I-Z-Z strewn in its wake.” He admired the “indiscriminate mingling of the choicest of diction” with barely comprehensible slang. He thrilled at Krazy’s tail, “a most remarkable creation, ending very squarely indeed, and almost always betraying one or two quite heart-rending kinks.” And he relished the strip’s surreal, shape-shifting landscapes, including “trees with extraordinarily large and bulging trunks crowned by the merest tuft of foliage.”
Baldwin did quite a nice job detailing the strip’s delights. But then he stopped and, like every Krazy Kritic after him, threw up his hands: “I have been incompetent to devise any consistent critical theory that would do justice to his genius … My sole purpose has been … to perform what is really the sole function of criticism, the function of discovering genius wheresoever it may be concealed.”
Yes, even 95 years ago the truth was as loud and clear as a pair of clapping mitten rocks rising up out of the mesa encantada: Krazy Kat is perfect and Herriman is a genius — linguistically, graphically, poetically, onomatopoetically, every which way. Confronted with such perfection, most of Herriman’s critics, once they finish reciting plot, affecting accents, and making comparisons to classics, have always thrown up their hands and said, “Behold!” But does it have to be that way? The genius label, after all, has never kept Shakespeare or Picasso scholars from finding something to say.
Maybe the problem is that critics feel they must use all their air to hoist Krazy Kat from low culture to high. Or maybe the problem is humor; analyzing why something is funny is a sure way to kill it. Or maybe the problem is that Krazy Kat simply lacks a basic feature required by critics to analyze a work of art: development.
Krazy Kat never evolved. Indeed, in some respects, it actually devolved. Whenever Herriman’s format was restricted to regular-sized frames, his strips became more wooden. And color — which crept in briefly and beautifully in 1922, then permanently and less beautifully in 1935 — was a mixed blessing. But so what? Everything great about the strip was present in the first few years of its three-decade run: the radical layouts (vertical, horizontal, diagonal, wavy); the language and accents (a mix of New Orleans Creole, Elizabethan English, Brooklynese, Yiddish, and Spanish); the wordplay; the weird wheel with a dot; the Navajo-inspired zig-zag (which Charles Schulz borrowed for Charlie Brown’s shirt); the time conundrums and gender bendings; the landscape of the Monument Valley; and the intertwinings of species and race, of family myths and genetics, of fabric and skin, of art and artifice, of dreams and reality, of crime and charity. And, of course, the amazing riffs on natural events and objects: wind, waves, mitten rocks, tumbleweeds, tule swamps, and the old ignis fatuus.
After Herriman had finished laying out this grand picnic before him, he didn’t really develop. He fiddled, he noodled, he rearranged, he played. In this respect, the artist he most resembles is not Picasso, who developed and changed constantly, but rather someone like Mark Rothko, who, after discovering his vocabulary of colored rectangles, spent his last 20 years exploring it.
Just because a body of work lacks development doesn’t make it boring. It can, however, make it hard to write about. And that difficulty, in Herriman’s case, is compounded by the fact that Krazy Kat lacks not only stylistic development but plot development too. The plot, if you can even call it that, is almost always the same — a brick, hurled by a mouse, at a cat who loves it. Though the characters get deeper as their biographies extend back in time and their families extend to the air and sea, the plot never thickens, never develops. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine what Krazy Kat would have become if Herriman had ever dropped the brick and created a true plot, a long yarn that would give his characters a chance to stretch out and change.
As luck would have it, Herriman did once drop the brick, for nearly a year. From May 15, 1936, to March 17, 1937, Herriman used his daily strip to spin out a single story: Krazy Kat discovers a cache of Tiger Tea (a strong katnip tea) which gives its drinkers a tiger-like power and ferocity — and eventually gives them stripes too. In the final pages each animal except for Krazy rejects the Tiger Tea, preferring not to aspire to the grandest of the Kats, but rather to the grandest animal of its own kind. (Fish want to be like sharks, mice like rats.) For Herriman, this is not just weirdly plot-driven and weirdly topical — the movie Reefer Madness was made the same year — but also weirdly didactic, with its Aristotelian message that everyone should strive for self-realization, not self-alteration. And maybe there’s another moral here, a hidden one, proffered unconsciously: Characters under the influence of plot (or pot) will lose their character, becoming like everyone else. In the end, we see Herriman returning his characters to their pre-Tiger Tea selves, and the plot virtually eats itself, turning into a fable about the evils of plot. Maybe Herriman learned his lesson. After the “Tiger Tea” saga, he went back to his ur-plot — the daily hurled brick — never to abandon it again.
¤
Now that Krazy Kritics have gotten their dearest wish — all of the Sunday Krazys published in book form — what will happen to Kriticism? Will it yield to real criticism? Will the endless retelling, mimicking, and gushing stop? Will we finally be able to say, as Ignatz might, fooey to all that?
One essay in Yoe’s collection, Douglas Wolk’s “The Gift,” offers a ray of hope. Wolk finds something new to analyze in the strip — its peculiar pace: “The real comedy of Krazy Kat is almost always slower than its surface humor, which is appropriate for a strip whose central joke is miscommunication on a grand scale. The one way you can’t read it for pleasure is quickly.” This helps explain why Herriman, now a god among cartoonists, was never terribly popular during his lifetime. Yes, he had plenty of high-toned fans — e.e. cummings, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Willem de Kooning, H.L. Mencken, and Edmund Wilson among them — but his strip was under constant attack from newspaper readers, editors, and especially advertisers. Readers who couldn’t understand the strip were skipping it, so advertisers began to worry that readers were skipping their ads too. As Blackbeard notes, William Randolph Hearst, the strip’s key supporter, would often find that an editor had quietly pulled it out of the lineup and have to demand its restoration.
The problem with Krazy Kat is the same as its genius: It cannot be consumed quickly or easily. And it is best not consumed in great quantities all at once. The first time I read it I was stunned and, for a while, stumped, by the verbal and visual density of the strip. How do you get through this? Where do you start? According to Wolk, “Everything from Herriman’s crabbed hand-lettering and batty phonetic spellings to his habit of showing Ignatz’s brick flying from right to left (against the flow of reading) to the way he constructs his panels and pages — with vistas so wide the eye can’t take them in all at once — means you need to slow down …”
To take Wolk’s analysis a step further, the strip’s slowness is probably also due to something that has been present from the beginning and that runs against the grain of most comics and most Western reading: its verticality. Herriman was obsessed with matters of up and down, not just when it came to birth and culture, but also graphically. He had a tendency to push downward against the horizontal tide of comics, against reading in general, and, as in the “Tiger Tea” tale, against the idea of a linear plot. Instead, the reader’s eye wanders restlessly over the page, up and down, back and forth, “William and Nilliam,” as Krazy would say. It can take a long time to read one full-page comic thoroughly, and even then you cannot be sure you’ve gotten it all.
The vertical push of the strip lies in its very origins. The first time that Ignatz beaned Krazy (with a marble, on July 26, 1910), the cat and mouse drama appeared as a sub-cartoon, underneath another Herriman strip, The Family Upstairs — literally underfoot. And even when Krazy Kat had become its own strip, breaking away from the hijinks of The Dingbat Family, Herriman’s vertical proclivities continued: Wolk informs us that the first all-Kat strip, on October 28, 1913, ran in the New York Journal‘s comics page “in a vertical, page-high stack of five tall panels beside the horizontal rows of regularly laid-out comics.” That verticality stuck until the end: The very last frame of Krazy Kat, the one that shows the Kat sailing away, is a panel that lies beneath the floorboards of the main strip, in what Herriman called “the waste space.”
To make the eye track vertically as well as horizontally, to mess with the very process and direction of reading, is not only a sure way of slowing down a newspaper reader, who is, after all, used to gobbling words and pictures easily, it is also a way of breaking down a sacred wall. If “prose … is ordinary speech,” says Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky, then poetry is “the language of impeded, distorted speech.” Of course, that’s just a fancy way of saying that Krazy Kat is not just a low-down comic strip, but high-class poetry too. And that, after all, is something we Kritics have known all along. So let the parsing begin!

