We have a choice: either we continue to passively accept institutional false information or we resist. What are the checks and balances that we must put in place to reduce conflicts of interest in public health and research institutions? How can we decentralise the media and academic journals in order to reduce the influence of pharmaceutical advertising on their editorial policy?
How Can We Trust Institutions that Lied? Read Journal Article
If some website offered a deal to users – you post pics of lunch, cats, and flowers, and we give you ads – and it worked, fine. That’s normal terms of use. That’s not what is going on. Via explicit and implicit pressure, combined with irresponsible management, Facebook turned over its entire business model to government to deploy on behalf of regime interests. The customers and stockholders were the victims.
Facebook Is Dead Unless You Post Something that Does Not Matter Read Journal Article
Outrageous government policies are often shrouded by fogbanks of bureaucratese and political deceit. But a snappy sentence can sometimes puncture the veil and spur the ridicule that policy-makers richly deserve. Following is a round-up of verbal harpoons I flung at Leviathan last year.
Pandemic Potshots and Other Epigrams Read Journal Article
The person and role of Gottlieb is a paradigmatic case of why and how solving the mysteries of the lockdowns and mandates is such a complicated undertaking. It’s not just about government intervention and it’s not just about private corruption. It’s about a complicated relationship between the two, involving a range of public and private actors in and out of government who seized control of the policy machinery to achieve private ends at enormous public expense.
The Censorious Scott Gottlieb Was a Major Influence on Lockdowns Read Journal Article
The current fad of the financially fabulous is Effective Altruism, which essentially involves promising to give your money while you are still alive to causes and organizations that “do good,” while simultaneously tethering them to your whims through financial dependence. A very specific example of this is the massive money going to barely-surviving but purportedly legit media organizations (or you can just buy the Washington Post.) You get good press when you own it.
Ineffective Maltruism Read Journal Article
When you stop and think about it, there’s no way a “Woodward and Bernstein” could tell the story of the Covid Scandal. There’s simply too many scandals that would have to be exposed. It would take an army of Woodward and Berstein’s to break the pieces down into individual, sub-scandal components.
Where’s the Woodward and Bernstein of the Covid Scandals? Read Journal Article
The entire mess began not just with a bad prediction but an outrageously bad falsehood – spoken in front of deeply ignorant and terrified politicians – one that was followed by an egregious demand that we get rid of normal social and market functioning. The consequences are for the ages. Fauci had his own masters and minions but it is impossible to avoid the reality that he bears primary responsibility as the voice of panic that shut down freedoms hard won over a millennium.
Fauci Fibbed on the Day Everything Changed Read Journal Article
It’s morally, legally, and intellectually repugnant that federal officials in the United States have constructed a vast apparatus for censoring legal speech, bypassing the First Amendment—without informing the public—on the pretext that the activities of foreign regimes which have been deliberately permitted on our online platforms have gotten so out of control.
Disinformation, Censorship, and Information Warfare in the 21st Century Read Journal Article
Bottom line: the government conspired to remove valid public health messages and social media posts by myself & others, because they disagreed with the viewpoint which contradicted the federal government’s COVID-19 public health message and views.
The Government Conspired with Big Tech to Infringe on Free Speech Read Journal Article
The common thread among all of this coverage is that they all focus on the system, rather than the human. There’s this concept called “capacity” that we all somehow need to know about, and we all need to make decisions because of it. The entire concept is backwards. It’s a fundamentally utilitarian mindset that stems from a fundamental misrepresentation of how systems work, and an inverted moral philosophy that prioritizes systems over people. Hospitals were built for humankind, not humankind for the hospital.
What the Media Gets Wrong about Hospitals Read Journal Article
Note that Breton’s tweet and the introductory post to his Mastodon thread both indeed call on Musk to “significantly reinforce content moderation,” thus making clear that the Commission not only disapproves of the prospect of banned accounts being restored, but also of the relatively more laissez-faire attitude that Musk has thus far adopted toward current users.
How the EU Killed Elon Musk’s Twitter “Amnesty” Read Journal Article
Xi Jinping sees the concepts of democracy and human rights as mere propaganda that western elites use to further their own self-interest. So long as they approve of a policy, then it’s not a human rights violation, but if they oppose it, then it is.
The Absurdity of Lockdowners Who Support China’s Anti-Lockdown Protests Read Journal Article
