An article in the UK Telegraph this morning comments on the cover up of Biden’s cognitive decline saying:
“The ability to have some trustworthy sources in the world does matter – and will matter an awful lot more in the years to come. The media that helped cover up Biden’s condition should take a serious and critical look at themselves – even though it’s not clear that self-criticism is something of which they are remotely capable.”
Unfortunately untrustworthy sources are not limited to the media. A paper published in the Journal of Independent Medicine is entitled “Metacritique of Influential Studies Purporting COVID-19 Vaccine Successes: Part 1 – Watson et al” which concludes that the risks of Covid vaccines outweigh any perceived benefits, saying one highly cited study, relied upon by health services, falsely purported to show Covid vaccines saved 14 million lives:
“[The study included] the use of inaccurate estimates of effectiveness and safety due to inadequate counting windows; lack of recognition of waning effectiveness and eventual negative effectiveness; failure to account for confounding variables; exaggerated infection and case fatality rates; insufficient consideration of vaccine-related risks; and possible financial or political conflicts of interest.”
Search engines which employ AI are another source of unreliable and biased information, or rather misinformation. Last week I used Google to try to find out if the official March 2025 figures for New Zealand births and deaths had been published. Google AI overview told me:
“In March 2025, New Zealand saw a 7% increase in both live births and deaths compared to the same month in 2024. There was a natural decrease, with 584 more deaths than births. The average daily birth rate was 44, while the average daily death rate was 63.”
This answer is entirely false, in fact the New Zealand March figures had not been published and AI, ever eager to speak with authority, simply substituted the latest Slovenian data for that of New Zealand. The current standard AI search engines which provide one sentence answers to complex questions, which may be inaccurate simplifications or even false, are going to be a greater and greater curse on our education system as time goes by.
Believing in one thing to the exclusion of many, thinking that a single winner is the only person worthy of praise and reward, maintaining faith in something that doesn’t work or for which there is no evidence, posing as an expert on something about which you know little and pretending to certainty when there is doubt are all symptoms of a failure of intelligence. This arises when the knower pays attention to a PART of a problem but fails to appreciate the WHOLE picture.
Last week there were articles in papers around the world like one in the NY Times entitled “Baby Is Healed With World’s First Personalized Gene-Editing Treatment“. A nine month old baby known as KJ suffers from a rare genetic disorder which affects only one out of 1.3 million babies and is usually fatal. A customised gene editing intervention has saved his life for now. I don’t want to debate the merits of a life saving procedure which has so far cost many millions of dollars and has left the child dependent on the attentions of a team of doctors for the rest of his life, but I do take issue with Dr Peter Marks, the recently replaced director of the US FDA Centre for Biologics Evaluation and Research, who claims in the New England Journal of Medicine that the procedure will “transform healthcare”.
170 million Americans are suffering from one or more chronic diseases and a senior medic is suggesting that a risky gene therapy technique costing multi million dollars per person and requiring the lifetime attention of many doctors per patient will transform healthcare. Such a view is not just myopic, it combines blind faith, professional conceit, corporate greed and disregard of the glaringly obvious—gene editing will not solve the crisis in public health. On present evidence it is more likely to exacerbate it.
Far far more likely to transform healthcare is a story published in the UK Telegraph entitled “Eat three yogurts a day and other secrets from the woman who lived to 117. This reports the findings of a study of the exceptionally healthy gut biome of a supercentenarian published under the title “The Multiomics Blueprint of Extreme Human Lifespan. “Individuals with a greater variety and “balance” of microbes in their gut seem to have a lower risk of experiencing around 70 different chronic conditions, ranging from heart disease to Type 2 diabetes, as each type of bacteria or microbe does something different for the body.” The subject of the study who lived in California ate three yogurts a day, had a diet rich in fruits and vegetables, exercised regularly, cut down on alcohol and avoided toxic people.
If you are going to start eating yogurt, remember to avoid the processed flavoured and sweetened versions that crowd our supermarket shelves, research shows they are unhealthy. Organic plain yogurts are available and it is very easy to make your own fresh yogurt overnight at home—the healthiest option.
