Category: media and media people

Categories
insider corruption media and media people national politics & policies

Settled Science

Rand Paul, Anthony Fauci, covid, gain of function

Remember the blow-​up last summer between Sen. Rand Paul (R‑Ky.) and Dr. Anthony Fauci over gain-​of-​function research? 

Paul charged that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had supported such research in China. “Senator Paul,” Fauci fired back, “you don’t know what you are talking about, quite frankly.”

“Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared to be channeling the frustration of millions of Americans when he spoke those words during an invective-​laden, made-​for-​Twitter Senate hearing on July 20,” imagined Katherine Eban recently in Vanity Fair. “You didn’t have to be a Democrat to be fed up with all the xenophobic finger-​pointing and outright disinformation, coming mainly from the right.…”*

Nevertheless, Ms. Eban added, “Paul might have been onto something.”

Might? 

Last week, the NIH sent a letter to Congress admitting that its grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, laundered through the infamous EcoHealth Alliance, resulted in research that even the NIH acknowledges was gain-of-function. 

Sen. Paul knew what he was talking about; Dr. Fauci did not.

NIH was quick to defend Fauci, arguing the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the Chief Medical Advisor to the President was in the dark last summer about the controversial research because EcoHealth Alliance was two years late in reporting. For its part, EcoHealth Alliance “appeared to contradict that claim,” telling Vanity Fair, “These data were reported … in April 2018.”

“Given all of the sensitivity about this work,” Stanford University microbiologist Dr. David Relman remarked to Vanity Fair, “it’s difficult to understand why NIH and EcoHealth have still not explained a number of irregularities with the reporting on this grant.”

Is it?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

* Eban concluded her sentence with this clause: “up to and including the claim that COVID-​19 was a bioweapon cooked up in a lab.” Her assertion that “the right” was calling COVID a “bioweapon” is a canard designed to prematurely halt any inquiry into even the possibility. When Sen. Tom Cotton (R‑Ark.) simply said there needed to be an investigation of the Wuhan lab, he was fiercely attacked by big media and the lab leak theory was suppressed on Facebook and Google. 

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
Accountability general freedom media and media people social media

Unlinked at LinkedIn

Microsoft, Bing, LinkedIn, China, Uyghurs

Congressman Jim Banks is rebuking Microsoft for censoring its LinkedIn account holders who criticize the Chinese government.

This includes users in the United States.

“LinkedIn is pressuring U.S. citizens to remove posts critical of China’s dictatorship because, apparently, ‘regional laws’ compel them to do Xi’s bidding,”  Banks tells the Washington Examiner. “That’s a lie. LinkedIn is simply selling out America’s values and national security in order to boost its bottom line.”

The congressman has written to the company, which connects job seekers to job providers.

He demands answers about how LinkedIn cooperates with Chinese censorship.

His allies include Carl Szabo, VP of a trade group called NetChoice. Szabo says that American tech firms “should actively push back on such [censorship] demands. China suppressing the profiles of American users should not be happening.”

Microsoft has a history of aiding and abetting the Chinese Communist Party, Chinazi Party for short.

Although Google withdrew its search engine from China in 2010 rather than (continue to) help China censor search results, the Bing search engine currently operates in China. And you can’t be a search engine in China without helping the CCP to censor.

Microsoft has even provided facial recognition resources used to track the Uyghurs, a Muslim population that the Chinese government has subjected to mass incarceration and torture.

A few years ago Microsoft apparently retreated on that facial-​recognition front. But it shouldn’t be doing anything to help the Chinazi government to censor and repress. 

Nobody should.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
First Amendment rights ideological culture media and media people

Unmasking the Mask Debate

Covid, mask, UV light, disinfectant

Sometimes things are complicated.

Many factors matter when deciding whether it makes sense to wear a mask to fend off infection. Let alone whether it’s okay to compel others to do so.

Now add another question: whether it is ever okay to deliberately suppress discussion of these subjects.

I’ve talked about all this before. But on those occasions I could not yet point you to a lengthy Heartland Institute post by James Agresti on “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Masks, and the Deadly Falsehoods Surrounding Them.”

Once disparaged as ineffectual except maybe for hospital workers, the power of masking up was later drastically oversold by policy makers.

Agresti aggregates evidence indicating that COVID-​19 is spread mainly by fine aerosols that can stay aloft a long time and easily penetrate most masks. But the evidence for mostly aerosol rather than big-​droplet transmission was ignored or downplayed by the WHO and CDC for over a year.

Agresti also argues that trials of the effectiveness of masks in preventing infection are “inconclusive” with respect to N95 masks in clinical settings. And that these studies show no statistically significant benefits for any masks in “community settings.”

To combat aerosolized COVID-​19, he recommends more extensive indoor use of UV disinfection systems.

Lots to talk about. Experts familiar with the research that Agresti canvasses often disagree. How about it, big-​tech social-​media firms. May we discuss?

Or must we stick to received dogma regardless of observations and logic?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

mask1 /​ mask2

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall media and media people

Democracy Fail?

