Report turned over under FOIA doesn't explain basis for Pfizer's conclusion that "other" causes were behind lost pregnancies. FDA has known findings for 16 months.
MALPRACTICE: California gender clinic treats patients as young as 2-years-old. “UCSF explicitly adheres to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) guidelines, which recommends that children as young as 8 could begin medical transition. WPATH is set to release its new 8th edition guidelines this year, which plans to lower the minimum age for teens to obtain hormones, as well as face, chest, and genital surgeries.”
YouTube inventor Allen Pan decided that 'God made a mistake' and decided to 'give snakes their legs back'. We've seen a lot of weird and wonderful inv...
The Canadian government-controlled health care establishment realizes, “Hey, wait a minute, it’s cheaper if these people die, let’s pressure them into it.”
“Euthanasia” is now Canada’s sixth-leading cause of death.
At no point does it seem to have occurred to anyone that giving the government strong financial incentive to want you dead was a bad idea.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson expressed his shock at author Salman Rushdie being stabbed by a man at an event in New York on Friday and condemned the attack on his freedom of expression.
“Appalled that Sir Salman Rushdie has been stabbed while exercising a right we should never cease to defend,” Johnson said in a tweet. “Right now, my thoughts are with his loved ones. We are all hoping he is okay,” he said.
Former chancellor and the contender to succeed Johnson as the new prime minister, Rishi Sunak, also took to Twitter to express his shock. “Shocked to hear of the attack on Salman Rushdie in New York. A champion of free speech and artistic freedom. He’s in our thoughts tonight,” Sunak said.
Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, the other finalist in the Conservative Party leadership election, said: “Disgraceful attack on Sir Salman Rushdie. People must be able to speak freely and freedom of speech must be defended. “My thoughts are with him, his family and loved ones.” “My thoughts are with him, his family and loved ones.”
Hardly a day goes by without some viral international incident reminding us why we’re so lucky to have the First Amendment. The latest such lunacy comes courtesy of the United Kingdom, where police just arrested a man for posting an allegedly offensive tweet.
Yes, seriously.
As shown in a viral video, Hampshire officers on Thursday confronted and arrested a UK man. One of the officers says, “Someone has been caused anxiety based on your social media post. And that is why you’re being arrested.”
"Feels like another attempt to isolate and pressure cadets into getting the vaccine over a weekend where they will be limited in their ability to consult with attorneys or medical professionals," said attorney R. Davis Younts.
My teenage son, Michael, returned from staying at his father’s house in mid-March 2020. He was standing on the stairs when I returned home from work. We had plans to go to my mother’s house, his grandmother’s, for dinner. I went to hug him like I always did when I returned. He recoiled, and stepped back. His face had changed.
“What’s wrong, Michael?” I said. He could not say anything. I told him we were going to Nana’s for dinner. He said he wasn’t going. He was afraid of the virus, of spreading it to others though he was not sick. I tried everything I could think of to reassure him, but nothing worked.
He said maybe he would feel safer if he went back to his father’s house.
Michael asked his father to return and pick him up.
I called Michael’s father to try to make sense of this. He said that since our son had been on an orchestra trip with his high school string orchestra a few weeks before, and based on mainstream media broadcasts on Covid and cruise ships, my son’s father said that he feared contracting Covid from our son. Michael was healthy with no symptoms of illness.
When our son was at his house for the previous week, the shutdowns began. Then, his father made Michael, aged 16, stay six feet away from him inside his house. He had worn a face mask in our son’s presence and asked our son to wear a mask in the house. He had talked to our son about virus asymptomatic spread, that strange and horrible and now widely disproven phenomenon. He told Michael that he could unknowingly infect him with Covid, even if Michael had no symptoms of illness. His father was gripped with fear and had spread it to our son.
My son was not home, the home I had made for him, for his brother, and for the family, where he had grown up and where he still lived most of the time and returned to after frequent stays with his father. We had divorced several years ago. Fear messages bombarded us; confusion was swimming around us. I was trying to learn as much as I could about this virus and about what was happening in the world. Michael returned to the house some after the mid-March crisis, but he was never the same after fear changed his eyes. I felt wild to protect him.
My older son, Alan, had called me “the Mominator” when they were growing up. I even had a license plate made, one that Alan had suggested and had helped craft. The characters were MOMN8R. For a period, all things zombie captivated Alan. He made a joke about me being the mom who would intercept the zombie as it tried to break into her child’s bedroom, would grab it by the throat, kill it instantly with her bare hands. That may’ve been one of the ways he saw me. He always made us laugh.
Alan was a strong reader, reading series after series. He was also curious about the classics. He read 1984. I, of course, knew the many cultural references to the book but had discontinued reading it when it disturbed me too deeply. When he was in high school, Alan recounted the end of the novel to me when Orwell describes Winston, completely taken over. “He loved Big Brother,” Orwell writes.
In these past two and a half years of confusion and fear and harm, of gate after gate clanging shut, locking behind us, I told Michael that the virus fear may be distorted, and we may want to keep questioning and seeking different perspectives. I told him that I was trying not to be ruled by fear, that my main instinct was to protect him from fear and harm, harms that I didn’t think were coming from a virus. I tried to reassure him. I tried humor and hyperbole, saying that I would travel to the middle of any war zone to retrieve him if I had to; I would slog through fields of infected people, into pestilence, disease, disaster to drag him to safety if that were required of me.
“So, you know more than the CDC and all the experts, Mom?” he asked.
“I’m not sure, Michael. I could be wrong. I just always question things, you know that,” I said. “I can’t help it. Especially something as serious as shutting down the schools and making us stay isolated. The people who deliver the Amazon boxes aren’t staying home.”
I had always been an outsider, I reminded him; both my sons knew this. They had attended national protests with me against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, against Obama’s drone assassination program, and local protests against chemical additives in our county drinking water, among others. I am the daughter of a Vietnam combat veteran. I am a Quaker.
In Quaker Meeting and at camp, my sons learned about Quakers who had risked their lives and their families’ lives to shelter escaping slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. I shared with my sons my readings of Quakers who had traveled to the middle of war zones to feed starving families and children, including Nazi children, in the build-up to WWII and Quakers who worked with all sides in conflict zones to try to prevent harms and quell violence.
I had been the Mominator, helping my sons handle bullies and negotiate problems with difficult teachers. I always had chewable Tylenol in my bag to hand to them for headaches wherever we were, cared for them when they were sick, prayed over them as they boarded the school bus with no seat belts when they started kindergarten.
I had invented lullabies to calm fears and prayed for their protection as they fell asleep; made them practice piano and strings and fussed at them to keep up their grades; paid attention to who their friends were and made sure I knew their friends’ parents. Through the years, they would turn to me, ask me questions about a confusing world. And they mostly had listened to me and believed me. But this was over my head. I was wild to fix this; I could not fix it.
I called loved ones to ask for help with what to say to Michael. One family member tried reassuring him by advising him to follow the CDC website. Another advised him to not be afraid -- while media everywhere proclaimed fear-inducing messages. Michael’s school closed in the spring of his sophomore year. The school where I taught in another district also closed. Viscerally, I felt closing schools was deeply harmful and not necessary.
“So, you don’t care if teachers die?” my son snapped.
“Of course, I care about teachers, Michael,” I said. “I am a teacher. Many of my friends are teachers.” I added that I thought children and teens should be in school for their health and well-being, and that the virus posed almost no risk to children and young people for serious illness or death, I had read. Hearing my son parrot the circulating propaganda about “killing teachers” alarmed me. I had also read that the virus affected mostly old people or people with seriously poor health and that the average age of death from it was in the 80s. Most people survived the illness with early treatments that were emerging each day. I kept praying for guidance and clarity, reading, asking, listening, thinking, searching.
Early in the shutdowns, Ron Paul was one of the only public figures to immediately question the dominant narrative on Covid policies. Though I disagree with Paul strongly on some important issues, I thought his comments on Covid policies made sense. I shared a couple of his articles with both my sons – mainly to offer alternative opinions, to stimulate their critical thinking and perhaps alleviate some of the spreading terror. I said I was trying to find my way through and was not sure if Paul was right either.
