LONDON, Jan 22 (Reuters) – The U.S. is due to officially exit the World Health Organization on Thursday, in the face of warnings it will hit both U.S. health and global health and also in violation of a U.S. law that requires Washington to pay the U.N. health agency $260 million in fees that it owes.
President Donald Trump gave notice that the U.S. would quit the organization on the first day of his presidency in 2025, via an executive order. Under U.S. law, it has to give one-year notice and pay all outstanding fees before departure.
On Thursday, a U.S. State Department spokesperson said the WHO’s failure to contain, manage and share information had cost the U.S. trillions of dollars and the president had exercised his authority to pause the future transfer of any U.S. government funds, support, or resources to the WHO.
“The American people have paid more than enough to this organization and this economic hit is beyond a down payment on any financial obligations to the organization,” the spokesperson said by email.
This post provides a concrete example of what FIML practice does and why it is needed. Stress voice is an involuntary intrusion of instinct into speech. In some contexts, this is a very good thing. In many other contexts, it can be a very bad thing because it alerts us to dangers that do not exist while generating the illusion that they do. ABN
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Humans are semiotic animals that respond to human signals as primary percepta.
Some obvious examples are sex in advertising, pictures of hamburgers, people enjoying a natural view from a balcony in a hotel brochure. Each of these relies on an “instinct”—sex, hunger, an animal’s response to nature—while at the same time signaling a complex human contribution to the basic signal.
Another type of human signal that arouses instinct is tone of voice. A good example of this is the “stress” or “alarm” voice that is used by most if not all mammals and birds.
The basic instinctive stress or alarm voice is a shriek. If words are used, the shrieking tone will be accompanied by rapidly spoken words—“stop! stop! stop!” or “Watch out! it’s falling” or “get down! get down!” etc.
In basic situations involving real danger, the alarm voice is very important. We definitely want to have both the voice and the sudden energized response it draws from us.
In many situations, though, the stress voice can cause problems when it arises due to simple miscommunication. For example, I say or do something different from what you asked or implied and it causes you—virtually involuntarily—to use an alarmed tone that involves a bit of a shriek and rapid words.
For example, you asked me to cut some mushrooms for a broth we are making. What you meant is you want the mushrooms to go into the clear broth after it has been made but I toss them into the pot with the chicken bones and vegetable scraps that will be strained and thrown away.
When you first see what I have done, you experience slight confusion, even cognitive dissonance, and say in an alarmed voice, “What are you doing with the mushrooms?”
In turn, I respond directly to your stress voice and to the now evident miscommunication with my own confusion and stress voice, “I thought you wanted them in the broth!”
If we are friends, this minor contretemps will probably be easily overcome and we may even laugh about it. If we have had many unresolved contretemps of this type, however, one or both of us may escalate the problem by being accusatory or even abusive.
Even though the mushroom contretemps is very simple and insignificant, it can still be dangerous even between good friends because this type of contretemps can quickly get blown out of proportion due to the primal, instinctive quality of the stress voice.
Similar problem situations might be miscommunicated directions while driving or working, messed up meeting times, or getting the wrong thing from the store.
These problems are generally easy to resolve, though they may still generate discord or stress both because a confusing miscommunication happened and also because the stress or alarm voice just is that way; it causes stress or alarm in and of itself.
If you can see and deal with concrete situations such as the ones described above, imagine how similar situations may arise in less concrete forms and how they can be even more dangerous and lead to even more serious problems.
Miscommunicated emotional, sexual, psychological, or intellectual signals can also give rise to primal stress or alarm tones and, in turn, generate further stress and alarm. Contretemps like these can be much harder to pinpoint, analyze, and understand than simpler ones involving concrete communication about mushrooms or directions.
In FIML practice, if partners can mutually understand a few concrete contretemps and how and why they generate stress and confusion and use these forms as basic paradigms for more complex contretemps, they will go a long way toward removing stress and confusion that is entirely blameless, unconscious, unmotivated, and unintended by either of them.
Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and five other plaintiffs today accused the American Academy of Pediatrics of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule. CHD filed the RICO suit in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
In a lawsuit filed today in federal court, Children’s Health Defense (CHD) and five other plaintiffs accused the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) of running a decades-long racketeering scheme to defraud American families about the safety of the childhood vaccine schedule.
The suit alleges that the AAP violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) by making “false and fraudulent” claims about the safety of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) childhood immunization schedule — while receiving funding from vaccine manufacturers and providing financial incentives to pediatricians who achieve high vaccination rates.