 

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/krazy-kriticism-the-tics-of-the-trade/

The Prison Drawings of Frank Jones



The Prison Drawings of Frank Jones

Edward M. Gómez
Frank Jones, “Untitled (Puerto Rican German)” (circa 1960), colored pencil on paper, 18.75 x 25 inches (all images courtesy of Shrine, New York)
For Frank Jones (1900-1969) — a Black self-taught artist who spent his life in Texas, where he died while serving time at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, north of Houston (home of the Lone Star State’s execution chamber) — making art might have served as a form of spirit-lifting escape from the monotony and tension of his long years in prison.
Although his remarkable drawings in colored pencil on paper are well known among informed collectors and specialists in the outsider-art field, they still have not achieved the broad recognition enjoyed by the similarly unique works of Bill Traylor (circa 1853-1949) or Thornton Dial, Sr. (1928-2016), to name two other renowned, African American self-taught artists. This might be due in part to the fact that only a few hundred of Jones’s drawings are known to exist, and many of them have been in private hands for many years.
As a result, although examples of his work do routinely turn up at events like the annual Outsider Art Fair in New York, presentations of significant quantities of Jones’s drawings are generally less frequent than those of, say, Traylor. His last notable showings took place at Carl Hammer Gallery in the spring of 2017 and, later that same year, at Ricco/Maresca Gallery in New York.
Frank Jones, “Untitled (number 602)” (circa 1960), colored pencil on paper, 20.5 x 25 inches
Now, though, Shrine, a gallery at the southern end of Manhattan’s Lower East Side that often focuses on outsider art, is presenting 114591 — at nine drawings, a relatively bountiful exhibition of Jones’s production and one brimming with some of his highest-quality, most emblematic creations (tip to fans: there’s a tenth piece available that is not on display). The show takes its title from the artist’s own prisoner number. (Jones, who was illiterate, routinely marked his drawings with that impersonal, institutional identifier.) The exhibition remains on view through September 13.
Jones was born in northeastern Texas, near the border with Oklahoma. His enslaved ancestors had labored on cotton plantations. Young Frank grew up in a rural environment in which generations-old African traditions helped shape his aesthetic-spiritual sensibility and worldview.
Jones was born with a caul: part of the fetal membrane covered his left eye. In the society in which he grew up, this unusual physical feature was known as a “veil,” and children born with such cauls were regarded as “double-sighted.” It was believed that they could communicate with the spirit world. Throughout his life, Jones claimed that he could see supernatural beings — animated objects, animal-like creatures, demons — which he called “haints” (“haunts”), “devils,” or “haint devils.”
Frank Jones, “Untitled (number 112)” (circa 1960), colored pencil on paper, 12 x 18 inches
Jones, who worked as a farm laborer and did odd jobs to eke out a living, spent roughly two decades in and out of Texas jails; he was sent to the prison in Huntsville to serve a life sentence for a murder he insisted he had not committed. In the 1960s, as an inmate, he began making drawings on found scraps of paper with the stubs of blue-and-red accountants’ pencils. In them, he developed his “devils’ houses” motif — wiry-looking structures depicted in cross-section, in which his omnipresent, horned, bird-like “haints” resided.
Through his depictions of the demons he claimed to be able to see, and that, he explained, were always eager to cause mischief, Jones not only gave visible form to his spirit sightings, but also contained or curtailed what he perceived to be their hurtful powers. His winged devils’ grinning faces belie the harm he believed they could cause. Clocks often appear in Jones’s drawings, too, alluding to the marking of time and sense of mortality that, inevitably, are on many a prisoner’s mind.
In the early 1960s, Murray Smither, a young employee of the now-defunct Atelier Chapman Kelley, then an important gallery in Dallas specializing in modern and contemporary art, traveled back to Huntsville, his hometown, to judge a competitive exhibition of art made by inmates at the state penitentiary. There, he chose Jones as the winner of the contest. He shared his discovery with his boss, Chapman Kelley, whose gallery began offering the self-taught draftsman’s works for sale at a time when the market for what would become known as “outsider art” was still in its infancy in the United States.
Frank Jones, “Untitled (Whiskey Drunken Devil House CFA 692)” (1964), colored pencil on paper, 8.5 x 11 inches
Smither went on to become a collector, curator, and respected authority on folk art and outsider art from Texas and the American South. Today, at the age of 83, he is bringing his large, renowned collection to market through a year-long series of exhibitions at the Webb Gallery in Waxahachie, a small town south of Dallas. (Seekers of Jones’s works take note: one of his iconic drawings is among the Webb Gallery’s offerings, and Smither is in the process of donating a second work to a Texas museum.)
In the works on view at Shrine, some of Jones’s houses are so packed with fluffy demons that they seem ready to teeter or wobble. In some of these drawings, which are rich in decorative detail, Jones’s devilish spirits seem to emerge right out of the crossbeams of the houses they inhabit. In one elaborately shaped structure, they appear only symbolically, integrated into the artist’s form-giving, decorative patterning.
In this group of drawings, Jones’s houses are also at times exuberantly non-rectilinear, with appendages or protuberances providing quirky charm. (The artist’s cathartic intentions notwithstanding, another way to appreciate his works is to view them as intriguing examples of fantasy architecture.) Notable here, too, are the drawings in which Jones’s colored-pencil palette expands beyond blue and red to include green, orange, and purple.
Frank Jones, “Untitled” (circa 1964-69), colored pencil on paper, 25.5 x 30.5 inches
Of special interest among the works at Shrine are five that the gallery’s founder-director, Scott Ogden, a longtime outsider-art collector, managed to find from a private source who had owned them for many years and was ready to bring them to market.
These drawings offer vivid evidence of the expressive range of Jones’s draftsmanship and compositional skill, and several still bear, on the backs of their frames, labels from the galleries through whose inventories they passed over the years. For collectors interested in such artworks’ provenances — the records of those who have owned them over time — the collective history of these drawings mirrors the development of the outsider art field in the U.S.
Admirers of drawing in all its forms have plenty to savor in Jones’s mysterious — and mysteriously elegant — delicacies. Those who are already familiar with his art will find some gems in Shrine’s presentation. Newcomers may find them devilishly alluring.
Frank Jones – 114591 continues at Shrine (179 East Broadway, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through September 13.


