ELIMINATIONIST RHETORIC: Catholic university speaker urges students to “crucify whiteness.” “The speaker suggested that whiteness is a concept, and stated that people of color can ‘also be white.'” It’s as if “whiteness” has nothing to do with race or racism and just means “our political enemies.”
A DAY LATE BUT NO LESS SERIOUS A WARNING: I meant to link this post by Jeff Dunetz at The Lid yesterday, May 1, aka “May Day,” but unaccountably didn’t. So here it is today, marking the rotten fruit of the deadliest political movement in human history:
“That’s right, during the 20th-century, communism, and socialism murdered at least 94 million people. The reason for using both communism and socialism is they are both based on Karl Marx, are bloody, and many Communist regimes call themselves Socialist.
“Per the detailed analysis in “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression” (which should be required reading by every student in America), the number of deaths caused by Communism and Socialism was estimated at 94,360,000, broken down as follows:
USSR — 20 million
China — 65 million
Vietnam — 1 million
North Korea — 2 million
Cambodia — 2 million
Eastern Europe — 1 million
Latin America — 150,000
Africa — 1.7 million
Afghanistan — 1.5 million
Communist and Socialist movements, parties not in power — 10,000
“These estimates were made twenty-five years ago, in 1997. Imagine how some of the socialist and communist regimes have added to their total since (and some believe the estimates are too conservative). And let’s not forget the full name of Hitler’s Nazi party was; Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National-Socialist German Workers’ Party).”
Tragically, there is more to this reality check, so click the link and read the rest of it.
While we’re here, I also highly recommend Robert Conquest’s three works on Soviet Communism, especially “Reflections on a Ravaged Century,” written at the dawn of the 21st century to look back at the accumulated horrors of the 20th and prophetically ahead at the ills likely to accompany the European Union (he was right on target).
Here’s a recent video everyone (including public policy makers in Australia) should watch for just 60 seconds (the link starts 9:15 into the video).
Mark Steyn makes the point that it’s “either official information so you can say it, or it’s disinformation and you’ll lose your Facebook account”
He goes on to say that the official UK government data clearly shows that your third shot significantly increases your risk of infection, hospitalization, and death. He says (start watching at 13:50) that if you are triple vaccinated, you die at three times the rate of people who aren’t triple vaccinated.
Some people pointed out that the data is age confounded because Mark assumed that the numbers who are triple vaccinated equaled the numbers who are less than triple vaccinated for all age groups. This is not true for the elderly for example. But my article takes all of that into account and finds that even when you compute the rates for each age range, the data isn’t favorable for the vaccine. It’s probably why the UK government stopped reporting the numbers so you wouldn’t be able to figure it out anymore.
It’s also important to note it isn’t just the UK numbers that are troubling. The numbers from Walgreens in the US aren’t supportive either, not even for the elderly which is the most vulnerable group. It shows that the third dose wears off and leaves you much worse off than the unvaccinated (more than twice as likely to be infected).
You have to be dumber than a doornail to mandate this.
Three recent papers everyone should be aware of.
Here are three recent papers that everyone should be aware of and their conclusions.
In short, why would we mandate a vaccine (with lots of disabling side effects) that doesn’t save any lives? Nobody wants to answer that question on camera.
The paper is one of the mechanisms that explains tweets like this one which I see all the time:
The vaccines impair our ability to resist future variants of the virus. The more we vaccinate, the more vulnerable we become. This paper is extremely troubling: Anti-nucleocapsid antibodies following SARS-CoV-2 infection in the blinded phase of the mRNA-1273 Covid-19 vaccine efficacy clinical trial. It points out that the more times people are vaccinated, the less likely they are to develop broad-based immunity when they get the actual virus. What this means is the more vaccines you get, the less likely you are to develop full immunity from the virus when you get it (which you will since the vaccines are going to make that more likely).
Igor’s newsletter has a great writeup of the paper. Here is the most important image from his article:
In plain English, you are more than 13X less likely to develop full natural immunity to a breakthrough infection after your initial two jabs.
Here’s the thing. Moderna knew this over a year ago, but they didn’t think it was worth warning anyone about. Now they’ve admitted it but not issued any kind of press release or public warning about it. And of course the mainstream media is not going to ever cover this at all. But there is the paper, in black and white, for everyone to see. Including all the mainstream docs.
But this is the really important part: this is a paper with multiple authors from both the NIH and Moderna so nobody can say it is “misinformation.”
Summary
The COVID vaccines are bad news. They always have been. But now the papers are being published in the scientific literature that make all our earlier warnings about the dangers of these vaccines impossible for any sane person to ignore.
At a bare minimum, we need to stop mandating these vaccines (and masks) worldwide and every honest member of the mainstream medical community (yeah, both of them) should be calling for stopping all the mandates.
Will this new science make a difference? No, not one bit. Why? Because the CDC says the vaccines are safe and effective and only a small handful of health officials (like Florida’s Joe Ladapo) are willing to challenge the narrative.
Science doesn’t matter to politicians and public health officials. It’s all about following the CDC and government narratives, not the data.
Today, the problem is not the scarcity of data, but the opposite. We have too much data, and it is undermining the credibility of science.
Luck is inherent in random trials. In a medical study, some patients may be healthier. In an agricultural study, some soil may be more fertile. In an educational study, some students may be more motivated. Researchers consequently calculate the probability (the p-value) that the outcomes might happen by chance. A low p-value indicates that the results cannot easily be attributed to the luck of the draw.
How low? In the 1920s, the great British statistician Ronald Fisher said that he considered p-values below 5% to be persuasive and, so, 5% became the hurdle for the “statistically significant” certification needed for publication, funding and fame.
It is not a difficult hurdle. Suppose that a hapless researcher calculates the correlations among hundreds of variables, blissfully unawarethat the data are all, in fact, random numbers. On average, one out of 20 correlations will be statistically significant, even though every correlation is nothing more than coincidence.