California, recall, democracy

“California recall fails,” The Visalla Times Delta explained. As did KSBY, the NBC affiliate in San Luis Obispo. Not to mention The New York Daily News and The Chicago Sun-​Times.

FiveThirtyEight analyzed “the failed California recall” at length. Even the South China Morning Post proclaimed the apparent democratic malfunction (reprinting an Agence France-​Press report).

Yet the recall did not fail.  

Sure, voters decided not to jettison Governor Newsom mid-​term. But that’s not a failure of this century-​old democratic check on power — not unless a whole bunch of the 64 percent voting to keep Newsom filled in the wrong oval on their ballot by mistake.

I almost wish that were so; it would be easier to correct going forward.

“In a state famous for its acts of direct democracy,” a New York Times feature informs, “detractors of this year’s special election say the recall process is democracy gone off the rails, a distraction from crises that require the government’s attention, and a waste of hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Some folks never complain about government spending until it comes to the cost of holding an election. Funny, that’s precisely when our money might actually be well spent.

“No one in the state’s Democratic leadership is suggesting the elimination of recalls,” The Times notes, merely “vowing to make it more difficult for them to qualify for the ballot.”

In other words, legislators intend to raise the cost … so as to fight wealthy interests, they’ll argue. With a straight face.

“In a sharp piece of political irony,” that Times’ piece bemoans, “it will take a referendum to decide whether to change this particular referendum.”

Which is a feature of the system, not a bug. That is, no fail there. 

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
folly general freedom media and media people

Where We Are Now

Covid, panic, hysteria, crazy

Two young people, a high school girl and a college man, have two very different COVID stories, but both reveal where we are right now in the pandemic.

“Abby Chenoweth was a healthy 16-​year-​old,” writes Emily Walker for MSN. “The Titusville teen took virtual school classes and wore a face mask when she left the house. Her mom said she didn’t have pre-​existing conditions, and she didn’t go out often.”

The report goes on to focus on her horrific COVID case, and readers’ hearts go out to her. But that opening paragraph is bald-​faced lie. 

Or at least a “white lie.” You decide.

You see, Abby Chenoweth is obese. She is obviously so in the photos provided by her mother. And not merely a “little bit” overweight.

Our hearts break all the same, but her obesity is a “pre-​existing condition.” We knew early on that COVID can be devastating for the overweight.

The article does not once mention her corpulence. Were it not for the photos, readers wouldn’t have a clue. They would read Abby’s mother’s mask apologia at the end as an earnest and honest plea.

Next to Ms. Chenoweth’s harrowing story, and the see-​through propaganda made out of it, 22-​year-​old Logan Hollar’s story is comic. The title delivers the punch line: “Rutgers student says he’s being stopped from taking virtual classes because he’s not vaccinated,” Karen Price Mueller’s piece summarizes.

“I believe in science, I believe in vaccines,” cautions Mr. Hollar’s stepfather, “but I am highly confident that COVID-​19 and variants do not travel through computer monitors by taking online classes.”

Do the professors and administrators at Rutgers know that?

COVID craziness seems more infectious than COVID itself.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

Photo Credit: crazy person

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts

Categories
media and media people social media

Ingested Invective Rejected

Covid, Ivermectin, propaganda

“There is a bizarre propaganda underway in the United States of America to brand Ivermectin a ‘horse dewormer,’” mused OpIndia, in its coverage of Joe Rogan’s recent brief bout of COVID and Alex Jones’s on-​air Ivermectin ingestion stunt, “despite the fact that a version of the drug is known to be used for human treatment.”

The origin story is instructive. “The propaganda appears to have been triggered by an ambiguously worded tweet by the US Food and Drugs Administration.” 

Well, ambiguity is in the eye of the beholder: “You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y’all. Stop it.” This FDA tweet led to virality of invectives against Ivermectin users. 

Then Katelyn Ogle, of KFOR in Oklahoma, upped the hysteria ante, claiming that a “rural Oklahoma doctor said patients who are taking the horse de-​wormer medication, ivermectin, to fight COVID-​19 are causing emergency room and ambulance back ups.”

This then went stampede, with Rolling Stone taking it up.

Apparently without a fact check.

In hardly any time at all, the hospital in question issued a statement repudiating the whole brouhaha.

It was Fake News — capital F and capital N — and Rolling Stone had to issue a … well, it wasn’t a retraction. 

Journalist Glen Greewald offered his take: “The only reason Rolling Stone is calling this an ‘UPDATE’ as opposed to what it so plainly is — a RETRACTION — is because liberal outlets know that their readers don’t care at all if they publish fake news as long as it’s done with the right political motives and goals.”

Dismissing Ivermectin as any kind of “de-​wormer” is fraudulent. That this strain of invective against its COVID-​suffering users was started by the government is especially galling.

Lots of people swallowed the meme. 

Will they develop immunity to future, similar spin?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

PDF for printing

—

See all recent commentary
(simplified and organized)

See recent popular posts