 hyperallergic.com

The Art of Upsetting People



Engravings of Jonathan Swift by Edward Scriven, after Francis Bindon, 1818, and of the Marquis de Sade, by H. Biberstein, nineteenth century.
(L) Jonathan Swift, by Edward Scriven, after Francis Bindon, 1818. © The Trustees of the British Museum. (R) The Marquis de Sade, by H. Biberstein, nineteenth century. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
To place Jonathan Swift and the Marquis de Sade next to each other looks at first like setting up hero and antihero. Jonathan Swift is the fierce but righteous satirist; the Marquis de Sade is, as Henry James put it, the “unnameable” pornographer. Swift was the consummate Church of England man who had no shortage of invective to lob against libertine freethinkers like the Earl of Wharton and advocated for theater censorship to stave off vice. Sade was reported to the police by a prostitute for masturbating on a crucifix.
Their characters may never have been clearer than at the end of their lives. Swift’s self-penned Latin epitaph for his burial site at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, where he was a dean, translates as “Fierce indignation can no longer injure the heart. Go forth, voyager, and copy, if you can, this vigorous (to the best of his ability) champion of liberty.” Sade, who died in prison sixty-nine years after Swift, struck a more defiant and grandiose tone in an oft-cited passage said to be from his will: “Imperious, choleric, irascible, extreme in everything, with a dissolute imagination the likes of which has never been seen, atheistic to the point of fanaticism, there you have me in a nutshell, and kill me again or take me as I am, for I shall not change.”
Their parting words left an imposing, almost abstract, impression of these authors on subsequent generations. They had become monuments, examples, ghosts. Whether they were benevolent or malevolent depended on what those conjuring chose to see. At times Swift’s writings were obviously the work of a lunatic, while Sade’s writing was capable of driving people to lunacy and even fits of epilepsy. At other times Swift was lionized by the likes of Irish president Eamon de Valera as “one of the [Anglo-Irish] pioneers…who realized that they ought not to permit themselves to be governed by ministers from England.” William Butler Yeats offered a more grandiloquent, un-Swiftian translation of Swift’s epitaph, claiming that “he served liberty.” In 2014, on the bicentennial of Sade’s death, the scroll manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom Sade had spent thirty-seven days in the Bastille writing was put on public display in Paris; in 2017 it was declared a national treasure by the French government, which ordered it to be withdrawn from private auction.
Treating the manuscript as an object of admiration was likely preferable to trying to actually finish it. Neither author made for easy reading. Sade’s best-known novels are huge bricks alternating between philosophical digressions and sexual depravity that are both comically grotesque and repetitively vulgar. “One of the most fascinating things about Sade’s writing,” Maggie Nelson writes, “is its immense capacity to shock, and its equally immense capacity to bore.” The challenges of Swift are more temporal. His writings are filled with conflicts, controversies, and people long abandoned by posterity. Much of the potency of his language is flattened and the sharpness of his irony dulled because the subjects being ridiculed proved so ephemeral. “He has written miscellaneously,” John Boyle, the fifth earl of Orrery, fairly assessed in his otherwise unfair account of Swift, “and has chosen rather to appear a wondering comet than a fixed star.”
Reading them, we see why Swift biographer John Stubbs calls his subject Sade’s “satirical cousin” with a “technique…classified above all as the art of upsetting people” and whose “determination to vex…prevents any political group from conscripting him.” We see why Swift and Sade are the first two entries in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor. And we follow why, in Simone de Beauvoir’s words, Sade rejected the idea of submission as “hypocritical resignation which is adorned in the name of virtue” that aims “to destroy the individual by imposing upon him a stupid conformism.” All dissidents would admire such attributes, especially at the height of the twentieth-century obscenity trials, when both Sade and Swift could be cast as patron saints of extremism in the pursuit of liberty. Whatever their pursuits, they were extremists who created literature that wasn’t so much great as it was relentless. Even now they make passive reading impossible.