Real researchers don’t correlate random numbers but, all too often, they correlate what are essentially randomly chosen variables. This haphazard search for statistical significance even has a name: data mining. As with random numbers, the correlation between randomly chosen, unrelated variables has a 5% chance of being fortuitously statistically significant. Data mining can be augmented by manipulating, pruning and otherwise torturing the data to get low p-values.
Science still works. It’s just a shame so few “scientists” practice it.
Musk and a merry band of fellow billionaires that includes [Internet entrepreneur David Sacks] and the venture capitalist Marc Andreesen seem to be coalescing into an American counterelite committed to breaking the monopoly on public discourse held by our current ruling class.
On the other side of the skirmish line we have the forces of the bipartisan political establishment under the command of General Barack Obama. The members of this faction are easy to identify because they have been engaged in an unhinged freakout for weeks. Ever since news first broke indicating that Musk was trying to acquire a controlling share of Twitter, his critics have been apoplectic about the dangers to democracy that will be unleashed by allowing users to more freely share and view information. Former Clinton administration Labor Secretary Robert Reich captured the shrill zeitgeist of apocalyptic liberal technocrats everywhere when he warned that Musk’s “libertarian vision of an ‘uncontrolled’ internet [is] also the dream of every dictator, strongman, and demagogue.” Uh, sure, “what linked Idi Amin, Suharto, and Adolf Hitler,” James Kirchick recently noted in The Scroll, “was their belief in unfettered freedom of speech.”
But the official, buttoned-up version of the freakout was articulated by Obama himself. Less than a week ago in a speech at Stanford University, the former president warned that it’s necessary to impose more regulations on the internet, in order to prevent toxic disinformation from destroying American democracy by eroding citizens’ trust. “Once they lose trust in their leaders, in mainstream media, in political institutions, in each other, in the possibility of truth, the game’s won,” Obama told the audience at the Silicon Valley hub. “As Putin discovered leading up to the 2016 election,” Obama said, “our own social media platforms are well designed to support such a mission.”
Nina Jankowicz, who will head the board as executive director, has an extensive, swampy background in the area of “disinformation” as well as the geopolitical interface between Russia and Europe. Her bio for Syracuse University, where she is an adjunct professor, reads in part:
Jankowicz’s expertise spans the public, private and academic sectors. She has advised governments, international organizations and tech companies; testified before the United States Congress and European Parliament; and led accessible, actionable research about the effects of disinformation on women, minorities, democratic activists and freedom of expression around the world.
Jankowicz has extensive media experience, with writing published in many major American newspapers and magazines, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Atlantic. She is a regular guest on major radio and television programs such as the PBS Newshour, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS and Amanpour, the BBC World Service, and NPR’s All Things Considered.
Clearly, the Left is very worried about black and Hispanic Americans hearing anything contrary to the party line.
Additionally, states the bio, “In 2016-17, [Jankowicz] advised the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry on disinformation and strategic communications under the auspices of a Fulbright-Clinton Public Policy Fellowship. Prior to her Fulbright grant, she managed democracy assistance programs to Russia and Belarus at the National Democratic Institute.” Just the person to make sure only approved information reaches Americans, as the administration fumbles us closer to war every day while assuring us that news about Hunter’s Ukrainian lucre is merely Russian misinformation.
Jankowicz has written two books, How to Lose the Information War and How to Be A Woman Online. In a pinned tweet pimping her newly released second book, Jankowiz lets her inner misandry loose and writes, “Men ‘burst violently into your mentions and your life like the Kool-aid man, demanding your attention, hawking opinions that they believe are unarguably, manifestly correct and indispensable.’”
ELON MUSK’S PURCHASE OF TWITTER CAUSES MSNBC PUNDIT TO MIRACULOUSLY AWAKEN FROM COMA AFTER FIVE YEARS! Or perhaps, there’s some other reason for Ari Melber to exclaim on air:
“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook,” Melber prefaced by saying, “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees.”
Apparently having no self-awareness or sense of irony at all, he continued his laughable speculation: “or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff, and turn up the reach of something else and the rest of us might not even find out until after the election.”
More here: The Melber foresight. “There is truly nothing funnier than this MSNBC host ranting about what Elon Musk could do to Twitter, and accidentally giving a perfect description of how Twitter has actually operated for the last five years.”
By James D. Agresti
April 25, 2022
Near the top of its home page, the New York Times has published an essay by three professors about a “highly effective” technology to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in “high-risk environments” like nursing homes and places prone to “superspreader events.” Based on more than 500 hours of research, the institute Just Facts identified the same technology in September 2021 and promoted it to scholars, public officials, journalists, and commentators. However, most of them ignored the research while big tech suppressed it, thus costing countless lives.
The technology, called ultraviolet air disinfection, has been proven to stop the spread of contagious respiratory diseases in settings like schools and hospitals for more than 80 years. It is so effective that when it was used in a wing of a California VA hospital during the Asian influenza epidemic of 1958—not a single patient caught the disease. In contrast, the epidemic struck the other wing of the same hospital “with explosive force,” producing a “severe, prostrating illness” among 19% of the patients.
The professors who wrote the Times essay were well-qualified to analyze this issue, as they specialize in “environmental health and how to prevent the airborne transmission of diseases like Covid.” They include:
Donald K. Milton, a professor of environmental and occupational health at the University of Maryland School of Public Health.
Edward A. Nardell, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.
David Michaels, a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University, and a former OSHA official.
The scholars emphasize that ultraviolet air disinfection “can end large superspreader events and make public events and dining safer for everyone” and then finish their essay by asking, “What are we waiting for?”
The answer to that rhetorical question is appalling and contains broad lessons that can prevent an enormous amount of harm from Covid-19 and other scourges going forward.
