Public: Trust in Corporate News Deservedly Continues to Plummet

Excerpt from "It’s Time To Save Civilization From The Pathocratic StateRescuing democracy and free speech from nihilism and psychopathologies will require new institutions — and your support," by MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER, LEIGHTON WOODHOUSE, ALEX GUTENTAG, AND ZAID JILANI at Public. . An excerpt:

[T]he events of the last year make clear that the media and political establishment in the US and other Western nations pose a far greater threat to democracy than the populist movements they relentlessly defame.

Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter, the release of the Twitter Files, and the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit revealed how widespread and near-total the Western establishment’s control of the media environment was and is. The picture it presents of itself as neutral, objective, and balanced is a lie. The media and political establishment are anti-populist, elitist, and anti-democratic. They deeply resent the rise of new independent voices through social media because they have long held undeserved influence over what ideas can be discussed, what’s important, and who can hold elected office.

The single word that best describes the professional-managerial class-dominated “deep state” agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, Department of Justice, FBI, and others, along with news media corporations that engage in character assassination and disinformation, is “pathocracy.” ...

The good news is that the public increasingly distrusts the news media. Just 32% have some or a lot of trust in the news media compared to 29% who report “not very much” trust and 39% who say they have “none at all.” Nearly every major media organization saw its digital audience decline 13% to 35%. News media corporations will lose $2 billion between 2021 and 2026 due to a decline of print advertising spending from $7 billion to $5 billion, and flat digital spending. And mainstream news media companies laid off 2,681 people in 2023, a nearly 50% increase from 2022.

Continue ReadingPublic: Trust in Corporate News Deservedly Continues to Plummet

The Social Costs of Sincere Truth-Seeking

I founded this website in 2006 primarily as my way of documenting my journey, my attempt to make sense of things around me. I've always tried to get things right, but that doesn't always work out. Looking back, I've found more than a few articles on this site where modern-day me disagrees with the me of the past. There is no way to get everything right, because truth-seeking is a never-ending task. 90% of the recipe is not giving up, staying in the game, not falling prey to tribal impulses.

We live in a tribal world, however. A world were powerful tribal forces are concocted not only organically, but by large media operations, often working in concert with the U.S. government, including the U.S. security state. Many people scoff that that. They are fish who fantasize that they are totally free, not constrained by the water in which they swim.

Many of the people I formerly spent a lot of time with have remained fully immersed in the left-leaning corporate news ecosystem. They grew up with the NYT, WaPo, MSNBC, CNN and NPR. They have trusted these news sources for many years and they continue to trust them because they see FOX as the only alternative. They have been convinced by corporate media that they must avoid all independent journalists. Most of them think they are already well informed, but they have a one-sided understanding of many salient issues of the day, including censorship and warmongering, issues the democrats of ten years ago opposed, but now they largely favor.

How could that be? If you ask them, they have no answer for why they have flipped 180 degrees over the last ten years. They cannot point to any new evidence that explains their enthusiasm for supporting the war, including the war in Ukraine. It was so utterly strange how so many of them got quiet about the war in the Ukraine as soon as the U.S. turned its military might from Ukraine to Israel. How was it that so many of those gold and blue flags quietly disappeared from social media and front porches, without explanation?

Many of these same people, formerly ferocious opponents of censorship, now advocate for censorship. So much so that many of them deny the existence of the Censorship Industrial Complex, despite abundant evidence from the Twitter Files. Michael Shellenberger recently posted this graph on Twitter. Notice how Democrats have become big advocates for censorship:

Most people I know are intentionally and proudly ignorant of the decision of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decision of Missouri v. Biden. They are sure they don't need to know anything about this decision even though they no almost nothing about it.  They run away when I try to tell them about these dystopian findings by the Fifth Circuit:

The Individual Plaintiffs have not sought to invalidate social-media companies’ censorship policies. Rather, they asked the district court to restrain the officials from unlawfully interfering with the social-media companies’ independent application of their content-moderation policies....The Plaintiffs allege that federal officials ran afoul of the First Amendment by coercing and significantly encouraging “social-media platforms to censor disfavored [speech],” including by “threats of adverse government action” like antitrust enforcement and legal reforms. We agree... [Article continues . . .]

Continue ReadingThe Social Costs of Sincere Truth-Seeking

Sasha Stone: How to Remake America

On a recent podcast, Sasha Stone condemned the Biden administration, offering some words of support for Donald Trump. Unlike Stone, I would never consider voting for Trump. Nor can I in good conscience vote for Biden, as I did three years ago. That said, I very much agree with Stone about the many ways the United States has gone off the rails during the Biden years. An excerpt:

Four words on a red hat. Make America Great Again.

Make America able to take a joke again.

Make America understand basic biology again.

Make America the land of the free and home of the brave again.

Make it okay to be white, a Christian, a male, a Jew, a woman, a mother and American again.

Make Thomas Jefferson a hero again.

Make movies watchable again.

Make America a country where we can still say what we think without fear of banishment, public humiliation or the loss of our jobs.

Make America tolerant again.

Make reality cool again, make it okay to reward merit.

Make it okay to be friends with people you don't agree with.

Lots of the hysteria is happening on both sides. It has to do with algorithms and their effects on our brains and our perception of reality.