After that, Michael called me from his father’s house to question me. He was nervous and was not coming home this time to see me. He had heard that Libertarians like Paul were “right wing” or “Republican.” He acted as though he feared that I was more infectious, more of a virus danger, more reckless, if I was one of those. I reminded him that I was an Independent, not registered with any political party, the same as I had been for many years. He was somewhat reassured when he read online that Libertarians could be left or right politically. I again told him I considered myself neither ‘left” nor “right.” I saw Michael through the summer and fall of 2020 but less frequently.
I took him on long hikes as often as he would go. We planted a garden and listened to a lot of music. He was not getting together with his friends. I went to my boyfriend’s, now husband’s, farm to help with chores and food production. I asked Michael to go, but he wouldn’t.
“Why not?” I asked.
“We have to say home,” he answered. I told him I was going to work at the farm sometimes during the day and hoped he didn’t mind. He said he would have to ask his father if it was okay for me to leave the house. Michael’s father and his partner often sent Michael text messages when he was with me, telling him to wear the mask, reminding him that we were to stay home, and instructing him that I should be staying home as well.
“Maybe he knows more than me,” Michael said. I did not seem to have any influence.
At his high school as a ninth and tenth grader, Michael attended the Dungeons and Dragons (D and D) Club, the largest club in the school. D and D is an in-person fantasy and story-telling game, promoting imagination and group problem-solving. The club met every Friday after school and into the evening, filling two large joined classrooms. Michael’s close friends also attended every Friday night. In addition, Michael joined three or more friends Sunday afternoons at one of their houses to play the game. These activities with friends were very important to him after he had lost contact with his older brother Alan when he became addicted to computer games.
Michael played in the school string orchestra. Orchestra class met every morning with Mrs. Findman, who had been his teacher since sixth grade. Mrs. Findman, a violinist and cellist, had also taught his older brother. She was like family to my sons, looking after them in class and on orchestra trips. These activities protected Michael’s spirit when he had to travel between two households, especially in the absence of Alan, who had left him too soon. In spring 2020, Michael’s tenth grade year, the D and D club ended and did not resume while he was in school.
When we went on hikes in the nearby Shenandoah National Park or other hiking trails, many people wore masks outside on the trails in spring and summer of 2020, stepped away from each other, or turned their faces away from each other on the hiking trail. Something terrible was descending all around us, taking my beloved, ebullient, creative Michael with it – Michael, who had fearlessly climbed walls and hills when we took walks, bounded on and across stone walls with his brother on the University of Virginia grounds as we walked there when they were younger. He had a mischievous, defiant smile, climbed on his brother’s back when they watched TV, belly-laughed at his brother’s jokes, and loved Garfield comic books and MythBusters on Netflix.
Once I stopped at Walmart to buy a few things before I drove Michael to his father’s one evening in 2020. He used to like going to the store with me. I was trying to choose a cookie jar for our kitchen because I thought it would make him happy. I let the mask drop below my nose, so I could get more oxygen to be able to think and make a decision. Michael became angry and ordered me several times to pull up the mask over my nose. I said I was doing the best I could but could not breathe well. I tried walking away from him but he followed me and ordered me to put up the mask.
His eyes darted with fear, looking around at the other people. I think he believed that he could somehow take Covid to his father’s house after we went to Walmart, or perhaps by my letting the mask slip below my nose, I would pass it to him and then he could pass it to his father though neither one of us had any illness symptoms for many months. This terrifying magical thinking was also reflected by a family friend, who shared that his four-year old came home and said, “I have to wear the mask, so I don’t kill people.”
In fall 2020, in his junior year, all Michael’s classes were on Zoom. They were difficult classes, including AP courses and string orchestra. How was string orchestra possible on the computer? My school district required teachers to drive to the school building to teach while students were at home. I taught at my desk in my empty classroom. In my classroom, I could remove the face mask; when I got up to walk to the bathroom or to my mailbox down the hall, we were required to put on the mask, even if no one was around. We were prohibited from gathering in classrooms to eat together. I drove to the building every day.
Michael was at home, struggling. Assignments accumulated, and he could not complete them. I was still driving him to his father’s house, as I was required to. I wished then that we could have moved away to my partner’s farm or to some other safe and normal and open place, away from this descending doom. At my partner’s farm and other places surrounding it, life went on mostly normally. Animals had to be fed, cows had to be milked, equipment had to be repaired. Hay had to be harvested. We worked with a neighbor and friends to process a steer and filled freezers with meat. To socialize and share ideas, we attended a local farm tour event outside on a beautiful day in October 2020. No one wore a mask. Before spring of 2020, Michael loved exploring the fields and woods and riding the 4-wheeler at the farm. He had invited his friends to come too.
I asked Michael to come to my school building with me to work in my classroom, just to get out of the house, but he wouldn’t. He became paler and more withdrawn. When he returned from his father’s one afternoon, a bottle of caffeine pills sat on his desk. He told me his father had given them to him when he complained of not being able to complete his school work. I said that I did not think the pills were good for him and to please not take them. Getting outside, drinking water, socializing with friends, playing music, exercising, and getting fresh air were better and may help, I said. I told Michael’s father that I was worried about his health and asked if he would help me encourage him to get together with his friends.
“I don’t want him to get together with his friends until the vaccine comes out – I told him that,” he said. I contacted Michael’s brother, Alan, and said that Michael was struggling and needed to see him in this challenging time. Michael couldn’t drive yet, so his father had to take him to a restaurant to see his brother. Michael’s father madeAlan, and his girlfriend sit at a separate table from Michael, his father, and his father’s partner. This may have been when the government and media told people to stay away from others from “different households.”
I tried to make things normal, tried hard to stay cheerful, and kept talking. I felt like I was desperately trying to ward off despair, but nothing worked. I was losing. I took Michael to our favorite nearby restaurant where we had gone for years, with Alan too, and where we played games while waiting for our food – Set, Blink or Scrabble, the Scribble Drawing Game, and others. Early in the shutdowns, the restaurant handed out sheets, instructing customers to wear the mask while seated at the table, while waiting for food. If the waiter saw people maskless, he would pass by the table, the sheet said. “That is your clue to don the mask,” the sheet said. “We believe that every minute wearing the mask helps keep others safe,” it read. It was one of the strangest documents I have ever read. Another time, the hostess made me wait outside in the rain, waiting for a call on my cell phone when the food was ready. I was heartbroken that fear and repression ruined a favorite restaurant.
Weeks later, I decided to try going to the restaurant again. They had stopped handing out instruction sheets. Michael was reluctant to go but did. We sat outside. I took off the mask when I sat down; Michael did too. Michael’s eyes darted with fear around the restaurant. At a nearby table, a middle-aged couple sat with their son, who appeared college-aged. The couple did not have masks on; the young man did. Mike saw the young man with a mask on, then put one back on his own face.
I thought being honest might help. I told Michael that I wished children and teens did not have to wear a mask, that I didn’t like it myself, and that I found it very hard to breathe with it on.
“I don’t mind it,” he said. “I can breathe fine with a mask on.”
In late fall of 2020, Michael’s father wrote me an email saying that CDC guidance instructed us to minimize travel between households, so he thought it best that Michael only see me every two or three weeks or less. Michael agreed, his father said, because he cares about not infecting others, about not infecting us.
“Marilyn and I think of the virus differently than you and Ryan (my partner) do,” Michael’s father wrote to me in an email. He told me he was not driving Michael to stay with me. “The CDC has said that the virus can spread even when you have no symptoms. We hardly ever leave the house, which we think is safer. You and Ryan seem to have different opinions about the virus. We’re very cautious and careful and think it’s best to rarely go outside the house. Michael agreed to do this to protect us.” I was wild with grief. My partner tried reassuring Michael that I was not afraid of Covid, so maybe if Michael’s father was afraid of getting it, then why not just stay with me? None of this worked.
When Michael did come home rarely, he stopped going places with me. When I asked him when he would go out to do things with me again or see his friends, he said, “When the pandemic’s over.” All over the internet and TV, messages were inescapable that the pandemic may never be over.
Michael did not join his grandmother, uncles, and cousins and me and my partner for Thanksgiving or Christmas in 2020 and stopped coming at all to the house where he grew up.