Jonathan Swift produced enough prose to fill as many as nineteen printed volumes. For him writing was less a vocation than a means for a narrow set of ends. Professionally he was a clergyman, yet he never produced any notable theological work, much to the disappointment of his church superiors. He had strong opinions about the quality of sermons but looked upon his own with indifference; only twelve survive. He was not as innovative a journalist as his rival Daniel Defoe, nor was he as sagacious as his critic Samuel Johnson. Unlike Johnson, who believed that “no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Swift saw payment for his writing as an affront to his pride. Swift’s aims were loftier than mere cash could provide. He wanted prestige and thought his pen the surest route to achieving it. “Swift was outside the shrewd discipline of talent,” critic Carl Van Doren wrote. “He could not sit down and write prose and verse as if they were sufficient ends…He used them in his tragic role, in his war of ambition, not because he valued them but because they were the only weapons he had.”
Swift was born in Dublin to English parents and spent his entire life moving from colony to empire and back again. His writing settled down between those two worlds. In England from 1710 to 1714, during the later reign of Queen Anne, he lived the life of a public intellectual. He engaged in coffeehouse banter and court politics. He helped forge opinion journalism as a propagandist for the Tory party and an advocate for the Church of England before the fall of the Tory ministry sent him back to Ireland. His writing thereafter was closer to that of a dissident, though one who was careful to avoid prosecution. Yet Swift looked at Ireland as something foisted on him. “Irishness,” Conor Cruise O’Brien wrote, “is not primarily a question of birth or blood or language; it is the condition of being involved in the Irish situation, and usually of being mauled by it. On that definition Swift is more Irish than Goldsmith or Sheridan, although by the usual tests they are Irish and he is pure English.”
His sharpest weapon was a shapeshifting “I,” by which Swift could effortlessly attract an audience and voice a person’s prejudices. He ridiculed the outgoing Whig party as sore losers and corrupt miscreants in his Examiner papers. His pamphlet Conduct of the Allies helped shift public opinion on the War of Spanish Succession toward peace after a decade of fighting. He could rally another to a cause of his choosing, most successfully with the Drapier letters, inveighing against a coinage-debasing scheme meant to be foisted on Ireland. Yet it is Swift’s more playful ventriloquism that has made a deeper cultural impression. An ear for mimicry, combined with what F.R. Leavis called an “emotional intensity,” enabled savage, inventive, and even delightful attacks on the “enthusiasms” of religious heterodoxy, intellectual frivolity, and political extremism that so provoked Swift. In this mode he became the unstable hack who exemplified the fashionableness and pretensions of “modern” writing in A Tale of a Tub and the arrogant astrologer Isaac Bickerstaff, one of Swift’s funniest creations, predicting the death of a rival.
Engraving of Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., by John Sturt, after Bernard Lens II, 1710.
Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq., by John Sturt, after Bernard Lens II, 1710. © The Trustees of the British Museum.
Aside from Lemuel Gulliver, no Swiftian creation is more significant than the unnamed speaker of his 1729 pamphlet A Modest Proposal. The three-thousand-word monologue has often been ranked the greatest English prose satire ever written. It is an efficient showcase for Swift’s greatest strengths: his sharp irony, his perverse imagination, and his polished style. It has spurred many imitations but has never been bettered. Yet when it was published it seemed strangely minor compared to Swift’s “Proposal for the Universal Use of Irish Manufacture” and the Drapier letters. Rather than a rousing piece of writing defying the English colonial behemoth, A Modest Proposal—with its ironical endorsements of child murder, body harvesting, and cannibalism—seemed more provocative than persuasive, “a cry of despair,” in the words of Swift biographer Leo Damrosch. And it was wider in its targets. A Modest Proposal is “unusual,” Swift scholar Claude Rawson writes, “in being a satire aimed not at the English oppressor but at the Irish victim”—that is, the Anglo-Irish “settler class failing to look after its own interest” and disregarding Swift’s earlier, more reasonable appeals.
Swift wrote his Proposal as a last resort, after several more straightforward tracts about the generally appalling conditions of Ireland’s poor failed to have much impact on the public. The opening sentence, “It is a melancholy object to those who walk through this great town or travel in the country when they see the streets, the roads, and cabin doors crowded with beggars of the female sex, followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags and importuning every passenger for an alms,” has echoes of the beginning of his 1715 sermon “On the Causes of the Wretched Condition of Ireland”: “It is a very melancholy reflection that such a country as ours, which is capable of producing all things necessary, and most things convenient for life, sufficient for the support of four times the number of its inhabitants, should yet lie under the heaviest load of misery and want our streets crowded with beggars, so many of our lower sort of tradesmen, laborers, and artificers, not able to find clothes and food for their families.” But the sermon and his other tracts had little effect. The Irish, Swift told Alexander Pope, “are all inevitably undone; which I have been telling them in print these ten years to as little purpose as if it came from the pulpit.”