How It Works
Ultraviolet (UV) light is an invisible part of the energy spectrum emitted by the sun, and it can also be generated by lamps. Multiple studies have found that it proficiently kills airborne microbes, thus preventing the spread of contagious respiratory diseases. These lamps can be deployed in several ways, each with pros and cons.
The most successful studies of UV disinfection systems have been conducted with “upper room” UV. This involves installing UV lamps above people’s heads so that the UV light can’t enter their eyes. Although invisible, the type of UV used for such systems can cause eye pain after hours of direct exposure, which doesn’t occur if the light stays above their heads. When used with fans to increase circulation, upper room UV systems can disinfect the air in a room at very high rates of 57 to 100 times per hour.
Moreover, the professors assert there are “newer, commercially available” UV systems which “do not irritate the eyes” and “can be used safely at lower areas of a room and can directly disinfect the air between people sitting at a dinner table.” However, they don’t document this claim.
Another option is “in-duct” devices that use UV to disinfect air as it passes through heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. Lab and field studies have repeatedly found that these systems kill the vast bulk of airborne microbes that flow through them, but their air turnover rates are typically much lower than upper room UV systems. For example, the HVAC air turnover rates in the Washington State Convention Center range from 5.9 to 20.1 times per hour, which is 65% to 94% lower than upper room UV.
With regard to costs, adding in-duct UV to buildings that already have HVAC systems is much less expensive to install and operate than upper room UV. On the other hand, upper room systems are more economical than installing a complete HVAC system. Likewise, the professors write that “the initial costs for equipment and installation of a highly effective” new direct UV system “can often be cheaper than upgrading or replacing ventilation systems.” They also say that these systems use “far less electricity than ventilation and filtration.”
Somestudies have failed to find benefits from upper room UV, but as explained in a 2010 paper in the journal Public Health Reports, they were conducted in situations where there was “a high risk of acquiring the same infection outside the location where” the UV was deployed, such as school buses. This is not an issue for places like hospitals and nursing homes, where UV lights can be installed wherever the patients and residents may be.
The bottom line is that well-designed UV systems are incredibly effective at stopping the spread of Covid-19 because they kill SARS-CoV-2 virions instead of merely trying to block them.
Why Governments Missed It For So Long
During the first year of the C-19 pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and numerous public health officials assumed that Covid is mainly spread by large respiratory droplets generated by talking, coughing, and sneezing. For a prime example, the World Health Organization published a “fact check” in March 2020 declaring without evidence that “Covid-19 is NOT airborne” and “is mainly transmitted through droplets” that “are too heavy to hang in the air”:
If WHO were correct, upper room and in-duct UV systems would be useless because the droplets would never enter the spaces where the UV light is located. Even direct UV systems would be ineffective because it only takes a second or two for a droplet to travel through the air from one person to another, leaving little time for the UV to penetrate the saliva and kill the virions in it.
In reality, however, at least 20 studies and analyses in science journals have shown that Covid-19 and other contagious respiratory diseases are mainly spread by microscopic respiratory vapors called “airborne particles” or “aerosols.” Like droplets, aerosols are generated by talking, coughing, and sneezing—but unlike droplets—they are also generated by simple breathing and are small and light enough to stay airborne for minutes to hours. Thus, they easily penetrate or circumvent most masks, spittle barriers, and other measures claimed to block the spread of the virus.
UV air disinfection, on the other hand, is ideal for killing aerosols precisely because they are airborne. Hence, they are drawn into HVAC systems and circulate into the kill zones of upper room UV systems.
Highlighting the prevalence and deadly potential of claims that C-19 is mainly spread by droplets instead of aerosols, 14 authors of a June 2020 paper in the journal Environment International:
lamented that “no countries or authorities consider airborne spread of Covid-19 in their regulations to prevent infections transmission indoors.”
stressed that “this failure to immediately recognize and acknowledge the importance of airborne transmission and to take adequate actions against it will result in additional” C-19 infections.
Six months later in November 2020, the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases published a statement signed by 239 scientists documenting “more than enough supporting evidence” that C-19 could be spreading via aerosols. These scientists also:
stressed that “most public health organizations, including the World Health Organization,” have not come to grips with these facts.
appealed to “the medical community and to the relevant national and international bodies to recognize” this reality and take measures to deal with it.
Detailed documentation of how public officials came to believe the droplet theory while rejecting the reality of aerosols is available in Just Facts’ September 2021 research on this issue. While disturbing, it pales in comparison to what officials did after they realized they were wrong.
The Cover-Up
After more than a year of downplaying and denying the threat of aerosol transmission, the CDC and WHO changed their websites in the spring of 2021 to admit that aerosols play a major role in the spread of C-19. But instead of announcing they were mistaken about this life-or-death matter, they silently altered their webpages on how Covid spreads. The CDC also deleted a statement that exposed the fatal consequences of their fecklessness. This cover-up has allowed countless preventable deaths to continue to the present day.
Those sordid actions began on April 30, 2021 when the World Health Organization changed its webpage about how Covid-19 is transmitted by:
deleting this claim: “Current evidence suggests that the main way the virus spreads is by respiratory droplets among people who are in close contact with each other.”
adding this statement: “A person can be infected when aerosols or droplets containing the virus are inhaled or come directly into contact with the eyes, nose, or mouth.”
deleting this claim: Covid-19 “infections occur mainly through exposure to respiratory droplets when a person is in close contact with someone who has Covid-19.”
adding this statement: “Covid-19 spreads when an infected person breathes out droplets and very small particles that contain the virus.”
Both agencies quietly made those changes as if they had no import. However, epidemiologists knew full well they had deadly implications. For example, Mary-Louise McLaws, an epidemiologist and member of WHO’s Covid-19 infection control committee, told the New York Times in July 2020 that she was “frustrated” by WHO’s stubbornness on the issue of aerosols and wanted them to revisit it. She also stressed that a change in WHO’s position “will cause an enormous shudder through the infection control society” and that “we would have to be prepared to change a lot of what we do.”