Because he could not get his assignments done on the computer, Michael thought something was wrong with him. He told his father he thought he had attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Michael was healthy and had no disorder, I told him, but this was an extraordinarily difficult time for everyone, especially children and young people. I worked with special needs public school students, many with ADHD diagnoses, I reminded him. I said I could help him get through the school work, we could do it together, and this time would pass.
As a soccer player, a cellist, a piano player, and a gymnast, Michael had excellent attention. I had sat with him during years of piano lessons in parent-child classes. His father and I attended years of recitals, soccer games and tournaments, and string orchestra performances. Michael mastered the Hula Hoop, the Pogo stick, and juggling almost instantly. He was physically gifted, lovely to behold. We had played hours of frisbee; his focus was extraordinary. I reminded his father of this. None of it mattered.
His father took him to a clinician, who diagnosed Michael, on Zoom, with ADHD and prescribed Adderall. The clinician said that his anxiety was so strong at first that the Adderall would not work, so she also prescribed an antidepressant. There was nothing I could do. I told Michael that I didn’t think he needed the ADHD drug but that maybe the low dose antidepressant could be helpful. I told him to stop taking the drugs if he didn’t like the way they made him feel. When he stopped taking them once because he did not like the side effects, his father told him to resume taking them.
When I saw Michael in spring 2021, his affect had flattened, his skin had paled. His eyes were weaker and darted over the mask. A close family member was very ill that spring, with a non-Covid-related illness that could have been fatal, and his uncles and I asked Michael to go see her, but he declined. It was as though something had dropped out of him. He was a son who had volunteered to accompany me when I had to have our dog euthanized when she suffered from an extremely painful cancerous tumor on her spine. He cried with me when a giant oak tree fell on our house in a storm and put a hole in the roof, destroying the dogwoods he had loved to climb. Over the years, he had helped me take care of underweight puppies and kittens from the ASPCA. He had cried for his older brother, saying, “He doesn’t miss me the way I miss him.” This was my Michael.
In January of senior year, the face mask mandates in schools were lifted in our state, but Michael said that there was peer pressure at his school to continue wearing the mask. He had dropped string orchestra at the end of his junior year. There was no D and D club. He was staying inside most of the time. He had dropped down to taking only three classes and attending school two days per week. Before the shutdowns, he had been in all advanced classes, was doing well and was set to earn an Advanced Diploma. He decided his senior year to get a Standard one.
Michael lost more than two years of high school, his junior and senior years. Classes were conducted on Zoom, then later, two days per week in person, masked, and the other days on the computer. When school resumed in person, five days per week, students were masked and prohibited from sitting together at lunch and socializing normally. Fear infused every aspect of school.
In my district as well as Michael’s, in fall 2021 and spring of 2022, long bureaucratic government documents regularly appeared in emails when someone tested positive for Covid. They included repetitive, boilerplate language with detailed instructions to closely monitor our health, wash our hands, monitor ourselves for symptoms, and check our temperatures regularly. Michael’s district distributed notices that students participating in theater and sports were required to show proof of vaccine or submit to weekly PCR tests because these activities involved more breathing than other activities. Children in my school district were regularly disappeared for required “quarantine” when they tested positive. We received notices that the child would be absent for a week or two, and we were to send computer assignments. Other students were left to fear and wonder if the child would return.
Over this period, Michael’s father had him receive three Covid shots. He did not consult me. His father received four shots. In spring of 2022, a few weeks before his high school graduation ceremony, Michael’s father notified me by email that Michael had tested positive for Covid. His father kept at-home test kits and subjected him to regular testing.
Michael’s high school graduation ceremony in spring 2022 was held in a large arena. Masks and vaccine requirements had been dropped. Most students and audience members were unmasked. The crowd was raucous as though relieved that some of the repression had lifted. Michael wore a large face mask over his beautiful young face. When the family met after the ceremony to take pictures, Michael turned to his father for permission when he could take off the mask.
Most legislation or regulation that spends hundreds of billions of dollars aimed at a purpose is extensively analyzed or scored to that purpose. OK, the numbers are often, er, a bit unreliable, but at least proponents go through the motions and lay out assumptions one can examine and calculate differently. Tax and spending laws come with extensive analysis of just how much the government will make or spend. This is especially true when environment is concerned. Building anything requires detailed environmental assessments. An environmental review typically takes 4.5 years before the lawsuits begin.
In this context, I'm amazed that climate policy typically comes with no numbers, or at least none that I can find readily available in major media. We're going to spend an additional $250 billion or so on climate policies in the humorously titled "inflation reduction act." OK, how much carbon will that remove, on net, all things included, how much will that lower the temperature and when, how much and when will it quiet the rise of the oceans?
Our contributor Bjorn Lomborg looked at the Rhodium Group estimate for CO2 emissions reductions from Schumer-Manchin policies. He then plugged them into the United Nations climate model to measure the impact on global temperature by 2100. He finds the bill will reduce the estimated global temperature rise at the end of this century by all of 0.028 degrees Fahrenheit in the optimistic case. In the pessimistic case, the temperature difference will be 0.0009 degrees Fahrenheit.
Maybe you don't like Bjorn's numbers and the IPCC model. (Not exactly a right-wing operation). Maybe you don't like the Rhodium group's analysis. A quick reading left me the impression its thumb might be on the wildly over-optimistic side of what this rathole of pork can produce, and of experience with what the similar past ratholes have produced:
Our preliminary estimate is that the IRA can cut US net greenhouse gas emissions down to 31% to 44% below 2005 levels in 2030—with a central estimate of 40% below 2005 levels—compared to 24% to 35% under current policy. The range reflects uncertainty around future fossil fuel prices, economic growth, and technology costs. It will also meaningfully reduce consumer energy costs and bolster US energy security over the medium-term,
10% of 2005 levels is a lot. Subsidies reduce consumer costs, but not the cost to society overall. Clever. How one can claim that clamping down on fossil fuels and subsidizing windmills and solar panels helps energy security with the German example before us is a good question. Bjorn's point is that even with this immense thumb on the scale, the actual climate benefit is tiny. If you disagree, fine, produce some alternates.
(BTW, politicians who tell you we need to do something about climate to turn off heat waves and stop forest fires are either lying or profoundly ignorant. Nothing even Greta Thunberg proposes will actually lower temperatures in our great grandchildren's lifetimes. Read carefully, "reduce the temperature rise." Not "reduce temperatures." )
But why are these numbers being produced by think tanks and private researchers, who often have agendas to push? Why are we doing all this after the fact? Shouldn't these numbers be proclaimed, debated, and analyzed ahead of time? We have a Congressional Budget Office that scores the financial impact of legislation. Why is there no Congressional Climate Calculation Office that scores how much carbon proposed legislation will save, and how much it will lower 2100 temperatures? The SEC wants to mandate that every company calculate and disclose carbon emissions, so it surely does not think it an insuperable task. If you have to do a full 5 year NEPA environmental assessment to build a road or conduct a controlled burn, why do you not have to do the most minimal calculation to save the environment?
It is astounding that we are asked to spend gargantuan amounts of money, and severely reduce economic prosperity along the way especially in poor countries, to address the climate during our great-great-grandchildren's lives, yet proposed legislation and regulations do not calculate and advertise what the actual benefits of policies are are in a public, quantifiable, and transparent way.
Brownstone Institute has repeatedly reported on the unholy alliance between the administrative state and Big Tech with the censorious results of free speech suppression. We’ve published a full articles of inquiry as a template for further investigation into these unprecedented actions.
The cooperation between these people during the pandemic response became intense and pervasive. This model is being deployed in other areas too, with a symbiotic relationship between power centers that ends in suppressing dissent. This is contrary to the First Amendment.
The state attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana have filed suit against the Biden administration. Among the plaintiffs are Brownstone Senior Scholars Martin Kulldorff, Jay Bhattacharya, and Aaron Kheriaty who have experienced this censorship first hand. The case is joined by the New Civil Liberties Alliance and filed in the US District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Monroe Division.
The text of the lawsuit is embedded below. Here is an excerpt.
