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Accountability ideological culture social media

Stossel Sues Facebook

“After 40+ years of reporting,” offers John Stossel on his Facebook page, “I now understand the importance of limited government.”

“I just sued Facebook,” Stossel posted yesterday. “I didn’t want to sue. I hate lawsuits. I tried for a year to reach someone at Facebook to fix things, but Facebook wouldn’t.”

What needs fixing?

Facebook’s fact-​checkers dinged him with a “partly false”/“factual inaccuracies” label for his StosselTV video “Are We Doomed?” — without challenging any specific fact. And regarding another video, “Government Fueled Fires,” Todd Spangler of Variety quotes the case, which accuses Facebook of “falsely attributed to Stossel a claim he never made, and on that basis flagged the content as ‘misleading’ and ‘missing context,’ so that would-​be viewers would be routed to the false attribution statement.”

Stephen Green writes in support of Stossel’s $2 million lawsuit, demurring only to add that there’s only one little problem: “If there’s a way through the courts to change Facebook’s bad behavior, it’s going to take a judgment with a lot more zeroes on the end.”

The lawsuit in question is a defamation lawsuit.

I confess: it is for breach of contract that I am most annoyed with Facebook. The company brought us all in with an openness ethos and now relentlessly pushes progressive talking points. I suppose it’s futile to compete with Facebook’s lawyers on grounds of Terms of Use agreements, so perhaps that’s why the focus is on slander and libel and all that. 

It is as liars and promise-​breakers that Facebook’s ideological tyrants most grate.

What they did to John Stossel is unconscionable. But, sadly, not nearly uncommon enough.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Categories
Accountability too much government

[Not] Just Plain Bats

It’s been several months since I’ve focused on Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance (EHA), which was funded by your tax dollars to “improve” upon viruses found in nature. 

The evidence for this has been out there for some time, but many avoid drawing any conclusion, finding it circumstantial. Or something.

Remember Daszak being caught organizing the open letter in The Lancet, proclaiming all talk of gain-​of-​function research as “conspiracy” theorizing and “dangerous”?

Well, now The Lancet is reported to be preparing to publish an article going so far as to say that “there is no direct support for the natural origin of SARS-​CoV‑2, and a laboratory-​related accident is plausible.”

Meanwhile, my co-​podcaster, on his LocoFoco Netcast, quotes Daszak’s own public boastings (from YouTube), effectively laying out EcoHealth Alliance’s gain-​of-​function research, talking of insertions of the spiked protein, and referencing to his colleagues in China.

And now another revelation, via science writer Matt Ridley. Specifically, Drastic Research reveals an earlier Daszak grant proposal to inject “deadly chimeric bat coronaviruses collected by the Wuhan Institute of Virology into humanised and ‘batified’ mice.”

This proposal — “named ‘DEFUSE’” — was not accepted by … oh, and this gets good … DARPA.

“In other words, a branch of the federal government had already judged aspects of EHA’s research … as falling under the definition of GOF [gain of function], only for [Health and Human Services] to approve similar work without P3CO review in 2018 and 2019,” the Drastic Research report summarizes.

So it was too iffy for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, but hunky dory with our medical bureaucrats?

The story is more than just about bats, it’s about laboratory manipulation of existing viruses to create new viruses.

Which is, well, batty.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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Accountability Thought

Yves Guyot

The Law of supply and demand was not promulgated in any code. Its power comes from elsewhere. It imposes itself upon mankind in as implacable a way as hunger and thirst. We furnish fresh demonstrations of its truth, whether willingly or not, even while we imagine ourselves to be violating it. If the Socialist excommunicates and abuses the economist, who formulates this law, he should also hold Newton responsible for all the tiles that fall on the heads of passers-​by, and should declare that if some poor wretch, in throwing himself from a window, kills himself, it is the fault of those physicists who have discovered and taught the law of gravitation.

Yves Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism (1894).
Categories
Accountability national politics & policies

Death By Definition?

“What we’re alleging is that gain-​of-​function research was going on in that [Wuhan] lab and NIH funded it,” Sen. Rand Paul told Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the last 37 years and the chief medical advisor to the president, at a Senate hearing last week.

Paul contended that Fauci had lied to Congress by claiming “NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology,” when NIH did indeed finance such activity in that lab.

But Fauci denied that research met the official definition of “gain of function.”*

“You take an animal virus and you increase its transmissibility to humans. You’re saying that’s not gain of function?” the senator asked incredulously.

“That is correct,” replied Fauci, before adding, “And Senator Paul, you do not know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Many scientists,” writes Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, “think Paul actually does know what he’s talking about. One of them is Rutgers University microbiologist and biosafety expert Richard Ebright, whom Paul quoted as saying this research ‘matches, indeed epitomizes the definition of gain of function research.’”