The CDC clearly knew that—for on the same day it changed its webpage on how C-19 spreads—it deleted from the webpage a statement which reveals the lethal harm caused by their misinformation. Explaining what must change if Covid is airborne, the webpage stated, “Pathogens that are spread easily through airborne transmission require the use of special engineering controls to prevent infections,” an apt description for ultraviolet air disinfection.
On that same day, the CDC made another blatant attempt to cover its tracks. It did this by creating a “Scientific Brief” titled “SARS-CoV-2 Transmission” which claims, “Although how we understand transmission occurs has shifted, the ways to prevent infection with this virus have not.” This directly conflicts with the CDC’s statement that special engineering controls are needed to control the spread of airborne pathogens. Again, the CDC deleted that statement on the very same day it admitted that aerosols play a major role in the spread of C-19.
The CDC was aware of UV air disinfection technology but relegated it to a “supplemental treatment” when “options for increasing room ventilation and filtration are limited.” Meanwhile, a note at the top of the same webpage and others on cdc.gov instructed people to “wear a mask indoors in public if you are in an area of substantial or high transmission.”
So instead of changing “a lot of what we do,” the CDC and WHO kept advising people to use the same droplet-based measures (like masks) which perform poorly against aerosols and ignore the ones that work well.
The Culpability of Media and Big Tech
The Covid-19 pandemic has also been a pandemic of misinformation in which the people who run influential institutions like the CDC and WHO repeatedly promulgated deadly fictions. In turn, media outlets and big tech companies spread them to the world. Beyond issues like droplets, aerosols, masks, and UV—public health officials have botched vitally important matters like:
the lethal harms of lockdowns, especially on children.
Despite that atrocious track record, the executives of companies like Google/YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter made these purveyors of misinformation the arbiters of truth on their platforms.
In vivid contrast, Just Facts consistently published verifiable facts that refuted those falsehoods, and a cross-disciplinary array of Ph.D.’s complemented, shared, and cited Just Facts’ research. Yet with callous disregard for actual facts—and thus the wellbeing of people—big tech corporations shadow banned and censored these facts while many media outlets ignored them.
All of this created a torrent of misinformation that contributed to the adoption of policies that will have devastating effects for decades to come. The executives of these big tech companies and media empires have played—and continue to play—an instrumental role in this carnage related to Covid and many other issues.
NOTE (5/14/22): In response to an inquiry from Just Facts, the professors have provided documentation of commercially available UV systems that kill airborne pathogens and can be directed at humans without eye irritation or any other ill effects. This includes but is not limited to:
a study published by the journal Nature in March 2022 which shows that a technology called “Far-UVC”:
reduces the indoor presence of a continuously released airborne pathogen by 98.4%.
provides the equivalent treatment of 184 air exchanges per hour.
does “not induce acute reactions in the skin or eyes, nor delayed effects such as skin cancer.”
is “an effective and ‘hands-off’ technology to reduce airborne disease transmission.”
“Over a 1,000 installations for over a year with no reported transmission or safety issues.”
“The most impressive DC installation is probably at the US Army HQ in the Pentagon where for over 18 months they have not required masks or social distancing and used Far UV as their only intervention to protect their facilities.”
“The Army HQ has had 5 separate cases to date where people have come back from vacation or remote business meetings infected with the Alpha, Delta and Omicron variants and worked side by side with other colleagues for multiple days (without masks) before falling ill and testing positive. In each case, everyone in the office was tested and there were no confirmed cases of transmission to others under the Far UV light”
a special issue of the journal Photochemistry and Photobiology dedicated to “germicidal photobiology and infection control.”
The committee finally convened on 22 April via video conference, delayed apparently because communicating with Karl Lauterbach’s ministry has been a huge problem. In the hours after that meeting, the committee chair notified its members that he had finally heard from Lauterbach. The health minister had raised the idea of extending the evaluation deadline to 31 December, and suggested that the committee mandate might end up being redefined.
As Welt explains, Christian Drosten had previously voiced staunch opposition to the project of investigating the efficacy of containment measures:
… [A]n internal virtual meeting in March, Charité virologist Christian Drosten argued against individually evaluating the containment measures. In a nine-minute speech, he said there was too little data, it was too early for such a study, and one could end up “in hot water,” according to WELT information. In view of this intervention from Drosten, who has been one of the most important advisers to political decision-makers since the start of the pandemic, the committee turned to the Ministry of Health for further instructions.
Nothing came of that meeting; the committee had a mandate from the Bundestag, the legal force of which does not rest upon Drosten’s feelings.
When Welt asked the health ministry to comment on the latest delays, a Lauterbach spokesman said the experts don’t have sufficient data, and that the ministry is in discussions with the Bundestag about how to handle this. He even denied that there would be any delay in the committee’s work, which is plainly a lie, because Welt has documents and off-the-record statements from committee members to the opposite effect. One such member even complained to their reporter that “It shows great disrespect to try to withdraw our mandate to evaluate containment measures after so many hours of work.”
We are asked to believe that containment measures have been super successful in the past, and that they remain an important tool for future waves. Lauterbach himself has promised the return of containment in the Fall, because he did not get his vaccine mandate. At the same time, nobody must be permitted to evaluate the efficacy of these allegedly crucial measures. We can’t be allowed to know which ones work and which ones don’t. That would be dangerous somehow, even for an expert committee. In fact it would be so dangerous, that Christian Drosten, the public face of mass containment in Germany, felt compelled to deliver a secret lecture warning against any such evaluative process.
What’s really galling about all this, isn’t that they’re lying, but that they’re terrible at it.