The aggressive censorship that Defendants have procured constitutes government action for at least five reasons: (1) absent federal intervention, common-law and statutory doctrines, as well as voluntary conduct and natural free-market forces, would have restrained the emergence of censorship and suppression of speech of disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoint on social media; and yet (2) through Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA) and other actions, the federal government subsidized, fostered, encouraged, and empowered the creation of a small number of massive social-media companies with disproportionate ability to censor and suppress speech on the basis of speaker, content, and viewpoint; (3) such inducements as Section 230 and other legal benefits (such as the absence of antitrust enforcement) constitute an immensely valuable benefit to social-media platforms and incentive to do the bidding of federal officials; (4) federal officials—including, most notably, certain Defendants herein—have repeatedly and aggressively threatened to remove these legal benefits and impose other adverse consequences on social-media platforms if they do not aggressively censor and suppress disfavored speakers, content, and viewpoints on their platforms; and (5) Defendants herein, colluding and coordinating with each other, have also directly coordinated and colluded with social-media platforms to identify disfavored speakers, viewpoints, and content and thus have procured the actual censorship and suppression of the freedom of speech. These factors are both individually and collectively sufficient to establish government action in the censorship and suppression of social-media speech, especially given the inherent power imbalance: not only do the government actors here have the power to penalize noncompliant companies, but they have threatened to exercise that authority.
With the senate passing the ironically named "inflation reduction act", which even Bernie Sanders said wouldn't reduce inflation, the Biden administration looks to greatly increase the number of IRS agents, as well as arm them.
If he believes that, then the IRS should have to pay your legal and accounting bills when you’re audited. If your compliance costs outweigh the taxes owed, they wind up in the hole. That would discourage abuse.
Also: Lots of conservatives should apply for these new positions at the IRS. We need moles in there to publicize any shenanigans.
YouTube user "Basically Homeless" posted a video last month about successfully turning his toilet into a "12700 & 3060 gaming PC." He also previously turned a refrigerator into a gaming computer.
A mathematical model designed to show a reduction in obesity based on an arbitrary caloric consumption assumption shows a reduction in obesity.
Repeat after me: all models only say what they are told to say.
NEW: As a result of our junk food advertising ban on @TfL, nearly 100,000 cases of obesity have been prevented since 2019.
It’s expected to save the NHS over £200 million. An incredible result. https://t.co/SIUi25RG95
— Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan (@MayorofLondon) August 2, 2022
An incredible result, says the mayor of London. Let’s see how this incredible result came to be. From a news story:
Junk food advertising restrictions on Transport for London (TfL) networks have prevented almost 100,000 obesity cases, research suggests.
The advertising policy, which has been in place since 2019, could save the NHS more than 200 million, researchers claim.
They estimate the policy has directly led to 94,867 fewer cases of obesity than expected (a 4.8 per cent decrease), 2,857 fewer cases of diabetes, and 1,915 fewer cases of cardiovascular disease.
Interesting they call these “obesity cases”. Cases. Let that pass and note that this is 94,867 fewer cases, and not 94,866, as some sources earlier reported.
The Abstract begins with this sentence, starting off on a false footing: “Policies aimed at restricting the marketing of high fat, salt and sugar products have been proposed as one way of improving population diet and reducing obesity.”
Eliminate processed sugar if you like, but decreasing fat is the opposite of “solving” (notice how we’re always discussing government “solutions”?) the problem of too many fat people.
Never mind that. Here’s what they did.
In 2019, Transport for London implemented advertising restrictions on high fat, salt and sugar products. A controlled interrupted time-series analysis comparing London with a north of England control, suggested that the advertising restrictions had resulted in a reduction in household energy [calories] purchases.
Now, most don’t know this, but London is a huge heterogeneous city, and the north of England, north of a land called Yorkshire, is not much like London at all. For instance, in Yorkshire they speak mainly English. Comparing the two areas is thus likely to confirm the two areas aren’t the same.
Here are their Methods:
A diabetes prevention microsimulation model was modified to incorporate the London population and Transport for London advertising intervention. Conversion of calorie to body mass index reduction was mediated through an approximation of a mathematical model estimating weight loss. Outcomes gathered included incremental obesity, long-term diabetes and cardiovascular disease events, quality-adjusted life years, healthcare costs saved and net monetary benefit. Slope index of inequality was calculated for proportion of people with obesity across socioeconomic groups to assess equity impacts.
A microsimulation model. Maybe this microsimulation had something to do with wee p-values? Too good to check.
Anyway, they stopped showing forbidden ads about bad foods in one location. Who noticed? Who knows. But
The study [by a survey firm] found that purchases of HFSS [government-defined bad] food increased over time in both locations. However; following the TfL intervention in London, relative purchases of energy decreased by an average of 1,001 (95% CI: 456 to 1,546) calories per household each week compared to the counterfactual, which was constructed using the pre-intervention trend in London and incorporating the changes seen in the North of England (to account for seasonal and secular changes common to both areas).
See that? Models of models of models. Based on sketchy data—the food bought was determined by food-recall surveys. All of which conclude what was desired: that the lack of ads caused people to buy less of certain foods.
And even if it’s all fine, which it isn’t, that’s a thousand calories less per household each week, which is to say on average 143 or so calories a day, per household. I don’t know how many are in an average household, but suppose it’s 3. Then you have about 50 calories of the “bad” food reduced per person. Plus or minus. How much more in calories people got from non-government defined “bad” food we don’t know.
An extra 50 calories a day—a cookie?—isn’t going to cause obesity, especially from only eliminating “bad” food ads in train stations.
And we don’t know what people ate, only what they bought. Our authors solve this by assuming “that reductions in weekly calorie purchase could be directly equated with reductions in weekly calorie consumption”. (I did the calculation above without having read the whole paper: when I did, I was happy to discover the authors came to an estimate of 55 calories per day.)
To determine eliminating the cookie is going to prevent obesity requires yet another model. And to determine that reduced obesity leads to fewer cases of diabetes and heart disease requires other models.
This paper is therefore a modelapalooza. All in service of providing rulers with The Science they need to justify their policies.
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By James D. Agresti
August 2, 2022
Left to right: Joe Biden, Ukrainian oligarch Nikolai Zlochevskyi, and Hunter Biden
Overview
Newly discovered emails prove beyond all doubt that the “true purpose” of Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with a Ukrainian energy company was for Hunter to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s primary owner, a notoriously corrupt oligarch with ties to Russia.
Documentation of this illegal scheme begins with a widely overlooked email on Hunter’s laptop in which a top executive of the Ukrainian firm describes the plan. Now, emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners:
explicitly agreed to this deal.
concealed the names of top U.S. officials to “be on the safe and cautious side.”
affirmed that only Hunter could credibly promise to get those officials to shield the oligarch from criminal charges.
Just one month later, then-Vice President Joe Biden did exactly what those emails specified by visiting Ukraine and threatening to withhold U.S. aid unless the prosecutor investigating Hunter’s cash cow was fired. Moreover, Biden did this by going after two “key targets” identified in the emails: the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”
The Background
In April 2014, Vice President Biden traveled to Ukraine and gave a speech to its legislators in which he promised that the U.S. would help Ukraine increase its fossil fuel production to make it less dependent on Russian energy. In that very same month:
Burisma began making a series of payments totaling at least $3.3 million over the next 18 months to a Delaware corporation, which paid $708,312.40 directly to Hunter and $2.5 million to entities associated with Hunter.
Nearly a year later in February 2015, the U.S. State Department and the FBI learned that Zlochevskyi allegedly bribed Ukrainian prosecutors to shut down criminal investigations of him. Thus, the government of Ukraine replaced the chief prosecutor with a new one who reopened investigations into the oligarch. At this time, Burisma was paying $166,666.66 per month to the Delaware company that was paying Hunter.