“For too long, the AAP has been held up on a pedestal, as if it were a font of science and integrity,” said CHD CEO Mary Holland. “Sadly, that’s not the case.”
Instead, Holland said, the AAP “is a front operation in a racketeering scheme involving Big Pharma, Big Medicine and Big Media, ready at every turn to put profits above children’s health. It’s time to face facts and see what the AAP is really about,” Holland said.
President Donald Trump announced a dramatic breakthrough in his bid to acquire Greenland after striking a deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.
Trump said he will scrap tariffs scheduled for February 1st following what he described as ‘very productive’ talks on a framework agreement covering the entire Arctic region.
The president said ‘additional discussions’ are ongoing regarding Greenland and that Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Special Envoy to the Middle East Steve Witkoff are ‘responsible for the negotiations.’
Trump told reporters in Davos on Wednesday that the deal will be ‘put out pretty soon.’
‘It gets us everything we needed to get,’ he insisted, adding: ‘It’s a deal that everybody’s very happy with.’
This has been one of my greatest geopolitical hopes — that Trump is ‘by deception doing war’ with Israeli Jewish Supremacy.
Gonna hang with this interpretation as long as I can because it feels so right, makes sense and is one of several such signals.
If Ritter is right, this is an example of real-world realism and why we don’t abandon Trump because he did not ban the covid vax, expose the Epstein blackmail op, or pay enough attention to Kirk’s assassination.
If Ritter is wrong about this, the basics are still the same:In the real world we have to take what we can get and work with it. ABN
All virtues must be wise or they are not virtues. What is wise or not can be discussed but never denied. Logos is wise. God is wise. Tathagata is wise. ABN
A regime is not upheld by abstractions, but by men—by their capacities, their instincts, and their loyalties. Every political order is biopolitical. It rests on who is born, who holds power, and who is cast out.
Hierarchy is the principle by which men are arranged according to their natural differences. Order is the cohesion and stability that arise when those differences are rightly understood and affirmed. Both emerge from the unequal distribution of traits among men: differences in character, in foresight, and in the will to lead or the willingness to follow.
Institutions do not endure through ideals alone. They endure through the strength, discipline, and continuity of a people—through the cooperation of the living and the faithful transmission of order across generations. Each man fulfills the station assigned to him. As the Roman poet Horace observed, “Content with his own place, he does not strive to rise above his rank.” This is the foundation of every stable order.
When these biological foundations are subverted—when the weak and unfit are gathered into a collective and their infirmity is transmuted into political force—politics does not vanish. It degenerates. It no longer serves truth, justice, or excellence, but becomes a mechanism of control. The regime still demands obedience, but not from men of worth. It secures it through dependence, and sustains it by elevating the weak over the strong, the base over the noble.
This is the logic of Bioleninism.
Coined by the writer “Spandrell,” Bioleninism describes a strategy of rule that emerges in times of civilizational decline. Unable to sustain themselves through the loyalty of the competent and independent, regimes in decay assemble a new ruling coalition from the biologically—and therefore, often socially—unfit. These are not men who ascend through merit, but men whose status, and in many cases their very existence, depends entirely on the system. Their loyalty is secured through dependency. Their resentment is weaponized against those more capable.
This is not a new phenomenon. Lenin perfected it in revolutionary Russia. He recruited from the embittered margins—what Dr. Edward Dutton calls the “spiteful mutants”: ethnic outsiders, failed intellectuals, radical ideologues, and social deviants. These were not men with a stake in the old order, nor any place in a just or natural hierarchy. But for a regime built upon destruction, they were the perfect instruments. Their failure bound them in loyalty. Their hatred made them merciless.
Bioleninism adapts this same logic to the postmodern West. It extends beyond socioeconomic class to encompass the full spectrum of biological dysfunction. Its favored instruments are the neurotic, the perverse, the embittered, and the malformed. The more broken the individual, the more easily he is controlled. The less capable he is of surviving on merit, the more tightly he clings to the regime that elevates him. In this perverse selection process, the ugliness of ineptitude and failure becomes power. Dependence is transfigured into virtue.
This is not a regime designed to elevate the noble or reward the capable. It exists to entrench itself through the destruction of those who might transcend it. What it cannot corrupt, it casts out. What it cannot cast out, it slanders or crushes. Its war on merit is not accidental but essential, for excellence threatens its command. Competence defies control. Beauty reveals the sublime indifference of nature, where nothing is owed and everything must be earned. Normalcy resists authoritarian domination, for it thrives on proportion and restraint. And so inversion becomes the law. The strong are treated as a threat, the virtuous as a danger, the noble as criminal. In their place rise the bitter, the weak, and the grotesque—men who could never have built a civilization, but who will burn one down to preserve their power.