OUR ENTIRE APPROACH IS A FAILURE, WE MUST REDOUBLE OUR EFFORTS: Authorities now fencing in buildings in Shanghai to stop people from leaving. “This reeks of something local officials felt obliged to do not because they expect it to limit transmission but because they’re desperate to show their bosses in Beijing how committed they are to the policy. . . . The grim punchline to China trying to move mountains in Shanghai in the name of ‘zero COVID’ is that … there’s now an outbreak in Beijing too. Just 22 cases were recorded today but residents of the capital are understandably terrified, knowing that a Shanghai-style lockdown awaits if the city can’t stamp out transmission quickly.”
Remember that our own ruling class sees China as a model.
SPACEX NOW SERVING AS AN EXAMPLE TO THE U.S. MILITARY: SpaceX beating Russian jamming attack was ‘eyewatering’: DoD official. “‘The way that Starlink was able to upgrade when a threat showed up, we need to be able to have that ability,’ said Dave Tremper, the Pentagon’s director of electronic warfare.”
In 2020, N.C. State Board of Elections Director Karen Brinson Bell made a successful push for the state to establish an online absentee ballot portal during COVID-19, however, emails show such a portal was already in the works long before the pandemic began.
Emails obtained by North State Journal show discussions between the N.C. State Board of Elections (NCSBE) and Democracy Live about adding an online absentee ballot portal happening as early as June of 2019; almost nine months prior to the emergence of COVID-19 in the state.
Democracy Live’s system utilizes “OmniBallot,” an online ballot replication system. The online absentee ballot portal powered by Democracy Live was first publicly named by the NCSBE in September of 2020.
According to a 2020 security analysis of OmniBallot conducted by Michael Specter of MIT and J. Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan, “OmniBallot uses a simplistic approach to Internet voting that is vulnerable to vote manipulation by malware on the voter’s device and by insiders or other attackers who can compromise Democracy Live, Amazon, Google, or CloudFlare.”
PRETTY MUCH: The End of Progressive Intellectual Life: How the foundation-NGO complex quashed innovative thinking and open debate, first on the American right and now on the center left. “If you are an intelligent and thoughtful young American, you cannot be a progressive public intellectual today, any more than you can be a cavalry officer or a silent movie star. That’s because, in the third decade of the 21st century, intellectual life on the American center left is dead. Debate has been replaced by compulsory assent and ideas have been replaced by slogans that can be recited but not questioned: Black Lives Matter, Green Transition, Trans Women Are Women, 1619, Defund the Police. The space to the left-of-center that was once filled with magazines and organizations devoted to what Diana Trilling called the ‘life of significant contention’ is now filled by the ritualized gobbledygook of foundation-funded, single-issue nonprofits like a pond choked by weeds. Having crowded out dissent and debate, the nonprofit industrial complex—Progressivism Inc.—taints the Democratic Party by association with its bizarre obsessions and contributes to Democratic electoral defeats, like the one that appears to be imminent this fall.”
Plus: “Chain-ganging (a term I have borrowed from international relations theory) in this context means implicitly or explicitly banning any grantee from publicly criticizing the positions of any other grantee. At a conference sponsored by the Ford Foundation that I attended more than a decade ago, an African American community activist complained to me privately: ‘Immigration is hurting the people in the neighborhoods we work in. The employers prefer illegal immigrants to young Black workers. But if we say anything about it, Ford will cut off our money.'”
Arrest quotas. Talk about an affront to liberty. Don't have enough crimes this month just throw an innocent into the slammer.
CHANGE: New Virginia Law Bans Police Departments from Enacting Arrest Quotas. “House Bill 750 and Senate Bill 327 – which both received unanimous bipartisan support – will prohibit police departments from establishing formal arrest quotas or maintaining informal arrest quotas, Just the News reports. These quotas would encourage officers to secure a certain number of arrests in a given time period.”
Plus: “‘I would be honest to say that like my first true experience with racism probably wasn’t until I came to college,’ the student said.” Time to shut this toxic industry down?
Palaeontologists believe that they may have found one of the victims of the extinction event that ended the dinosaurs. The fossilized leg, which was f...
Many people are interested in the distribution of income and wealth and how it may have changed over time. But there is no single and undisputed source for such data. Rather, economists construct historical time series using partial information and many assumptions.
French economist Thomas Piketty and colleagues have for years been publishing data showing extreme changes in top 1 percent income and wealth shares in the United States over the decades. Many news outlets report the information unquestioned, despite evidence that Piketty is sloppy with data and makes bad assumptions that throw his calculations off.
The other day in the Wall Street Journal, Phillip Magness and Vincent Geloso described errors in the top 1 percent income data of Piketty and his colleagues. The Cato Institute published a collection of essays critiquing Piketty’s theories and data in 2017. Alan Reynolds has been finding flaws in Piketty’s data since 2007.
I noticed this article in the New York Times magazine last week by editor Willy Staley that parrots Piketty’s incorrect claim about the persistence of top wealth holdings. It is classic Piketty. He asserts a supposed general rule of wealth, but appears to have done insufficient research to see if it is actually true. Here’s Staley:
In his book “Capital in the Twenty‐First Century,” the French economist Thomas Piketty notes that the new economic order has made it difficult for the superrich not to get richer: “Past a certain threshold,” he writes, “all large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates, regardless of whether the owner of the fortune works or not.” … “Once a fortune is established, the capital grows according to a dynamic of its own,” Piketty notes, adding that bigger fortunes tend to grow faster — no matter how extravagant, their owners’ living expenses are still such a small proportion of the returns that even more is left over for reinvestment.
Piketty’s claims here are incorrect, as Ryan Bourne and I discussed in “Exploring Wealth Inequality.” To back his claim, Piketty points to data from Forbes: “One of the most striking lessons of the Forbes rankings is that, past a certain threshold, all large fortunes, whether inherited or entrepreneurial in origin, grow at extremely high rates.” And he adds that, “the largest fortunes grew much more rapidly than average wealth. This is the new fact that the Forbes rankings help us bring to light.”