The “Ultimate Purpose”
In November 2015, a top executive of Burisma named Vadym Pozharskyi wrote an email to Hunter and his partners in which he:
criticized a proposal they sent to him because it was “lacking concrete tangible results that we set out to achieve in the first place” and did not “offer any names of top US officials” or “Ukrainian officials” to help the company’s owner (“Nikolay”) improve “his situation in Ukraine.”
stated that if they left these names out of their proposal “to be on the safe and cautious side, I can understand the rationale.”
instructed them to “proceed immediately” with enlisting “high-ranking US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and persuade “the highest level of decision makers” to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” the owner.
identified the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General” as two of the “key targets.”
repeatedly reminded them that closing down these cases was the “true purpose” and the “ultimate purpose” of their “engagement” with Burisma and “all our joint efforts.”
Despite the shocking nature of Burisma’s email, which was first revealed by Tucker Carlson of Fox News in October 2020, no other major news outlet has reported on it.
Just Facts, a research and educational institute, has now uncovered Hunter and his partners’ replies to that email among the 100,000+ emails on Hunter’s laptop. They show beyond all doubt that Hunter and his partners agreed to this deal, which Joe Biden followed to a tee.
“Hunter, You need to deliver that message.”
Immediately after the Burisma executive laid out what was expected of them, Hunter and his partners sent a flurry of emails stating that Hunter needed to tell Burisma that they understood the true purpose of the deal and “deliberately” concealed the names of the officials who would carry it out to “be on the safe and cautious side.” Hunter then emailed Burisma that they understood the job and could get it done.
Here are some of the key excerpts:
Eric Schwerin to Devon Archer and Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “I would tell Vadym that this is definitely done deliberately to the be on the safe and cautious side and that Sally and company understand the scope and deliverables.”
Devon Archer to Eric Schwerin and Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “Hunter, You need to deliver that message. I have walked this to the finish (aka starting) line but need some support to close.”
Eric Schwerin to Hunter Biden (11/2/15): “Do you want me to draft something for you to email to Vadym from you?”
Hunter Biden to Vadym Pozharskyi, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/3/15): “Vadym– Let me have one final call with them and verify once more that they understand the scope so we can all feel that the retainer is in line with the work required.”
Vadym Pozharskyi to Hunter Biden, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/3/15): “Thank you Hunter! And of course, if you and Devon feel comfortable that they will deliver what in real terms we are talking about, we should disregard the wording of the scope and move further with signing and starting actual work.”
Hunter Biden to Vadym Pozharskyi, Devon Archer, and Eric Schwerin (11/5/15): “Vadym, Devon and I do feel comfortable with BS and the ability of Sally & Karen to deliver. You should go ahead and sign. Looking forward to getting started on this.”
In combination with the email from Burisma, these emails leave no doubt that Hunter promised to get “top US officials” to “visit” Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” Burisma’s owner. Furthermore, the emails prove that two of their “key targets” were the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”
Joe Biden’s Actions
One month after the emails above were exchanged, Joe Biden did exactly what they specified.
In December 2015, Biden visited Ukraine and later recounted on video that he told Ukraine’s president and its prime minister on that trip that he would withhold a U.S. government “billion-dollar loan guarantee” unless they fired the “state prosecutor.” “If the prosecutor is not fired,” warned Biden, “you’re not getting the money.” Biden then added, “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired.”
However, that firing did not happen right away, and two months later on February 2, 2016, the chief prosecutor secured a court order to seize some properties of the oligarch who was paying Hunter, including his land, houses, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Just two weeks after the court’s seizure order, the president of Ukraine forced the prosecutor to resign. White House phone logs show that Joe Biden talked to the president of Ukraine at leastthreetimes in the week surrounding the firing. The phone log for the last of these calls states, “The Vice President also commended President Poroshenko’s decision to replace Prosecutor General Shokin, which paves the way for needed reform of the prosecutorial service.”
Contrary to Biden’s claim that the prosecutor stood in the way of reform, the president of Ukraine complimented the prosecutor for implementing reforms that his predecessors had “been opposing for decades” and then listed the specific reforms. The president then said that he only asked the prosecutor to resign because he “failed to gain society’s trust.”
Two months later in May 2016, Ukraine’s parliament approved the president’s appointee for a new chief prosecutor, who Biden described as “solid.” This new prosecutor, named Yuriy Lutsenko, was:
the best man of Petro Poroshenko, the president who appointed him.
convicted in a separate 2012 case for illegal surveillance.
pardoned by the previous president and released from jail in 2013.
was forced to resign by Volodymyr Zelensky (the current president of Ukraine) for failing to prosecute anyone of note during his three-year tenure.
Six months after Biden’s “solid” prosecutor was appointed, he dropped all criminal charges against the oligarch. The prosecutor also applauded the settlement as a “success” because the oligarch paid $7.46 million in back taxes and penalties. Far from being a prosecutorial victory, the oligarch praised these outcomes and stated that they would allow his corporation to increase production and “attract international companies to Ukraine.”
Two weeks later on November 16, 2016, Burisma made its last documented payment to Hunter. In addition to the recent closure of all criminal cases against the oligarch, Donald Trump had just won an upset victory in the U.S. presidential election. This left Joe Biden incapable of using U.S. taxpayer funds to influence Ukrainian officials.
Joe Biden’s involvement in Hunter’s illicit business deals is also evidenced by a 2017 encrypted What’s App message uncovered by the New York Post. In it, one of Hunter’s business partners wrote to another partner while discussing Joe Biden, “Don’t mention Joe being involved, it’s only when u are face to face, I know u know that but they are paranoid.”
The False Excuse
Joe Biden claimed that he pressured Ukrainian officials to fire the nation’s chief prosecutor because the prosecutor was “backsliding” on “corruption.” This excuse has been widely echoed by the media, who allege that the chief prosecutor was not even investigating the oligarch who was enriching Hunter.
Those claims are belied by the facts that the:
the Prosecutor General’s Office obtained a court order to seize property of the oligarch, including his land, houses, and a Rolls-Royce Phantom.
Burisma’s email to Hunter and his partners specifically identified the “Prosecutor General” as one of the “key targets” that “top US officials” should convince to “close down” all “cases/pursuits against” the oligarch.
“The truth is that I was forced out because I was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into Burisma Holdings, a natural gas firm active in Ukraine and Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, was a member of the Board of Directors.”
The president of Ukraine “was emphatic that I should cease my investigations regarding Burisma. When I did not, he said that the US (via Biden) were refusing to release the USD $1 billion promised to Ukraine. He said that he had no choice, therefore, but to ask me to resign.”
One of the more outlandish falsehoods about this affair comes from the Washington Post’s lead “Fact Checker,” Glenn Kessler. As alleged evidence that Prosecutor Shokin “was not investigating” the oligarch who was paying Hunter, Kessler claims:
In September 2015, then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt publicly criticized Shokin’s office for thwarting a British money-laundering probe into Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky.
In reality, the U.S. ambassador was not criticizing Shokin but his predecessor, Vitaliy Yarema. This is proven by the fact that the British money laundering probe cited by the ambassador ended on January 21, 2015, and Shokin was not appointed chief prosecutor until the next month in February 2015.
The London Guardian, the Financial Times, and the New York Times all reported that the probe ended in January, raising the question of how Kessler could honestly botch this fact.
In a related article, Kessler scales up the rhetoric and claims that the ambassador “blasted Shokin for ‘openly and aggressively undermining reform’ and having ‘undermined prosecutors working on legitimate corruption cases’.” However, the ambassador stated that “corrupt actors within the Prosecutor General’s office” did this, not Shokin.
Furthermore, in the very same speech that Kessler misquoted twice, the ambassador began speaking about the present and said, “We want to work with Prosecutor General Shokin” and help him lead “the fight against corruption.” This further demonstrates that the ambassador was not castigating Shokin and wanted to partner with him.
Twitter, in turn, invoked Kessler’s bogus fact check to insist that the “prosecutor was not investigating Burisma at that time.”
Like Kessler, articles by CNN and Bloomberg take the ambassador’s words out of context to make it seem like he was lambasting Shokin instead of his predecessor.
In contrast to those false reports—court records, first-hand sworn testimony, and a smoking gun email from Burisma show that Shokin was aggressively pursuing the oligarch when Joe Biden forced his firing.
Keeping People in the Dark
Beyond denying the fact that the prosecutor was cracking down on Hunter’s cash cow, a wide array of journalists, government officials, and big tech executives kept the public in the dark about this and related matters. This was especially the case just before the 2020 presidential election.