The dispute pits Kentucky’s junior senator, concerned over what actually happened, against the bureaucrat, wiggling out from the bad odor of a terrible policy by, apparently, redefining terms. 

Mere logomachy.

“What everyone can now see clearly,” suggests Rogin, “is that NIH was collaborating on risky research with a Chinese lab that has zero transparency and zero accountability during a crisis — and no one in a position of power addressed that risk.”**

“Fauci is arguing the system worked,” the columnist maintains. “It didn’t.”

The senator has officially referred the matter of Fauci’s fibbing to Congress to the Justice Department for possible (but unlikely) prosecution.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* “Any kind of animal virus that occurs in nature, that infects animals only, if you recombine it or mutate it or adapt it in the lab with other viruses so it has characteristics that change it from being an animal-​only virus to being a virus that now can infect humans, that you’ve gained in function, you’ve gained pathogenesis or you’ve gained virulence — you’ve made it more dangerous,” Sen. Paul explained to Fox News’s Martha MacCallum. “Without question this is what happened in the Wuhan lab.”

** “According to an intelligence fact sheet released by the Trump administration and partially confirmed by the Biden administration,” Rogin also points out, “the WIV took our help and used it to build another, secret part of the lab, where they worked with the Chinese military.”

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Accountability government transparency international affairs

Transparency with Chinese Characteristics

Chinese government officials are shocked, shocked — no wait, make that “extremely shocked!” — that the World Health Organization (no less) proposes “to further investigate whether the coronavirus emerged from a lab in Wuhan.” 

“We are asking China to be transparent, open and cooperate,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director-​general, “especially on the information, raw data that we asked for in the early days of the pandemic.”

But yesterday, at a Beijing news conference, the vice minister of the Chinese National Health Commission, Zeng Yixin, shared his feelings that “this plan revealed a lack of respect for common sense and an arrogant attitude toward science. We can’t possibly accept such a plan for investigating the origins.”

Instead, Zeng suggested searching for “signs of natural transmission … and the possibility that the virus may have first spread outside China” … or perhaps chasing after wild geese.

“[S]everal Chinese officials asserted that the W.H.O. inquiry got it right the first time,” explained The New York Times, “and that there was no evidence to justify renewed checks of the labs.”

Renewed”? That supposes that labs at the Wuhan Institute of Virology have previously been inspected, forensically, and the personnel interviewed — not to mention a ton of essential evidence on the virus shared and analyzed. None of that has happened.

The joint WHO-​China investigation was no such thing. It was a transparent* scam to dismiss the lab-​leak theory as “extremely unlikely” without scrutiny. Even the head of the W.H.O. publicly backed away from its own finding, declaring that more investigation was needed.

Only major U.S. media still buy Chinazi gaslighting …

… or express surprise that the genocidal mobsters running China won’t cooperate in holding themselves accountable. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


* No doubt, this marks the absolute zenith of transparency for the Chinese Communist Party.

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art: transparent /​ floater


ADDITIONAL LINKS

The Man the Media Missed — June 8, 2021

The Worshipful and the Incurious — June 3, 2021

The Sound of Sino-​Silence? — March 22, 2021

Now Safe to Blame? — March 8, 2021

Good Relations with Genocide? — November 24, 2020

Soft on China — April 29, 2020

Follow the (Media) Money — April 21, 2020

Categories
Accountability local leaders tax policy

Balking in Baltimore

So far, the besieged businessmen of the Fells Point area of Baltimore are only threatening to withhold payments of taxes and fees to the city.

If and when they follow through, the plan is to place the withheld funds in escrow. The money would then be turned over to the city government if and only if the city again meets minimal standards of performance. 

Tax resistance? Sure. But not in the usual mode.

Fells Point shop owners are rebelling against a “culture of lawlessness” in their streets, streets managed or mismanaged by the city. They want police to do more — be free to do more — about crime.

In a letter to Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott and other officials submitted not long after several shootings in the area, thirty-​seven Fells Point businessmen demand that the city “Pick up the trash. . . . Enforce traffic and parking laws. . . . Stop illegal open-​air alcohol and drug sales. . . . Empower police to responsibly do their job. . . . Please do your job so we can get back to doing ours.”

What will happen? I fear that, despite this worthy protest, city officials will continue to turn a blind eye. I fear that they will regard the protest as a PR problem, one that will go away and allow them to go on with the usual business of government — the way they see it. Their evasive initial responses to the letter are not encouraging.

Baltimore businesspeople are not trying to dodge city taxes here. They understand very well that one cannot expect to get something for nothing. They just want to get something.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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