The result is a system that no longer aspires to greatness, but to obedience. Its rulers do not seek honor, but control. They govern not through excellence, but through fear, distortion, and manufactured dependency. Their stability rests on the loyalty of those who would hold no place in any just or well-ordered world.
Bioleninism is not a temporary error, but the death knell of a collapsing system. It does not merely manage decline, as the familiar idiom suggests, but voraciously feeds upon it. And unless it is utterly annihilated—without hesitation and without mercy—all that is noble will be shattered and all that is beautiful will lie in ruin.
Victory does not demand cruelty, but it does demand resolve, the kind that does not turn away from necessity. It calls for fidelity to nature, the courage to name things as they are, and the unbending will to build again. Like all parasitic systems, Bioleninism is brittle. Its strength lies not in might, but in submission. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned, “Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” If enough men refuse to live by lies, the mask cracks, the spell breaks, and the whole decrepit order begins to fall.
Micro FIML practice is basic to all FIML practice.
(A description of micro FIML can be found here: How to do FIML.)
Basic or micro FIML provides a sturdy foundation for many other kinds of interpersonal discussions. This is so because basic FIML makes partners confident that they can say what they think without fearing that their partner will significantly misunderstand them.
Why is that? The reason is if your partner interprets what you have said in a palpable—and especially a negative—way, they will ask you about it. Once they have asked you, you can clarify what you meant, change it, expand on it, explain it, or do anything else you want with it as long as you are being honest.
Basic FIML explicates all new clouds that appear on the horizon. If your partner speaks or communicates in a way that causes a small cloud to appear on your horizon and you have time, bring it up immediately using the basic FIML technique linked above. If you don’t have time to bring it up immediately, do it later when you do have time if the cloud is still there. Even if the cloud is gone, it can still be interesting to bring it up later because you can discuss the incident and learn more about yourselves from that. Very small incidents are often the most interesting because data points are clear and strong emotions are not likely to be aroused.
No FIML partner should ever carry around a shadow of misgiving or negativity about their partner without saying something about it. This is where meso and macro levels of FIML come into play.
Meso and macro FIML come into play when you discover that even though you have been doing basic FIML perfectly and dealt with every cloud that appeared on your horizon, still there is a shadow or haze developing in your mind.
You can’t remember when it started or how it started, but you know it is there.
If you have been doing basic FIML and are reasonably skilled in it, you should be able to bring up the matter of a gathering haze in your mind and clear it with your partner. Maybe you partner is spending too much time away from you or too close to you. Maybe you are starting to feel weird about something they keep saying. No single incident of their saying whatever it is has bothered you enough to mention it, but they keep saying it and that is getting to you. Once you notice anything like that, just bring it up and discuss it at a meso level while relying on basic micro FIML practice to steer you toward a good resolution that works for both of you.
Another example of a meso discussion might be something like: you are a bit tired, your partner says something and you respond in what seems a pleasant way to you and they respond to that in a way that seems sharp or restrictive to you. Since you are tired, you don’t do basic FIML at the right moment but instead respond sharply to what you had perceived as their sharpness.
If your partner questions you on that and/or if you notice it yourself, just do a meso FIML discussion that brings in all of the factors you are aware of. Your habit of doing basic FIML will make it much easier to have conversations on meso or macro levels than if you had never done basic FIML at all.
A macro level FIML discussion might entail a growing shift in your understanding of any macro subject—science, religion, philosophy, politics, etc.
As with meso discussions, macro discussions will be much easier and more enjoyable if partners know how to do basic FIML.
Basic FIML solves most communication problems by helping partners be honest with each other in ways that are helpful and productive without being phony. Basic FIML also helps partners sail past the many minor snags that can occur in conversations, such as quibbling over word choices, minor details, tone of voice, gestures, and so on.
This happens because basic FIML will already have provided many examples of small snags and how to overcome them. It does take some practice to get to this point, but it is not much harder than learning to sew or make pizza. Requires some work and there are better and worse results, but once you get going the benefits should be clear enough to keep you going.
In my view, FIML will not work for partners only if a misinterpretation is not addressed, not honestly addressed, or not substantially addressed from the micro level on up. If you always jump in at meso and macro levels, you will almost certainly cause more problems than you will solve.
American Buddhist Net 