Just a few of the many examples include the following:
In July 2021, Politico reported that the Department of Justice (DOJ) delayed an investigation into Hunter Biden’s laptop “to avoid taking any actions that could alert the public to the existence of the case in the middle of a presidential election.”
In October 2020, Twitter locked the New York Post’s account for reporting on Hunter’s laptop and pinned a post to the top of Twitter’s home page claiming that Joe Biden “played no role in pressuring Ukraine officials into firing the prosecutor,” a statement flatly disproven by the words of Biden himself.
Multiple whistleblowers within the FBI have stated that officials in the FBI and DOJ used a deceitful assessment of Hunter’s laptop to “improperly discredit and falsely claim that derogatory information about Biden’s activities was disinformation, causing investigative activity and sourcing to be shut down.”
In October 2020, NPR managing editor Terence Samuels Public Editor wrote that NPR is not reporting on the NY Post’s expose of Hunter Biden’s laptop because “we don’t want to waste our time on stories that are not really stories, and we don’t want to waste listeners’ and readers’ time on stories that are just pure distractions.”
In October 2020, Facebook executive Andy Stone wrote, “While I will intentionally not link to the New York Post, I want be clear that this story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact checking partners. In the meantime, we are reducing its distribution on our platform.”
In October 2020, a group of former government intelligence officials led by James Clapper (Obama’s Director of National Intelligence) alleged without evidence that the contents of Hunter’s laptop could be or definitely are Russian “information,” while admitting that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement—just that our experience makes us deeply suspicious that the Russian government played a significant role in this case.”
Major media outlets and so-called fact checkers widely parroted that baseless claim while changing the phrase “Russian information” to “Russian disinformation” and failing to report that:
the samegroup of Obama officials who made that accusation also alleged that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, a charge disproven by a 2-year, $32 million investigation by an independent counsel which “did not establish” or “identify evidence” that the “Trump Campaign” or “any U.S. persons” “conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
the DOJ Inspector General (an Obama appointee) “identified at least 17 significant errors or omissions” in warrant applications that Obama’s officials used to surveil the Trump campaign and added that he “did not receive satisfactory explanations” for these misleading warrant applications.
In October 2020, Leslie Stahl of CBS’s 60 Minutesinsisted that the contents of Hunter’s laptop “can’t be verified,” even though 60 Minutesbrags that it conducts “hard-hitting investigative” journalism. Demonstrating the absurdity of that claim:
the recipient of one of the most incriminating emails on the laptop verified that same month that he was “the recipient of the email” and the “email is genuine.”
the NY Post pointed out that they published an array of pictures and emails from the laptop with “an extraordinary level of detail” that supports their authenticity, such as a picture of Hunter in a bathtub and a picture of a Biden family meal, along with emails to friends and family all bearing dates and times.
the New York Times slipped this statement about Hunter’s laptop into the 24th paragraph of an article published 18 months after the 2020 election: “The email and others in the cache were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.”
CNN reported 18 months after the 2020 election, “We know the FBI has possession” of Hunter’s laptop, and “they believe it is his laptop—that the contents of it are his.”
the Washington Examiner commissioned a forensic examination of Hunter Biden’s hard drive which found its contents are “indisputably authentic, and there is no evidence of any hacking or file manipulation, according to an examination conducted by a former Secret Service agent who has testified as a cyberforensics expert in over 100 classified, criminal, and civil matters at the state, federal, and international levels.”
This tidal wave of misinformation and censorship by media outlets, government officials, and big tech significantly boosted Joe Biden’s odds of winning the presidency. The effect was estimated by a November 2020 online survey of Biden voters in swing states commissioned by the Media Research Center and conducted by the Polling Company. It found that 45% of Biden voters “were unaware of the financial scandal enveloping Biden and his son” and that:
full awareness of the Hunter Biden scandal would have led 9.4% of Biden voters to abandon the Democratic candidate, flipping all six of the swing states he won to Trump, giving the President 311 electoral votes.
Summary
The emails on Hunter Biden’s laptop, combined with Joe Biden’s own words and actions, prove beyond all doubt that:
The “ultimate purpose” of Hunter Biden’s multi-million deal with Burisma was to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s owner.
In November 2015, Hunter agreed to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to end all investigations into the owner. Two “key targets” of this mission were the “President of Ukraine” and the “Prosecutor General.”
In December 2015, Joe Biden visited Ukraine and told its president and prime minister that he would withhold U.S. aid to their nation unless they fired the prosecutor general.
Those actions, which are complemented by a wealth of incriminating facts, align with textbook definitions of nepotism, bribery, extortion, and obstruction of justice.
Yet, major media outlets, big tech companies, fact checkers, former U.S. intelligence officials, and active government officials within the FBI and Department of Justice played major roles in keeping this information from the American people.
You may have thought the CDC’s loathsome propaganda, designed to spread misinformation to their partners in the purposefully susceptible media, was bad. And it most certainly was.
Their repeated attempts to justify masking through poorly conducted studies throughout the first year and a half of the pandemic, which covered Arizona, Kansas and others, were equally atrocious.
But now a new challenger has emerged, attempting to take the crown of most insidiously incompetent “study” to be released on masking.
And it’s already being shared and promoted by the anti-science crowd, determined to maintain their illusions that masking works and shows demonstrable benefits.
It’s a masterpiece of bad “science,” poor methodology, and purposeful misdirection.
There is no possible justification for anyone to refer to this “review” with anything other than derision, except that one of the world’s most prominent “experts” has already distributed it to his massive following.
It’s important to debunk studies like this, because it’s inevitable that some corporate executive, CDC official, or local school administrator will use it to justify their endless, panicked mandates.
The Abstract
What’s remarkable about this review is that the authors discredit their own work almost immediately.
The poor quality writing is readily apparent, both from their repeated phrasing of “facemasks” as one word, and the fact that of 1,732 studies considered for inclusion, only 13 actually met the criteria.
That’s correct, a mere 0.75% of the studies they apparently examined were actually used to generate their conclusions.
So how many people did this substantial, important, influential, seminal work actually cover?
Facemasks have become a symbol of disease prevention in the context of Covid-19; yet, there still exists a paucity of collected scientific evidence surrounding their epidemiological efficacy in the prevention of SARS-CoV-2 transmission. This systematic review sought to analyze the efficacy of facemasks, regardless of type, on the prevention of SARS-CoV-2 transmission in both healthcare and community settings. The initial review yielded 1,732 studies, which were reviewed by three study team members. Sixty-one full text studies were found to meet entry criteria, and 13 studies yielded data that was used in the final analysis. In all, 243 subjects were infected with Covid-19, of whom 97 had been wearing masks and 146 had not. The probability of getting Covid-19 for mask-wearers was 7% (97/1,463, p=0.002), for non-mask-wearers, probability was 52% (158/303, p=0.94). The relative risk of getting Covid-19 for mask-wearers was 0.13 (95% CI: 0.10-0.16). Based on these results, we determined that across healthcare and community settings, those who wore masks were less likely to contact Covid-19. Future investigations are warranted as more information becomes available.
243 people.
Yeah, 243. There have been 583,211,225 reported Covid cases in the world to date, with many millions more undetected, and this evidence review covered 243 of them.
A comparison between the two numbers illustrates the absurdity of suggesting that 243 is a remotely representative sample:
Beyond the incomprehensibly small sample size used to generate these percentages, the most absurd part of their conclusion was ignoring that inescapable reality that everyone will get Covid.
There can be no reduction in likelihood of getting Covid from mask-wearing because everyone will eventually get Covid. The absolute reduction is 0. The relative reduction is 0. End of study.
Of course, that’s not at all what happened in this instance, and the details make it look even worse.
The “Evidence”
The studies they collected to include in their “evidence” review were a combination of embarrassingly bad to unbelievably useless.
But before going into the studies they collected, it’s worth pointing out that the conclusions conflated healthcare and community settings.
Sixty-one full text studies were found to meet the criteria, and 13 studies were used in the final analysis. (Figure 1) Frequencies, relative risk, confidence intervals and t-tests were calculated where appropriate, to measure differences between groups who reported wearing masks vs. not wearing masks for the overall study group, as well as health care, and community settings.