The “projection” or “project”—a pitch made to the public for the improvement of their welfare—was a popular way of getting noticed in a burgeoning media environment of cheap, fast printing. Projects could be written by anyone and ranged widely in quality from outright scams to substantial, pathbreaking policy proposals. Defoe gained notoriety with an entire book of projects for the reform of mental health care, bankruptcy, the education of women, and other ideas. Not all projects were humanist, of course; Swift also wrote pamphlets in support of suppressing the opposition press and flogging beggars. With his satire exposing the condition of Ireland’s poor and the negligence of their imperial managers, Swift turned the projection on its head. The result is an authorial voice who, in the words of Swift biographer David Nokes, tilts between “nervous” reticence and “lip-smacking relish” over his one neat trick. The first eight hundred words of the Proposal are innocuously grandiloquent:
I think it is agreed by all parties that this prodigious number of children in the arms, or on the backs, or at the heels of their mothers, and frequently of their fathers, is in the present deplorable state of the kingdom a very great additional grievance; and, therefore, whoever could find out a fair, cheap, and easy method of making these children sound, useful members of the commonwealth would deserve so well of the public as to have his statue set up for a preserver of the nation.
The invocation of “sound, useful members” is perhaps the first red flag. Without further warning, the proposer gets to his point: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.” The selling of Ireland’s poor children for food will ensure a reduction of the noxious Catholics, he argues, and poor tenants will have children as currency to pay rent. “Constant breeders” will make “eight shillings sterling per annum by the sale of their children” and will be relieved from caring for them after a year. The author then makes the famous declaration of his own charitable disinterest: “I have no children by which I can propose to get a single penny.”
Like Swift’s previous efforts, however, A Modest Proposal had little practical effect. Ireland would continue to be seen as a burden to its neighbor. A famine came in 1740 that killed at least 300,000 people. One million died in the Great Famine a century later. Instead his proposal took on greater relevance the further it drifted from its intended context and came to indict humanity at large. Philosopher John Gray writes: “The final effect of the Modest Proposal is to leave the human story a dark and senseless farce.” This effect is best demonstrated by the reading Peter O’Toole gave in Dublin in 1984. He began by noting that the essay had “a little something to offend everybody,” and his appropriately lackadaisical reading did just that. O’Toole was heckled, people walked out, and the reading, broadcast live on Irish public broadcast station RTÉ, was cut short, setting forth a flock of ironies that would have delighted the dean in his nearby resting place.
Swift did succeed in his desire to “vex” his readers—some say far too much. Edward Said noted a “discomfort” in all of Swift’s work, “that we have before us a show of freaks and horrors: a mad writer, an astrologer being murdered, an absurd and impossible war…a gallery of raving freethinkers, men burrowing in dung, and so on.” Leavis went further, contrasting Swift’s cruel irony against what he saw as the less abrasive variety practiced by Edward Gibbon. “Gibbonian prose insinuates solidarity with the reader,” whereas the “ironical” solidarity of Swift is a “betrayal.” To Leavis, Swift’s irony “is a matter of surprise and negation,” as he implies that “this is the only argument that appeals to you. Here are your actual faith and morals. How, on consideration, do you like the smell of them?” It is a small blessing that Leavis lived only one year into punk.

If Jonathan Swift were a wandering comet, then the Marquis de Sade was the fixed star—or the black hole. He never moved very far, with the second half of his life spent shuffling around the French penal system for various sex scandals and blasphemies. Sade’s writing, begun in earnest once he reached middle age, was not a tool for raising his social station, as with Swift, but a by-product of his decline. Restricted from pursuing his orgiastic and blasphemous hobbies, Sade undertook several writing projects across different forms: philosophical dialogues, short stories, a Candide-esque novel of morals, and drama. In 1783 he wrote his wife from the Château de Vincennes that he had begun a “great novelistic labor” requiring six hundred pages of manuscript paper thin enough to be rolled. The result was, in his words, “the most impure tale ever written since the world began.” Few have been inclined to disagree.
Photograph of a page from the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom by the Marquis de Sade.
From the manuscript of The 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade, 1785. Photograph by ActuaLitté. Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0).
As with A Modest Proposal, The 120 Days of Sodom describes the utmost lengths of human depravity. In Sade’s case, the audience (predominantly four libertine men of eminent rank but grotesquely low character) is an active part of the sprawling narrative. It is an unfinished tale, written after he was incarcerated in the Bastille, then abandoned when Sade was transferred elsewhere for yelling that prisoners were being murdered, and seemingly lost when the prison was stormed just days later. The manuscript was discovered by a man named Arnoux de Saint-Maximin, who sold it to the Marquis de Villeneuve-Trans. Villeneuve-Trans’ family kept it until the early twentieth century, when it was sold first to a German collector, and then to Sade’s descendants in 1929. Of the four parts, only the first is near completion; the remaining three are in outline form, some largely just telegrammic lists of obscene acts. Sade replicated the novel’s tone in his subsequent works Justine, Juliette, and Philosophy in the Bedroom, but 120 Days remains the quintessential and most criticized and cited of Sade’s works.
“Any decent pleasures, or any prescribed by that beast…that you call Nature…shall be expressly excluded from this collection,” Sade wrote in his introduction, “and should you stumble across them by chance it shall only be in cases where they shall be accompanied by some crime, or tainted by some infamy.” The narrative, such as there is one, is double-layered. Inside a castle in the Black Forest four prostitutes regale the four noblemen with stories of past exploits. The men, eager to explore the “six hundred passions,” then imitate the remembered debauchery with the adolescent boys and girls they have kidnapped and brought to the castle for sexual exploitation along with older male studs, or “fuckers.”
Sade’s most salacious novels lead the reader to question how much of it is meant to be read as a litany of straightforward sexual fantasies. He rejected the speculative “wizardry” of the gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, but he had a gift for black comedy that won the appreciation of the surrealists. He described one of the storytellers as “the very image of crime incarnate. Her withered arse resembles marbled paper.” One of the libertines, in a test of his strength, “wagered he could suffocate a horse between his legs, and the beast breathed its last at the very moment he had predicted.”
“Written down, shit does not smell,” Roland Barthes wrote of Sade with a reassurance similar to a parent telling a frightened child that no monster hides under the bed. One salient criticism of pornography is that it glosses over the less pleasant physical rigors and secretions that accompany the acts depicted: sweat, stench, intrusions of the digestive process, exhaustion, vomit (when applicable), etc. Sade, quite famously, invites and revels in these by-products, which appear with such frequency, and are recounted in such detail, that the pungency of his prose is difficult to tolerate. The reader is ceaselessly confronted with the scents and sounds of Sade’s players and their playthings. Sade lacks the willingness or the ability to keep up the pornographic pretense of serving the reader’s pleasure. Instead the reader is beset with examples of pleasure he is certain they have never thought possible, performed with a sprightly energy that is almost more discomfiting than the acts themselves. One storyteller recalls:
“The first, whom I frigged as we stood naked, wanted floods of nearly boiling water to stream over our bodies through a hole in the ceiling as long as our session lasted…One cannot imagine the pleasure he felt as it washed over him; as for me…I screamed out like a scalded tomcat—my skin peeled from this, and I firmly promised myself never to return to that man’s house.”