Forbes has published an annual list of the 400 Americans with the highest net worth since 1982. Ryan and I found that only 21 from the 1982 list were still on the list in 2019. Where have the others gone? Numerous people have died and their wealth divided among heirs. The wealth of many others has stagnated or declined because of income taxes, consumption, charitable giving, poor investment choices, and business failures.
Piketty appears to have only looked at the winners on the Forbes list and did not account for people who lost wealth and dropped off the list. He doesn’t seem to have recognized that the rich can make bad investment choices, can manage their companies poorly, and are often outcompeted in the marketplace. The world’s richest man on Forbes global list in 1987 was Yoshiaki Tsutsumi, who was worth $20 billion. His fortune plunged to just $1.2 billion in 2006, and then he dropped off the list.
In the Cato Journal, Robert Arnott and coauthors examined the Forbes lists and found that of the 400 individuals on the 1982 list, just 69 individuals or their descendants remained on the 2014 list. They found that the wealth of those 69 people had grown far more slowly than if they had simply invested passively in stocks and bonds in 1982 and let their holdings grow. They conclude that “dynastic wealth accumulation is simply a myth.”
Similarly, the Tax Foundation’s William McBride looked at changes in wealth for the 400 individuals on the 1987 Forbes U.S. list through to the 2014 list. He calculated the growth in wealth for the 73 people who stayed on the list, and he estimated the growth for those who dropped off by assuming that the drop‐offs had barely missed the wealth threshold for the 2014 list. With that assumption, he found that the average annual real wealth growth rate over 26 years for the people on the 1987 list was at most a meager 2.4 percent. By contrast, the average annual real return on U.S. stocks over the decades has been about 7 percent.
McBride found that people on the Forbes lists who had inherited their wealth grew their fortunes more slowly than those with self‐made wealth. Active entrepreneurs often generate new wealth, but individuals on the lists who had inherited did not earn outsized returns—instead, their wealth was eaten away over time, as noted, by taxes, consumption, philanthropy, and bad business and investment decisions.
Reporters doing stories on income and wealth should read more than just Piketty. Economists across the political spectrum have found flaws in his data and theories. Since many assumptions are used to construct historical data on income and wealth distributions, reporters should at least convey to readers the uncertainty in such information and the different ways it can be assembled and interpreted.
Have you ever wondered why the corruption in the CDC hasn’t been exposed by whistleblowers?
In response to my latest whistleblower request, I received the following message from a doctor which I wanted to share with you:
I have had some contact with people who would fit your search - however, it appears they are unwilling to share information because of the danger of offering the information.
We have a client whose daughter had worked for the CDC but refused to sign an agreement to withhold information. She left her job and fled to an undisclosed location in <redacted>.
We had met her in 2021, and tried to link her with Del Bigtree as we have met him and are in communication with his employee <redacted>.
She said she was too afraid to speak with anyone about it. She feared for her life and her family's lives.
…
So I am wishing you the best in finding someone with information. They are out there, but they have been threatened in the worst ways imaginable. You may need to offer safety for them, their families, their distant relatives, their animals and their neighbors.
If the CDC is telling us the truth, then why would they have to resort to intimidation techniques like these?
This is not an isolated report
Two of our team members told me similar stories about CDC intimidation. There was no overlap in the stories but in both cases, the people at the CDC were scared enough not to reveal anything.
Surely, the HHS Inspector General’s office should know why intimidation techniques are necessary at the CDC, wouldn’t they? Maybe someone in Congress could ask them?
How they can get away with doing this
Do you want to know how they can get away with using such techniques?
It’s simple: the CDC is untouchable; they can do no wrong. It’s as simple as that. If VAERS shows that over 400,000 Americans were killed by the vaccine and the CDC says that they haven’t found a causal relationship, the vaccines are perfectly safe.
The CDC did a study that proved the MMR vaccine caused autism in African American boys.
The CDC then hid the study and disposed of the original data.
One person in the CDC kept the data and discussed it with a scientist who advocated for individuals injured by the MMR vaccine (Brian Hooker).
He convinced him to somewhat go forward (had to push him by using recordings of their conversations), and they gave the documentation showing the fraud at the CDC. The one member of congress who was willing to consider/listen to them and keep the documents was Bill Posey (who many parents in the autism field feel has treated them really well unlike the other members of Congress).
This is Posey giving a statement in front of congress asking for an investigation of the CDC on July 29, 2015:
The CDC essentially hushed all of this up and it was completely forgotten.
There may have been other whistleblowers but this is the only high profile case I know of and it was fairly recent. Nothing was ultimately done about any of this and the Obama administration covered it all up.
When Thompson originally raised the issue with the MMR paper to his superiors in 2004, he was put on leave of absence and was recommended for psychological treatment. This is SOP for the CDC as any scientific dissent morphs into a HR problem where the dissenter is labeled "rogue" or "crazy."
Today, Thompson isn’t talking to anyone. I believe they have made threats to him to preclude him from leaving CDC as he would be much more of a threat to them on the outside than on the inside. Some people speculate that they threatened him with Federal prison if he shares any documents with me.
There is a clear pattern of scientific corruption at the CDC
Of course this isn’t the only example of CDC corruption, it’s just the most recent.
I’ve written earlier about what happened at Simpsonwood where the CDC covered up the data linking thimerosal and autism.
So there it is in black and white. The science says 22 studies, starting 50 years ago, shows that the CDC is lying to the American public on a very serious health issue.
But as you saw earlier, nobody (except Congressman Bill Posey) holds them accountable, so they can get away with lying to the American public without anyone ever calling them on it. The New York Times is certainly never going to do it. Neither will anyone else in mainstream media.
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The only people who will consistently point out the lying and corruption are people like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and other so-called “misinformation spreaders” such myself and my colleagues.