Continue ReadingSasha Stone: How to Remake America

Steve Kirsch: “When you Try to Show People the Data, They Run Away

Steve Kirsch discusses the latest safety data regarding the COVID vaccine with Russell Brand at Rumble: Kirsch, inventor of the optical mouse, voluntarily received two COVID vaccinations at during the pandemic. He had minor reactions, but he started hearing from people who claimed that their relatives were dying shortly after getting vaccinated. After finding more than 700 safety signals in the VAERS data obtained as the result of the FOIA request, he approached the CDC, seeking comment or explanation. He received neither. Instead, he encountered willing and/or intentional ignorance regarding the data. The CDC started with the premise that everyone must get vaccinated. Anything conflicting with that must be suppressed. At min 24 of this interview, Kirsch reports recent findings (by Barry Young, a New Zealand whistle-blower who worked for a NZ public health agency, who is currently being prosecuted by NZ) that 1 out of 1,000 people receiving the COVID vaccine was killed by the vaccine. If true, this would project to 650,000 Americans killed by the vaccine. Excerpts from the Interview

Steve Kirsch: Let me start with the punch line, which is that when you analyze the data and you look at overall shots over all ages, what you see is about a increase of one death per 1000 doses on average, is that people that were killed by the vaccine that shouldn't have died. And so that corresponds to 13 million people killed worldwide, it corresponds to about 675,000 people in the United States being killed, and about 150,000 people in the UK being killed.

And so that's what the Barry's data reveals. Now, what's important about Barry's data is that this is the first time in history that we have ever seen record level data for a vaccine. It's always kept hidden from public view. So these are public health records that are always kept hidden from public view. You there's no country in the world that publishes this data that was leaked out. There is no state in the United States that publishes this data. Everyone keeps it hidden from public view. This is public health data, it belongs to the public. And this is the first time in history, this has never happened before. This is a big moment. This is the first time we get to peek behind the curtain and find out if they're what the man looks like behind the curtain. So what Barry did is completely game changing. And for me, it's it's like it this is the the Holy Grail.

This is what I've been searching for. This is what we've been denied all this time is access to the data that would show the truth. And nobody, nobody, nobody who is supporting the pro-vaccine narrative has ever called for any data transparency in the public health data. Nobody. There is not a single person calling for for data transparency. But but you know, there's not a paper that's published in the peer reviewed literature--I've checked that--saying that, "Hey, if you withhold the data from the public, it leads to better health outcomes." So if you want their health outcomes, you need to publish the data. ... He basically he exposed the data... He proved that you could publish the data and nobody's privacy would be violated that but there's still statistical fidelity in the data. So we can obfuscate the data but still have the statistical fidelity so we can do it the analysis without violating anyone's privacy.

This was thought to be impossible. And Barry has proved that it is possible to do and not even the New Zealand Ministry of Health or health New Zealand was able to figure out whose records were published. They know it's their records, but we obfuscated it. So there's no privacy violation, and this frustrates the hell out of them.

Russell Brand: How did Barry get that information, he worked for a New Zealand Health for like a government agency?

Steve Kirsch: He's an Oracle 11 DBA. He's a database administrator. He's a specialist on Oracle. He was tasked with creating the database for this pay per dose system in New Zealand. And there are two there are two systems. And one of them is pay per dose. And it's just the way that that that they do billing. And so he has 4 million, he has over 4 million records of the 12 million records that exist in New Zealand. So it's a sample of all the vaccination records, and it would be great to get everything, but it's only people who've been vaccinated."

In the meantime, the Texas Attorney General has filed a lawsuit against Pfizer for widespread misrepresentations:

The pharmaceutical company's widespread representation that its vaccine possessed 95% efficacy against infection was highly misleading. That metric represented a calculation of the so-called “relative risk reduction” for vaccinated individuals in Pfizer’s initial, two-month clinical trial results. FDA publications indicate “relative risk reduction” is a misleading statistic that “unduly influence[s]” consumer choice. Pfizer was also put on notice at that time that vaccine protection could not accurately be predicted beyond two months. Nevertheless, Pfizer fostered a misleading impression that vaccine protection was durable and withheld from the public information that undermined its claims about the duration of protection. And, despite the fact that its clinical trial failed to measure whether the vaccine protects against transmission, Pfizer embarked on a campaign to intimidate the public into getting the vaccine as a necessary measure to protect their loved ones.

In fact, Pfizer’s product failed to live up to the company’s representations. COVID-19 cases increased after widespread vaccine administration, and some areas saw a greater percentage of deaths from COVID-19 among the vaccinated population than the unvaccinated. When the failure of its product became apparent, Pfizer then pivoted to silencing truth-tellers. The lawsuit notes: “How did Pfizer respond when it became apparent that its vaccine was failing and the viability of its cash cow was threatened? By intimidating those spreading the truth, and by conspiring to censor its critics. Pfizer labeled as ‘criminals’ those who spread facts about the vaccine. It accused them of spreading ‘misinformation.’ And it coerced social media platforms to silence prominent truth-tellers.”

 

Continue ReadingSteve Kirsch: “When you Try to Show People the Data, They Run Away

Excellent Documentary on the Collision of Comedy and Cancel Culture

I just finished watching "Can We Take a Joke: When Outrage and Comedy Collide" (2016). Awesome documentary for those who understand the importance of free speech and who are concerned about the future of comedy.

Continue ReadingExcellent Documentary on the Collision of Comedy and Cancel Culture