Complementing this, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has published a study entitled “Premature Mortality Attributable to Ultraprocessed Food Consumption in 8 Countries“. This reports “Each 10% extra intake of UPF, such as bread, cakes and ready meals, increases someone’s risk of dying before they reach 75 by 3%”, according to research conducted in countries including the US and England. This adds to a growing body of evidence that UPFs are a fast track to an early death. For example, US research published last year in the BMJ found that people who consume the most UPFs have a 4% higher risk of death overall and a 9% greater risk of dying from something other than cancer or heart disease. It identified processed meat, sugar and ultra-processed breakfast foods, such as cereals, as the unhealthiest UPF products.
You might think that faced with such overwhelming evidence, government health experts would be rushing to warn the public about UPFs and incentivise healthy eating. In fact, governments the world over seem to be suffering from extreme myopia. A May 17 article in the UK Guardian is entitled “UK government dropped health push after lobbying by ultra-processed food firms“. This recounts the sorry tale of how planned government advice to supermarkets to prioritise promotion of fresh produce and drop promotions of junk food was abandoned after lobbying by the Food and Drink Federation (which represents corporations including Nestlé, Mondelēz, Coca-Cola, Mars and Unilever), repeatedly demanded the government ditch the healthy initiative.
These are the very same corporations who have been very busy substituting the natural ingredients in our traditional foods with genetically modified processing aids which contain harmful contaminated residues, as we reported in our article “Major Health Alert: the Extraordinary Genetically Modified Invasion of Our Supermarkets by Stealth“. As the 117 year old supercentenarian advised: ‘it is sensible to avoid toxic people’ and that goes for the glossy products of toxic corporations too. As consumers, we have more power than we realise. Time to STOP putting UPFs in our supermarket carts.
Our government is planning to deregulate biotechnology experimentation, putting millions of our taxpayer dollars into risky biotech research whose inevitable mistakes cannot be recalled or remediated, while proven measures to greatly improve public health which can be easily implemented with virtually no cost and managed at home go unnoticed, unheralded and unsupported. This is all the result of an education system which is failing the young who are the future leaders of society. Overwhelmed with an explosion of technology, people are gradually losing the capacity to think clearly and comprehensively. We are being bombarded with messaging tailored to influence our financial and political choices touting the very latest fad over simple, cheap, traditional tried and tested solutions. This war on common sense, nature and tradition is increasingly being designed by inherently dumb computers with the aim of subtly usurping our cognitive abilities.
We may not appreciate the scope and size of the effects, but reaching for a calculator, accepting the answer of a search engine, media source, or government pronouncement uncritically, copying and pasting without thinking, letting AI write it for you, and putting something in our mouth without reading the label are all rendering our intellect inactive and rusty. Use it or lose it.
Outer depends on inner.
There is a deeper kind of technology fully available to all of us—a technology of consciousness. Reflective time spent in deep meditation or prayer is a means to revive and refresh our intellect, quietly integrating experience into a broader knowledge framework, connecting the PART with the WHOLE. Modern education with its focus on exterior technology and superficial ideas is debasing this possibility. The kind of society and times we are living through are the end result of ignoring our inner life. History records the rise and fall of civilisations. Invariably, it is the wide availability of deep spiritual and intellectual insight that drives the rise, and ignorance and cruelty that drives the fall. We are sleepwalking into the end times of our civilisation, because we don’t understand life, yet life is the closest thing to us. If you haven’t yet begun a personal journey to fully discover inner life, it is time to begin. As Wordsworth put it so beautifully in Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey:
“….that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”
It would be a mistake to think that such deep insight comes upon us solely by chance. We have control over our behaviour and food, we can mostly choose what experiences we expose ourselves to. Our consciousness is our own to manage. Christ said the Kingdom of Heaven is Within, echoing the wisdom of the ages. St Francis found peace in nature and reflection, we can do so also. The Bhagavad Gita promises the natural result of the regular practice of deep meditation, saying “He whose mind is unshaken in the midst of sorrows, who amongst pleasures is free from longing, from whom fear and anger have departed, he is said to be a sage of steady intellect”. This is not a mood cultivated through indifference but the natural result of repeated experience of the transcendental bliss that Wordsworth described as he sat above Tintern Abbey. It is time we looked within and taught the next generation to do likewise. The collective effect of meditation on society is transformative and beneficial in a way that is unmatched by any modern technology. You can find out more about transcendental meditation and its effects on individual and collective consciousness in my book Your DNA Diet available from Amazon as a Kindle.