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Editor’s Note: This article was originally published by Liberty Unyielding on April 10, 2022, and is republished here with permission. Joe Biden has provided billions of dollars in handouts to high-income people. The most recent example is his administration’s decision last week to suspend student loan repayments yet again, through August 31. It did that even though people with big student loans tend […]
Largest Comet Ever Seen Nasa has spotted a record-breaking large comet headed towards Earth. Its icy nucleus is bigger than any ever seen – measuring around 80 miles across, and 50 times bigger than the heart of most known comets. It is also thought to have a mass of about […]
The last two years have been such a disorienting blizzard of shock and awe that it is truly hard to keep up. We went from lockdowns to mitigation theater to mandates so quickly, and now one gets the feeling that we aren’t supposed to think or talk about any of this.
We are just supposed to forget it all. Or believe that this is normal. Where are the investigative journalists and commissions? Where is the focus? Who is writing a serious, detailed, and critical history of this calamity?
There are so many features of the timeline here that need investigation and explanation.
Who came up with this 6-feet of distance rule and on what basis?
Who pushed the idea of festooning the country with plexiglass?
Who was instrumental in pushing the panicked school and church closures?
Who came up with the idea of shutting the hospitals nationwide to non-Covid patients even in places that had not yet met the virus?
Why so little concern for small businesses and why were big-box stores exempted from shutdowns?
What exactly was the relationship between federal and state health officials that enacted so many similar policies so quickly?
At what point did pharmaceuticals get involved and why were only three makers selected for the US and on what basis?
Who was responsible for suppressing facts about natural immunity?
How did the boosters get approved without support of top FDA officials who later resigned?
How did the federal government so easily conscript social-media platforms into its disinformation campaign?
How did it happen that the Department of Health and Human Services released a confidential lockdown blueprint on March 13, 2020, even before the idea had the green light from the White House?
Gain-of-function research anyone?
That’s only a brief list of questions but there are potentially hundreds.
Let me zero in on one weird thing that jumped out at me from the first tranche of FOIA’ed emails from the account of Anthony Fauci.
In mid-February 2020, we know for certain that Fauci, Francis Collins, and Jeremy Farrar were obsessing about the possibility of a lab leak from Wuhan. During that period, the World Health Organization worked with the National Institutes of Health and many other nations to organize a trip to China. This this took place February 16-24, 2020, two weeks after Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus of WHO had told the world that China as "setting a new standard" for virus response. All involved in this junket came back with glowing praise for how China handled the virus during its month-long lockdowns in Wuhan.
Here is a sample email, the first mention I can find.
To which Cliff Lane of NIH responded:
Later too, a Chinese journalist made an inquiry that went unanswered.
Journalist Jon Cohen (who later co-authored a puff piece on China in Science, March 2, 2020) asked for some photographs of the team but apparently did not get any.
The report that came out from WHO (with NIH approval) was full of praise for how China crushed the virus.
Here is the full report:
Cliff Lane of the NIH summed it all up well:
We know now that the strategy did not work. China did not contain SARS-CoV-2. What is happening in Shanghai today illustrates that. The lockdowns are more brutal than ever, effectively wrecking one of the major financial capitals of the world, and with no prospect for eradication in this country or any country.
And yet here we have officials from the NIH, presumably with the approval of Fauci, taking a trip to China, visiting several cities, meeting untold numbers of Communist Party members, and returning with glowing praise for how the government handled the virus. This trip might have been what set up the lockdown model for the entire world.
When Dr. H. Clifford Lane, an assistant to Dr. Anthony Fauci, traveled to China a year ago as part of a delegation of scientists studying how the deadly COVID-19 virus had emerged in that country, he found a population determined to confront the disease.
“There were all sorts of measures put in place ... social distancing, masks. Public awareness of the pandemic was known daily, said Lane, who spoke Feb. 18th via Zoom as part of the South Haven Speakers Series. “The entire country was at war against the virus.”
However, when Lane, who is deputy director of the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Disease, returned from his two-week trip to China in February 2020, he found a much different reaction to the virus in this country.
Unlike China, whose national government issued strict orders for the country’s inhabitants to follow, the U.S. federal government left much of the methods for controlling the spread of the virus to individual state governments.
The result was a mixture of control measures. While some governors in states like Michigan and New York forced closure of schools to in-person learning, and temporarily shuttered businesses considered “non-essential,” other governors took less stringent measures.
Even though health officials urged people to wear face masks to stop the spread of the virus, there was a resistance by people, in general, to do so. Even a number of federal officials, including President Donald Trump and some governors and senators, mainly Republicans, appeared in public with no masks on.
“There was a playbook for the federal government But was it applied? No. It was politics to a degree,” Lane said. Fauci, who heads up the National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases, also has been a critic of the mixed reactions to controlling the virus in America.
At that time, flights to and from China were banned for regular people. Did these officials charter a plane? Did the White House know this was happening? Who pushed for this and who approved it? When the WHO report came out (February 28, 2020), did anyone at the White House see it? The report mentions “mission members” (most from China) but how many staff from the NIH came along?
The meta-properties of the document mention that an American working for WHO, Maria Van Kerkhove, was the author. She is a highly trained scientist with long experience. She later found herself in hot water for telling the world that asymptomatic spread was not driving the spread of Covid, a statement she had to dial back (even if she was correct).
Why did she prove to be so gullible about China’s glorious success in crushing Covid? What does she have to say now about this report that influenced the entire world to lock down?
There are so many questions and far too few answers. This one junket is just the beginning but it is a massively important one. We know now that the idea that China managed the virus well is a complete myth (it did not “demonstrate that the infection can be controlled”). The countries that locked down less or not at all had better outcomes in every area: health, economics, culture, and education.