“Oh my God,” said the Duc. “I feel the urge to scald the love Aline like that.” “My lord,” the latter humbly replied, “I am not a pig.” At once everyone laughed at the innocent candor of her childish response.
That is probably the most representative Sadean exchange that one can respectably reprint, wherein “pleasure” is a top-down decree. “The idea of seeing another person experience the same pleasure,” Sade wrote, “reduces one to an equality which spoils the unutterable charms that comes from despotism.” If there is any cogent idea to extract from Sade’s filth, it is the lure of anarcho-tyranny. That was given full expression in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, the equally infamous 1975 film adaptation of 120 Days, set in Fascist Italy. “We Fascists are the only true anarchists, naturally, once we’re masters of the state,” the duke declares in the film. “In fact, the one true anarchy is that of power.” Sade’s worldview combined hostile atheism, might-makes-right determinism, and madcap nihilism, cutting against the humanist and deist grain of the Enlightenment philosophes: when God is absent, man will sooner re-create hell in His stead, not heaven.
The Marquis de Sade and the King of Diamonds, 1965, lithograph by Jose Luis Cuevas.
The Marquis de Sade and the King of Diamonds, by Jose Luis Cuevas, 1965. Smithsonian American Art Museum, gift of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, Inc., 1973.
As much as he tried to instill his work with philosophical heft and authorial ambition, Sade was not a writer of ideas—he was a writer of sensory overload. Even in his more thematically and compositionally complete novels, he could not stop pushing beyond the bounds of good taste or sense. Sade remained preoccupied with release at the expense of tension. The only option that leaves for a reader is simply to endure. Those who do endure likely get by on the faint traces of better, more concise narratives that Sade could have wrung out of his excesses.
If there is an irony in Sade, it is that, rather than scandalize and draw the reader into his morass, he incites them to flee as far away as possible—anything to escape Sade’s tedious and putrid garden of damnation.

Considering these texts sometimes leads me to wonder about a literary history where things turned out differently for their authors. What if Sade had somehow evaded prison? Doubtless he’d have kept on with his libertine extracurricular activities. His writing might have been a more gentlemanly or remunerative pursuit, producing bawdy but harmless stories and pedestrian infidel tracts. What he channeled into his novels might have been redirected into his letters—indeed, he might have become, as Gore Vidal thought him to be, one of the great letter writers of his age. What if Swift had managed to stay in England, never returning to Ireland—and even managed to attain a much-desired bishopric? More pamphlets and polemics, to be sure, and more banter in coffeehouses with his equals. But also likely a deepening involvement in sectarian issues, leading him to become a more rigid Tory and a more committed High Churchman. He might even have followed his colleagues Bolingbroke and Francis Atterbury into Jacobitism, and hence into exile in France. Something like Gulliver’s Travels would still have been possible, but one that had more in common with the bloody-minded Hobbes than with the anarchic Rabelais.
What is more certain is that The 120 Days of Sodom and A Modest Proposal have no place in these alternate histories, so wedded as they are to the circumstances their authors encountered at the time of writing.
The extremes of Sade’s novel would have been less possible if he had been free from the contradictory extremes of prolonged incarceration. The social and sensory deprivation, the regimentation of time and the elasticity of the experience of time, the total absence of freedom and the fluid morality of mere survival, the myopia of living with your own thoughts—all were necessary elements for the creation of The 120 Days. Sade obsessively kept track of the patterns and frequency of letters and visits to make sense of how long he’d been in prison and how long he’d have until he was released. By the time he wrote The 120 Days, Sade had been in prison for seven years; he remained imprisoned for five more before the Revolution freed him, if only for a time. “Prison is bad,” Sade wrote to his wife, “because solitude gives added strength only to ideas, and the disturbance that results therefrom becomes all the greater and ever more urgent.”
Similarly, Swift’s tract would never have been written if he had remained on the other side of St. George’s Channel, remote from the toll British policy exacted on its nearest colony. Gone would be the vision of a consumer economy taken to its most literal conclusion and of industrialism taken to its logical extreme. Swift makes several references to the overly fecund Catholics, the shameful waste of babies who are aborted, and the equally if not more shameful waste of resources by those babies who are not. At its heart, A Modest Proposal is a coldly concise plan for bodily control, rendered with the greatest simplicity, that comes with the dehumanization of one population by another. Swift never had a perfectly benevolent attitude toward the Irish as a mass, but he found them redeemable enough to conjure the great Swiftian image of a baby leaving an Irish womb only to enter an English mouth.
Both Swift and Sade created works with tenacious wills to survive. Their legacies now seem to cast them as more beast than ghost at first. Subsequent artists have tried to leash the anger of Swift or the depravity of Sade, taming them for their own transgressive ends. But in truth they are more like warnings. Swift’s and Sade’s literature was neither the literature of majestic vision nor of pure shock. They are not examples of a certain method of execution but of conditions that made other methods impossible. In considering the heirs of this kind of art, we move away from the provocative fantasies of Salò or Naked Lunch and toward the nightmare reportage of Elem Klimov’s film Come and See and Curzio Malaparte’s novel Kaputt. The result is a double-edged critique of humanism, which dredges the enduring capacity for cruelty out from beneath an enlightened, noble surface and shows the mind not as a parent to an idea but under the dictatorship of an idea.

a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light,

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When two neutron stars merge, they always produce a gravitational wave signal. However, dependent on a variety of factors, with mass being especially important, these neutron star mergers may or may not produce an electromagnetic signal as well. When they do, it does not arrive simulatenously with gravitational waves, but slightly later. (NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION/LIGO/SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY/A. SIMONNET)

Ask Ethan: Why Don’t Light And Gravitational Waves Arrive Simultaneously?