It’s the height of absurdity to compare the two while pretending that your results are some kind of definitive, universally applicable data-driven exercise.
But the studies included are where it gets extremely bad.
One of them, in an evidence review designed to supposedly determine the effectiveness of mask-wearing to prevent Covid, was conducted in 2004.
Yes, you read that correctly. 2004.
To no one’s surprise, there were no Covid infections in 2004 in Thailand when a full PPE policy was in place.
Better yet, they decided that the CDC’s embarrassing attempt at science, the infamous hairdresser study, should qualify for this exercise:
The audacity of including a study from 2004 and presenting two hairstylists as some kind of useful evidence should be immediately disqualifying.
Although based on their demonstrated standards, it’s no surprise that only testing half of the supposedly “exposed” individuals was enough to meet the criteria for entry.
It gets better.
Another study included used such high-quality methods as asking long-term care facilities to fill out a questionnaire describing their compliance with “preventative measures:”
How is it possible that not one person involved in this examination stopped to wonder if a questionnaire such as this could be prone to bias, especially in July 2020 at the height of Covid panic when masking suddenly became the single most important intervention to stop the spread of the virus?
Shockingly, several poorly designed studies from China were included that demonstrated the benefits of mask-wearing, with one example apparently using “social network analysis.”
As pointed out on Twitter, one included piece of “evidence” had nothing to do with mask-wearing at all:
You can clearly see the relevance of a paper on protection provided by gas masks while performing a tracheotomy is to prevent the spread of COVID.
It’s notable that the evidence review references two charter flight studies, although as mentioned in the tweet, this had nothing to do with a charter flight.
What appears to have happened is that the authors copy-pasted the same explanation onto two different studies. It’s easy to see how thorough and well-considered their work was; not at all sloppy or shoddy.
Not to mention that the actual charter flight examination involved 11 people who were all wearing masks.
It’s impossible to judge how effective masks are or aren’t, when you’re not comparing to people who aren’t wearing masks.
Absolutely ludicrous.
Also ludicrous is the fact that there are literally zero included studies after July 2020.
They also lumped together community examinations with individual ones.
From every possible angle, this is a disgraceful, demonstrably incompetent attempt to promote masking, with zero merit.
So it’s been ignored by “experts” and other prominent media figures, right?
The Reaction
Of course not!Naturally, the “study” was shared by the German Federal Minister of Health, Karl Lauterbach:
The translation, according to Google, reads as below:
For everyone who is still unsure whether masks protect against COVID: here is a new American mega study that evaluates over 1,700 studies. The benefit of the masks is very large, undisputed and applies to many areas.
This is the danger of misinformation.
People in positions of authority in major countries are sharing this study as if it contains some dramatic new revelations about the effectiveness of masks.
It’s ludicrous and unsurprising at the same time.
While not as important as a “Federal Minister of Health,” the study first gained prominence thanks to writer Maggie Fox, who gleefully shared it since it confirmed her biases.
Fox’s profile description starts by saying “Facts matter,” and continues with “truth is not liberal bias.”
It speaks to the remarkable ability of committed ideologues to ignore reality, “facts” and “truth” by sharing misinformation which conforms to their preconceived notions.
Masks must work, because my ideological heroes say they work, therefore I will share absurdist performance art as some kind of proof that my heroes are correct.
Meanwhile, well-conducted studies that show no benefit to masking are ignored.
The continued push for masking against all scientific data and evidence has led to absurdist studies being promoted and distributed.
This wouldn’t be as significant an issue, if not for the fact that the information channels used to disseminate this misinformation are the ones religiously frequented by politicians, executives and school administrators.
Obsessive commitment to ideology over evidence has caused immense harm to students, corporate employees and millions of citizens across the world.
Germans will likely face reoccurring mask mandates in fall and winter because the Federal Minister of Health is incompetent enough to believe pseudoscientific nonsense.
Even in the United States, it’s a significant concern that permanent mandates will be enforced by many prominent corporations.
There are no innocuous pro-mask “studies;” each of them contributes to confirming biases of deluded decision-makers who refuse to accept reality.
As more studies emerge, it’s even more important to debunk their conclusions to ensure that rolling mandates do not become a permanent feature of daily life.
Many of us with a libertarian frame of mind presume as a matter of theory that the interests of business are at odds with those of government. That’s generally true for businesses of a certain size. The regulations and taxes one faces in running an enterprise in the “land of free” are utterly shocking, as any small business owner can tell you. Even gaining the legal right to pay an employee is an arduous undertaking.
But matters change for any large businesses, especially industry leaders. Here the problem of mutual capture – business deeply involved in regulatory agencies to the point that which is the hand and which is the glove is not clear – is pervasive. It’s been an issue since the Gilded Age, as historians know. The bigger the government, the bigger the problem of these government-business partnerships.
It’s always worse in a war, when the opportunities for racketeering by ostensibly private enterprise are legion. That includes the war on the virus, which has been brutal on small businesses but a fabulous reward for large media enterprises.
Rarely do we experience this in such a direct way as we did during the pandemic. We were amazed to see huge corporations that control vast amounts of digital communications openly censoring on behalf of the CDC and the WHO. We know because they said so, and still do. Perhaps we might have assumed that administrators of these companies were as confused about the science as the politicians were. Maybe it was civic pride at work here.
A trove of emails obtained by America First Legal tells a far more alarming story. The 286-page stack of correspondence reveals a cozy and daily working relationship between people in a position of control between Twitter, Facebook, Google, the CDC, NIH, and the WHO. They shared strategies, advertising ideas, and messaging. They talked up grants and privileges for each other, all designed to crush and exclude contrary narratives. They set up meetings and shared mutual compliments.
They became besties.
In one page, the CDC flagged posts that it did not like and Twitter responded. This was a period in which people were being targeted for banning by Twitter. It was never clear why some posts got through and some were triggers for bans. Now we know why: the CDC essentially produced a hit list.
Among those targeted was Naomi Wolf, who, so far as I know, was the first to reveal the relationship between vaccination and irregular menstrual patterns. For talking about this subject, she was permanently banned by Twitter. This direct hit was ordered by the CDC itself.
Now, you might say, whatever you might believe about the flagged posts, this is a violation of the First Amendment! It’s fine for Twitter to have its own terms of use and kick people off as it sees fit. It’s something else entirely when the company is acting on the exhortations of deep-state bureaucrats who find themselves annoyed that someone believes in the right to exercise free speech. Surely there will be years of court challenges to this practice, as there should be.
What you have here is a government profoundly aware of the legal limits on its own ability to shut down dissenting voices, and thereby leaning on private enterprise to do the deed. But very clearly they did not have to lean too hard. Tragically, there were high-end people at these companies who were very excited to do the government's bidding. That was all about suppressing human liberty, and gagging the people who worried that this might not be a good idea.
Feels Like Feudalism
Ever since reading through these emails, I’ve been struck by the strange friendliness of all the emails. There is obvious absence of the supposed conflict between enterprise and government that animates most conversation between left, right, and libertarian. Indeed, they all seem highly collegial and filled with mutual flattery, as if making these connections and plotting the messaging amounted to doing a solid and professional job. The lack of self-awareness is palpable.
The relationship between Big Tech – and all aspiring reporters and enterprises – is very clearly complex, and elusive of ideological categorization. It is also corrupt, exploitative of the interests of the people, and at odds with the interest of Enlightenment values. How can freedom stand a chance when it is so viciously squeezed between the controlling interest groups, who are the powerful in society?
They believe they are the lords and we are the peasants.
Here is an example of what I mean. Last week, Anthony Fauci deigned to appear in the show Rising, as sponsored by The Hill. It was in this interview that Fauci said that if he had it to do over again, he would have pushed “more stringent restrictions.” He also claimed that he “didn’t recommend locking anything down,” which is unbearably untrue.
What’s more interesting is the backdrop to preparation for the interview. A leading reporter for the show is Kim Iversen, who would have loved the chance to question Fauci based on her extensive reporting and knowledge of all things Covid. At the last moment, she was blocked from being on.