Why was the US so quick to adopt the tactics and strategies of the Chinese Communist Party and to what extent did this “joint mission” to several cities in China in mid-February influence that?
GOOGLE CENSORS STRIKE AGAIN: The TechnoMetric Institute of Policy and Politics (TIPP) accurately predicted the outcome of the past five presidential elections. That kind of accuracy is why Issues & Insights (I&I) partners with TIPP on regular polling of American public opinion.
But according to the censors at Google AdSense, it doesn’t matter how accurate a poll is, what counts is whether the results advance the Left’s agenda, as represented by the Biden administration. Here’s how it came down, according to I&I:
“We reported on the results of our monthly I&I/TIPP Poll, which found that nearly two-thirds of registered voters thought decisions about COVID restrictions were driven by politics, not science. Majorities in just about every demographic, political, and ideological group felt this way.
“Nevertheless, Google’s AdSense network stripped its ads from this article because it contains what Google claims is ‘dangerous or derogatory content’ and that we must ‘fix it’ for Google to restore those ads.”
Sadly, the Google AdSense censors refused to even consider reviewing their decision, much less explaining how in this or any other universe it can be “dangerous or derogatory” to report accurately the results of a survey conducted by a pollster with a sterling record for reliability and precision.
Somewhere John D. Rockefeller and the rest of the Robber Barons are spinning in their graves, absolutely consumed with envy for Google AdSense.
Perhaps there is hope, even for Germany: Nine days into the lifting of the general indoor mask requirement, a marked shift in habits is underway. Fewer and fewer are bothering with useless plastic face-diapers.
As I carry out my semi-regular supermarket surveys, though, I’ve begun pondering all over again the whole problem of masks, and why we ever started wearing them, and what it all means.
The story is bizarre:
Everyone will remember that Corona astrologers and public health authorities, from Anthony Fauci to Christian Drosten, advised against masks early on. They pointed to longstanding public-health guidelines against community masking, which they claimed was powerless against viral infection. Then, beginning in April 2020, these very same people started singing a different tune. They had only played down the utility of masks to preserve their availability for healthcare personnel, they said. In fact everybody should wear masks; they would prevent infections, perhaps even make lockdowns unnecessary.
They proceeded to impose mask mandates upon the better part of the world. Lungs everywhere filled with new microplastics, oceans accumulated a new kind of trash, all of it to no effect whatever. Older public health doctrine against masking, it turns out, was totally right. Mandates plainly have no effect on infection curves. This is because SARS-2 is primarily transmitted by aerosols; it works like a gas that fills indoor spaces. Only N95 or FFP2 respirators have any chance of stopping the inhalation of these microscopic particles, but the discipline required to fit and seal a respirator properly is both inconsistent with the low quality of commonly available models, and incompatible with use outside of a controlled hospital environment. Thus, even respirators are totally worthless.
I am open to theories as to how our pointless mask obsessions ever came to be. Right now I have three ideas, which aren’t mutually exclusive and probably all apply to varying degrees:
Copying Asia: Corona was less virulent in the Asia-Pacific region, where masks are more common. A big part of how we got lockdowns and the rest of containment, was a bunch of people assuming that Asia was doing it right and that we needed to copy them.
Making Corona Visible: Consciously or unconsciously (probably both), public health authorities wanted a means of making the pandemic real and tangible to the masses. Pervasive disease statistics were part of this, hand sanitiser and distancing rules another part, masks yet another part.
Maintaining Useful Fictions: A lot of people came out of the first-wave propaganda campaign believing that SARS-2 had a 10% fatality rate and was likely to kill their kids. How could such an enormous threat be reconciled with the decision of authorities to insist on ordinary routine supermarket shopping, to end closures after April, or to weigh the problem of reopening schools? Rather than admit the danger of the virus had been wildly over-hyped, they claimed to have a charm that would magically save its wearers.
Near the top of its home page, the New York Times has published an essay by three professors about a “highly effective” technology to prevent the spread of Covid-19 in “high-risk environments” like nursing homes and places prone to “superspreader events.” Based on more than 500 hours of research, the institute Just Facts identified the same technology in September 2021 and promoted it to scholars, public officials, journalists, and commentators. However, most of them ignored the research while big tech suppressed it, thus costing countless lives.
The technology, called ultraviolet air disinfection, has been proven to stop the spread of contagious respiratory diseases in settings like schools and hospitals for more than 80 years. It is so effective that when it was used in a wing of a California VA hospital during the Asian influenza epidemic of 1958—not a single patient caught the disease. In contrast, the epidemic struck the other wing of the same hospital “with explosive force,” producing a “severe, prostrating illness” among 19% of the patients.
The professors who wrote the Times essay were well-qualified to analyze this issue, as they specialize in “environmental health and how to prevent the airborne transmission of diseases like Covid.” They include:
If WHO were correct, upper room and in-duct UV systems would be useless because the droplets would never enter the spaces where the UV light is located. Even direct UV systems would be ineffective because it only takes a second or two for a droplet to travel through the air from one person to another, leaving little time for the UV to penetrate the saliva and kill the virions in it.
In reality, however, at least 20 studies and analyses in science journals have shown that Covid-19 and other contagious respiratory diseases are mainly spread by microscopic respiratory vapors called “airborne particles” or “aerosols.” Like droplets, aerosols are generated by talking, coughing, and sneezing—but unlike droplets—they are also generated by simple breathing and are small and light enough to stay airborne for minutes to hours. Thus, they easily penetrate or circumvent most masks, spittle barriers, and other measures claimed to block the spread of the virus.
UV air disinfection, on the other hand, is ideal for killing aerosols precisely because they are airborne. Hence, they are drawn into HVAC systems and circulate into the kill zones of upper room UV systems.
Highlighting the prevalence and deadly potential of claims that C-19 is mainly spread by droplets instead of aerosols, 14 authors of a June 2020 paper in the journal Environment International:
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