There was less than a 2 second delay between gravitational waves and light, but that’s incredibly meaningful.

· 9 min read

There’s an important rule in relativity that — as far as we know — all objects must obey. If you have no rest mass as you travel through the vacuum of space, you absolutely are compelled to travel exactly at the speed of light. This is exactly true for all massless particles, like photons and gluons, approximately true for particles whose mass is tiny compared to their kinetic energy, like neutrinos, and should also be exactly true for gravitational waves. Even if gravity isn’t inherently quantum in nature, the speed of gravity should be exactly equal to the speed of light if our current laws of physics are correct. And yet, when we saw the first neutron star-neutron star merger in both gravitational waves and with light, the gravitational waves got here first by almost 2 seconds. What’s the explanation? That’s what Mario Blanco wants to know, asking:
“I read your articles and found the one on gravitational waves very interesting. […] What would account for the 2s delay of gravitational waves over light waves?”
If everything traveled at the same speed, and both are generated at the same time, then why would one arrive before the other? It’s a great question. Let’s investigate.
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Illustration of a fast gamma-ray burst, long thought to occur from the merger of neutron stars. The gas-rich environment surrounding them could delay the arrival of the signal, but the mechanism that produces like could also cause a delay in the emission of the signal. Light and gravity should both travel, through the vacuum of space, at the same speed. (ESO)
On August 17, 2017, the signal from an event that occurred 130 million light-years away finally arrived here on Earth. From somewhere within the distant galaxy NGC 4993, two neutron stars had been locked in a gravitational dance where they orbited one another at speeds that reached a significant fraction of the speed of light. As they orbited, they distorted the fabric of space owing to both their mass and their motion relative to the curved space through which they traveled.
Whenever masses accelerate through curved space, they emit tiny amounts of invisible radiation that’s invisible to all telescopes: gravitational, rather than electromagnetic, radiation. These gravitational waves behave as ripples in the fabric of spacetime, carrying energy away from the system and causing their mutual orbit to decay. At a critical moment in time, these two stellar remnants spiraled so close to one another that they touched, and what followed was one of the most spectacular scientific discoveries of all-time.
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This three-panel illustration of the inspiral and merger of two neutron stars shows how the amplitude and frequency of the gravitational waves both increase as the merger becomes imminent. At the critical moment of merger, the signal spikes, and then disappears behind the event horizon as a black hole is formed. Optical and other electromagnetic light may or may not be emitted as part of this process. (NASA)
As soon as these two stars collided, the gravitational wave signal came to an abrupt end. Everything that the LIGO and Virgo detectors saw was from the inspiral phase up until that moment, followed by total gravitational wave silence. According to our best theoretical models, this was two neutron stars inspiraling and merging together, likely resulting in a remarkable end result: the formation of a black hole.
But then it happened. 1.7 seconds later, after the gravitational wave signal ceased, the first electromagnetic (light) signal arrived: gamma rays, which came in one enormous burst. From the combination of gravitational wave and electromagnetic data, we were able to pin down the location of this event better than any gravitational wave event ever: to the specific host galaxy in which it occurred, NGC 4993.
Over the coming weeks, light began to arrive in other wavelengths as well, as close to 100 professional observatories monitored the spectacular afterglow of this neutron star merger.
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For the 2017 neutron star-neutron star merger, an electromagnetic counterpart was robustly seen immediately, and follow-up observations, such as this Hubble image, were able to see the afterglow and remnant of the event. For GW190425, the only other neutron star-neutron star merger seen in gravitational waves, that has not been possible. (P.K. BLANCHARD / E. BERGER / HARVARD-CFA / HST)
On the one hand, this is remarkable. We had an event occur some 130 million light-years away: far enough away that light took 130 million years to travel from the galaxy where it occurred to our eyes. Back when the merger took place, planet Earth was a vastly different place. Feathered birds had been around for only 20 million years; placental mammals for 10 million. The first flowering plants were just beginning to emerge, and the largest dinosaurs were still 30 million years in Earth’s future.
For all that time, from then until the present, both the light and the gravitational waves from this event were journeying through the Universe, traveling at the only speed they could — the speed of light and the speed of gravity, respectively — until they arrived at Earth after a journey of 130 million years. First the gravitational waves from the inspiral phase arrived, moving the mirrors on our gravitational wave detectors by an incredibly small amount: less than a ten-thousandth of the size of an individual proton. And then, just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal ended, the first light from the event arrived as well.
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An illustration of a very high energy process in the Universe: a gamma-ray burst. These bursts can arise when two neutron stars merge, and one was detected just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave signal from GW170817 ceased. (NASA / D. BERRY)
Immediately, this gave us the most impressive physical measurement of the speed of gravity ever: it was equal to the speed of light to better than 1 part in a quadrillion (1015), as it takes around four quadrillion seconds to make up 130 million years, and they arrived less than two seconds apart from one another. Prior to that, we had excellent theoretical reasons for knowing that the speed of gravity ought to equal the speed of light, but only had indirect constraints that the two were equivalent to within 0.2% or so.
Does this mean that the speed of gravity and the speed of light aren’t quite equal, then? That perhaps either gravity moves slightly faster than c, the speed of light in a vacuum, or that light itself might actually move a tiny bit slower than c, as though it had a tiny but non-zero rest mass to it? That would be an extraordinary revelation, but one that’s highly unlikely. If that were true, light of different energies (and wavelengths) would travel at different speeds, and the level at which that would need to be true is much too large to be consistent with observations.
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The longer a photon’s wavelength is, the lower in energy it is. But all photons, regardless of wavelength/energy, move at the same speed: the speed of light. The number of wavelengths required to cover a certain, specified distance may change, but the light-travel-time is the same for both. (NASA/SONOMA STATE UNIVERSITY/AURORE SIMONNET)