The remaining two reporters were clearly aware of the corporate need to go pretty easy on Fauci. Why? We know from his extensive emails that he is hyper-focused on curating his media appearances. He doesn’t want uncomfortable questions. He turns down most requests and is thereby in a position to extract concessions from venues. The venues want him on the show to drive traffic and credibility.
You can watch the appearance here and make your own judgment on how it went in the absence of Ms. Iversen.
https://youtu.be/WXrWTkEjDtQ
Ms. Iversen is a rare case of a reporter who has no interest in playing the game. After all this transpired, she quit the show based on her conviction that if she cannot report the truth, there really is no point in staying with a company. Clearly, in her view, The Hill was more interested in maintaining good relations with deep-state actors than in reporting the truth. So she bailed, and god bless her for that.
This is but a small look at the much deeper problem, which is the symbiotic relationship between the administrative state, Big Tech, and Big Media. They work together to forge a narrative and stick to it. We know that now better than we ever have. This involves shutting down dissident voices and curating content in a way that serves ruling-class interests.
This is why, while journalists can often hound elected politicians and their appointees, from Watergate to Russiagate and every “gate” in between, they tend towards a hands-off approach to the massive administrative bureaucracies that hold the real power in modern democracies. The press and the deep state live off each other. What that means is ominous to consider: what you read in the papers and hear on TV from the industry-dominant sources is nothing more than an amplification of deep-state priorities and propaganda. The problem has been growing for well over a hundred years and now it is the source of enormous corruption on all sides.
I observed this before the recent revelations of the direct relationship between social media and Covid enforcers. You are welcome to look at the emails here and form your own judgment. What we see here is not tension, much less conflict, but unity. Unity in what? My strong impression is that it is unity in power. They know they have it, are thrilled to exercise it, and happy to be in touch with others of the same ilk.
For want of a better phrase, we might call this profound “class consciousness” of the 1% of technology admins and bureaucratic managers in government. The distinction between the two is no longer clear, which should be confounding for any political worldview that posits an inherent conflict between public and private.
We can add to this class observation something even more tactile. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which exercised outsized influence on the pandemic response, has also funded nearly all mainstream media venues to the tune of $315 million, the details of which are reported here.
From this we can observe that it is not only class but also money: more precisely, the two go together. It makes it all-the-more offensive that this philanthropic empire which pushed the lockdowns and funded the media empires that controlled the narrative was built in the old fashioned way: by making and selling computers and software.
There’s an apocryphal quote attributed to Vladimir Lenin that predicted how capitalists would sell the rope from which they would eventually hang. He probably never said that. The truth of our times is just as grim. The freedoms that have been taken away from us made possible the fortunes that have led to the advance of serfdom and poverty the world over.
Making matters worse, there’s an ongoing plot to make it very difficult even to complain about it. Unless you happen upon the right channels, media sources, research institutes, and journalists, you can be made to believe that you are nothing but what they consider you to be: a peasant without rights, free only to do and say that to which they grant you permission. And no more.
THIS HAS A STRONG WHIFF OF SMOKING GUN: From Just Facts. Emails reveal inner details of why Burisma paid Hunter Biden so generously for services having nothing to do with energy.
So House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and meanwhile left. “During her meeting Wednesday with Ms. Tsai at Taiwan’s presidential office, the California Democrat was conferred with a civilian award, the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon,” reports the Wall Street Journal [paywalled; cached copy]. (h/t: Mrs. Arbel).
Meanwhile, the usual suspects on the far Left and far Right in the West were mobilized to sabotage the trip, among them some think tanks and “realist” commentators. Articles appeared warning of a new “crisis” and “escalation.” […]
The overall point of Pelosi’s trip is that she went. It doesn’t matter necessarily what got done or what she said, but that once there was talk of a “military response” and “red line,” the US had to show that its historic commitment to Asia, and Taiwan in particular, would continue. This is no minor thing.
The US has played a role in the Pacific for over 150 years. Back in 1853, American Commodore Matthew Perry led four ships into the harbor at Tokyo Bay in Japan. US missionaries, whale boats and traders played a key role in the Pacific, culminating in the role of men like John Birch, who one publication called a “fighting missionary.”
After 1945, key US figures like Douglas MacArthur played a role in shaping America’s commitment to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. This was no small endeavor. Leaders from the region were educated in the US and influenced by American cultural exports, and the post-war economic boom was tied to the US. It’s easy to think of the US role in Europe as one that is important, but in reality, it is the US role in Asia that was paramount for a century and it is only an accident of history that some of this is forgotten.
US-China relations have also ebbed and flowed over the years; from the era of the Korean war to Richard Nixon’s famous visit. What matters today is that the US still decides where Navy ships will sail and where congressional delegations will go. The US Coast Guard helps ships in Oceania through operations like Blue Pacific who patrol economic zones in the area.
As such, Pelosi had to go to Taiwan once news of the potential trip became public and Beijing began a campaign that appeared aimed at preventing it. Her trip matters for the fact it took place.
The US has to decide who will draw the red lines. Will America have policies dictated to it, or will it continue the status quo? Countries are watching, from South Korea to Japan, Australia and India. Smaller countries are also watching, and they want to know if the US is committed.
Of course, with Mrs. Arbel (a card-carrying Reagan Democrat) increasingly joining me in inveterate cynicism, we both were wondering if the trip isn’t really a charade, a “eminence front, a put-on” where Xi (protesting for show) throws his favorite bought-and-paid-for turtleboy Abu Hunter a bone such that he might go into the November elections with some achievements rather than the across-the-board record of embarrassing failure at present. After all, if control of the House and the Senate flip, US foreign policy might take a turn that Xi would not be able to control anymore — while I’m sure he has some GOP politicians on his payroll, I suspect nearly the entire “Democratic” party establishment is either a useful idiot for the CCP or outright in debt to it.
And I was amused that a bunch of commenters in Seth Frantzman’s article had reached the same conclusion… One is even suggesting that Xiden is deliberately engineering an incident that Xi could use as a casus belli to invade Taiwan. One “Michael Newton” has a slightly different take:
Her visit is important for the following. Joe Biden is increasingly feeble and senile and it is only a matter of time before he just collapses. The White House team is trying to keep him on life support but there are limitations to what they can do. Biden is in his second week of “COVID” lockdown (yeah, right) and the White House is trying to keep him out of sight. He national speech on Monday night was full of slurred words and word salad. Obviously this can’t go on forever. Kamala who is next in line for the Presidency is absolutely out of the question. Giggles. Cackles and word salad. (It seems Karine Jean-Pierre has been replaced). So Pelosi is the obvious choice. It seems she has made the trip to Asia (and Taiwan) on her own initiative (and not initially with the blessing of Biden). She is burnishing her credentials for the Presidency. A combination of Machiavelli, Lady Macbeth and Lucrezia Borgia, she will stop at nothing. Y[ou] can bet that H[i]llary is gnashing her [teeth].
ADDENDUM: and now for something completely different (via Instapundit):
ROT IN DOJ RUNS DEEP: Remember a decade ago when Lois Lerner and the IRS were targeting conservative, evangelical and Tea Party nonprofits? One of the Department of Justice (DOJ) officials who had a hand in that abuse of government power was Richard Pilger. Guess where Pilger is today, according to Just the News. He’s the chief of the Elections Crime Branch of DOJ’s Public Integrity Section. You just cannot make this stuff up.
Left to right: Joe Biden, Ukrainian oligarch Nikolai Zlochevskyi, and Hunter Biden
Overview
Newly discovered emails prove beyond all doubt that the “true purpose” of Hunter Biden’s lucrative deal with a Ukrainian energy company was for Hunter to get “high-ranking US officials” to visit Ukraine and persuade the nation’s leaders to “close down” all criminal “cases/pursuits against” the firm’s primary owner, a notoriously corrupt oligarch with ties to Russia.
Documentation of this illegal scheme begins with a widely overlooked email on Hunter’s laptop in which a top executive of the Ukrainian firm describes the plan. Now, emails uncovered by Just Facts prove that Hunter and his partners:
The “Ultimate Purpose”
In November 2015, a top executive of Burisma named Vadym Pozharskyi wrote an email to Hunter and his partners in which he:
