As far back as 2000, experts questioned the ability of academic institutions to regulate financial conflicts of interests when they were so reliant on billions of dollars annually from industry. University leaders avoid discussing the imperative to regulate financial conflicts because they fear losing revenue.
Conflicts of Interest in Science: History of Influence, Scandal, and Denial Read More
Art and literature are not enemies of reason – they are partners in the quest for knowledge. And in the quest for wisdom and for love, one might add. This insight is invaluable at a time when imagination as well as reason should be enlisted in the struggle against tyranny.
The intellectuals bombarded the populace with empirically unproven models of their own making about many things connected with Covid. And when the vast majority of them proved completely at odds with observable reality, they simply doubled down.
The implication of there being something beyond our immediate self, a shared experience across time, changes everything. It means there is something no longer measurable within all of us, and we can no longer ignore the results of our deeds, or those we condone in others.
To contain and combat: that was the goal of the policy, in words drawn from the modern history of US warfare abroad. The war finally came home in ways that have broken the American spirit, shattered dreams, and wrecked confidence in the future. The war failed in every way, at least according to its stated aims, but it was still a sure winner for elites.
When Nearly All Governments in the World Met Their Match Read More
The problem with the Great Barrington Declaration was not that it was not true. It’s that – unbeknownst to its authors – it flew in the face of one of the most funded and elaborate industrial plots in the history of governance. Just a few sentences sneaking through the wall of censorship they were carefully constructing was enough to threaten and eventually dismantle the best laid plans.
The measure of freedom in any society is the degree of inclusion for those who stand on the margins, those who linger on the edge, and those who suffer in silence. The potential and eventual realisation of inclusion is evidence of a free society, of genuine enfranchisement for all who seek it. Good rulers take care of those who come under their authority, including those parties on the losing side of military conflicts. Freedom is not achieved by overturning the results of conflict, revising the past, or instilling guilt and shame on the victors.
Drosten is the chair of the virology department at the prestigious Charité university teaching hospital in Berlin – which, incidentally, hosts and organises the annual World Health Summit on behalf of the German government. But how many outside of Germany know that serious doubts have been raised about Drosten’s own qualifications and the validity of his own degree?
Everything is dirty. Nothing works. But everything’s also more expensive. And oh, by the way, you don’t have privacy anymore.
Absent concerted action on our part, our recent past is our foreseeable future, because neither the ideology nor the power-centers profiting from it have changed. At stake in our response is our liberal democracy and our humanity.
This account of Lacan’s discourse theory enables one to make sense of the discursive struggles currently occurring in global space. And once one has an intellectual grasp of one’s adversary’s ‘master moves’ in this space, one can better prepare to counter them through the hysteric’s and analyst’s discourses.
Even if the disease itself is not mild, a pandemic wave through a population tends to reduce local stress and anxiety and focuses people on a singular goal. This has been called the “typhoon eye effect,” reported during outbreaks of SARS, people closer to the pandemic were less anxious and more able to accurately estimate their own risks. Conversely, those on the periphery or outside the outbreaks, who received their information from media sources rather than personal experience reported increased anxiety and distress. There’s nothing more effective than having your irrational fears debunked firsthand.
Explaining the Nocebo Effect, Emotional Contagion, and Mass Hysteria Read More