In simpler terms, if light had a non-zero rest mass, and that mass were heavy enough to explain why gravitational waves arrived 1.7 seconds earlier than light after traveling 130 million light-years across the Universe, then we’d observe radio waves traveling significantly slower than the speed of light: too slow to be consistent with what we’ve already observed.
But that’s okay. In physics, we don’t have any problem considering all possible explanations for an observed puzzle. If we’re doing our jobs correctly, every explanation except for one will be incorrect. The challenge is to find the correct one.
And we think we have! The key is to think about the objects that are merging together, the physics at play, and what signals they’re likely to produce. We’ve already done this for the gravitational waves, detailing how they’re produced during the inspiral phase and cease once the merger takes place. Now, it’s time to go a little deeper and think about the light.
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During an inspiral and merger of two neutron stars, a tremendous amount of energy should be released, along with heavy elements, gravitational waves, and an electromagnetic signal, as illustrated here. (NASA / JPL)
Up until these two neutron stars touched, there was no “extra” light produced. They simply shone as neutron stars do: faintly, at high temperatures but with tiny surface areas, and completely undetectable with our current technology from 130 million light-years away. Neutron stars aren’t like black holes; they aren’t point-like. Instead, they’re compact objects — typically somewhere between 20 and 40 kilometers across — but denser than an atomic nucleus. They’re called neutron stars because they’re about 90% neutrons by composition, with other atomic nuclei and a few electrons at the outer edge.
When two neutron stars collide, there are three possibilities that can result. They are:
  1. you can form another neutron star, which you’ll do if your total mass is less than 2.5 times the mass of the Sun,
  2. you can form a new neutron star briefly, which then collapses into a black hole in under a second, if your total mass is between 2.5 and 2.8 solar masses (dependent on the neutron star’s spin),
  3. or you can form a black hole directly, with no intermediate neutron star, if your total mass is greater than 2.8 solar masses.
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We knew that when two neutron stars merge, as simulated here, they can create gamma-ray burst jets, as well as other electromagnetic phenomena. But perhaps, above a certain mass threshold, a black hole is formed where the two stars collide in the second panel, and then all the additional matter-and-energy gets captured, with no escaping signal. (NASA / ALBERT EINSTEIN INSTITUTE / ZUSE INSTITUTE BERLIN / M. KOPPITZ AND L. REZZOLLA)
From the gravitational wave signal that arose from this event, officially known as GW170817, we know that this event falls into the second category: the merger and post-merger signal existed for a few hundred milliseconds before disappearing entirely all in an instant, which indicates that a neutron star formed for a brief time before an event horizon formed and engulfed the entire thing.
But nevertheless, light still got out. The next question was, simply, how?
How was the light that we observed generated? Again, there were three possibilities that we could think of.
  1. Immediately, as soon as the neutron stars touch, by processes that occur on their surfaces.
  2. Only after material gets ejected, where it collides with any surrounding material and produces light from that.
  3. Or from the interior of neutron stars, where reactions generate energy that only gets emitted once it propagates to the exterior.
In each scenario, gravitational waves travel unperturbed once the signal is generated, but light takes an extra amount of time to get out.
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In the final moments of merging, two neutron stars don’t merely emit gravitational waves, but a catastrophic explosion that echoes across the electromagnetic spectrum. The arrival time difference between light and gravitational waves enables us to learn a lot about the Universe. (UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK / MARK GARLICK)
If it’s the first option, and neutron star mergers generate light as soon as they touch, the light gets emitted immediately and therefore must be delayed by passing through the environment surrounding the neutron star. That environment must be rich in matter, as each fast-moving neutron stars, with charged particles on their surfaces and intense magnetic fields, is bound to strip and eject material from the other one.
If it’s the second or third option, merging neutron stars generate light from their mergers, but that light only gets emitted after a certain amount of time has passed: either for ejected material to smash into the circumstellar material or for the light generated in the neutron star interiors to reach the surface. It’s also possible, in either of these cases, that both “delayed emission” and “slowed arrival by surrounding material” are at play.
Any of these scenarios could easily explain the 1.7s delay of light’s arrival with respect to gravitational waves. But on April 25, 2019, we saw another neutron star-neutron star merger in gravitational waves, which was more massive than GW170817. No light was emitted of any type, disfavoring the first scenario. It looks like neutron stars don’t generate light as soon as they touch. Instead, the emission of light comes after the emission of gravitational waves.
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Neutron stars, when they merge, should create an electromagnetic counterpart if they don’t create a black hole right away, as light and particles will be expelled due to internal reactions in the interior of these objects. However, if a black hole forms directly, the lack of an outward force and pressure could cause total collapse, where no light or matter escapes at all to the outside observers in the Universe. (DANA BERRY / SKYWORKS DIGITAL, INC.)
With only two direct detections of merging neutron stars through the emission of gravitational waves, it’s a testament to how incredibly precise the science of gravitational wave astronomy has become that we can reconstruct all we have. When you add in the electromagnetic follow-up observations from the 2017 event that also produced light, we’ve definitively shown that a large fraction of the elements in our Universe — including gold, platinum, iodine and uranium — arise from these neutron star mergers.
But not, perhaps, from all neutron star mergers; perhaps it’s only the ones that don’t immediately form a black hole. Either ejected material or reactions in the neutron star’s interior is required to produce these elements, and hence, the light associated with a kilonova explosion. That light is only produced after the gravitational wave signal has ended, and may further be delayed by having to pass through the circumstellar material. This is why, even though light and gravity both travel exactly at the speed of light in a vacuum, the light we saw didn’t arrive until nearly 2 seconds after the gravitational wave signal ceased. As we collect and observe more of these events, we’ll be able to confirm and refine this picture once and for all!

Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com!
Starts With A Bang is now on Forbes, and republished on Medium on a 7-day delay. Ethan has authored two books, Beyond The Galaxy, and Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive.

Ethan Siegel
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The Universe is: Expanding, cooling, and dark. It starts with a bang! #Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist.