We live in a world where successful grifters like Sam Bankman-Fried can rise to this level without a modicum of public scrutiny.
And yes, he was a self-conscious grifter. His quote yesterday after the FTX collapse:
“By this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shiboleths and so everyone likes us,” Vox reported he said."
What else of grave importance don't we know about, thanks to the secrecy veil that one can buy with huge amounts of money?
For two years I have been amazed at the news media's non-interest in the origin of the COVID virus, especially given my presumption that many news outlets serve as the lapdog for the U.S. government. Here is a summary of where we are, as well as an itemized list of significant events, including what appear to be cover-ups of the lab origin story. First, from Reason Magazine, Zach Weisssmueller and Regan Taylor have this to say (this is an excerpt) in their article, "The Lab Leak Deception: Public Officials concealed their conflicts of interest and role in funding research that may have caused the pandemic, says health reporter Emily Kopp":
Journalists and scientists routinely dismissed the lab leak hypothesis as a crackpot theory and even as "racist," up until the summer of 2021 when science journalist Nicholas Wade published an influential article, and a viral rant by Jon Stewart pushed it into the mainstream. Until that point, social media platforms had been removing or throttling posts that took it seriously. Anthony Fauci, who didn't respond to our interview request, said it wasn't worth even considering the possibility that COVID could have originated in a lab.
More recently, emails made public through the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that Fauci, National Institutes of Health (NIH) director Francis Collins, and other prominent public officials took the possibility of a lab origin far more seriously than they were letting on.
"Top virologists, sort of giants in this field, were looking at the genome and freaking out, basically," says health reporter Emily Kopp, who works at the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know, an organization that has obtained thousands of pages of official documents and correspondence, some of which reveal an orchestrated effort by scientists to downplay the lab leak theory. It's also extensively analyzed emails obtained via a lawsuit by Buzzfeed's Jason Leopold that reveal the huge disconnect between what health officials were telling the public and what they were saying in private.
The above article refers us to this timeline compiled by Emily Kopp: "Timeline: The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2." Here are some excerpts:
In February 2020 — about a month before a pandemic had been declared — five top virologists huddled to examine aspects of a rapidly emerging coronavirus that seemed primed to infect human cells. (The furin cleavage site kept one virologist up all night.) A few days later, they concluded the virus had not been engineered. In March, their conclusions were published in Nature Medicine.[More . . . ]
Ken Klippenstein and Lee Fang of the Intercept have just broken one of the most important news stories of the decade. Caveat: You can't read about it at the NYT, NPR, WaPo or NPR (I just checked) because it doesn't fit their narrative. The U.S. Federal Government has been putting enormous pressure upon social media outlets to censor certain stories and push others without factual justification. This brazen censorship being done by social media outlets (and spinelessly followed by corporate media) has long been obvious to all of us who are heterodox thinkers, but we didn't have access to the mechanism for this censorship and these lies . . . until now. Anyone who abhors tribal membership (I am one) constantly sees that social media and corporate media refuse to allow obvious questions and criticisms when publishing questionable claims (e.g., re COVID). What is the reason that so many of us are nodding in agreement at Noam Chomsky's recent comment: "“The United States has imposed constraints on freedom of access to information which are astonishing and, which in fact, go beyond what was the case in post-Stalin Soviet Russia.” If you find Chomsky's comment difficult to digest, read the article by Klippenstein and Fang. Here are a few excerpts from the much longer article, "TRUTH COPSLeaked Documents Outline DHS’s Plans to Police Disinformation":
THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY is quietly broadening its efforts to curb speech it considers dangerous, an investigation by The Intercept has found. Years of internal DHS memos, emails, and documents — obtained via leaks and an ongoing lawsuit, as well as public documents — illustrate an expansive effort by the agency to influence tech platforms.
The work, much of which remains unknown to the American public, came into clearer view earlier this year when DHS announced a new “Disinformation Governance Board”: a panel designed to police misinformation (false information spread unintentionally), disinformation (false information spread intentionally), and malinformation (factual information shared, typically out of context, with harmful intent) that allegedly threatens U.S. interests. While the board was widely ridiculed, immediately scaled back, and then shut down within a few months, other initiatives are underway as DHS pivots to monitoring social media now that its original mandate — the war on terror — has been wound down.
Behind closed doors, and through pressure on private platforms, the U.S. government has used its power to try to shape online discourse. According to meeting minutes and other records appended to a lawsuit filed by Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, a Republican who is also running for Senate, discussions have ranged from the scale and scope of government intervention in online discourse to the mechanics of streamlining takedown requests for false or intentionally misleading information. . . . .
[More . . . ]
FIRE Statement on Free Speech and Online Payment Processors Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression by FIRE (September 30, 2022):
The issue: Online payment processors like Venmo and PayPal often deny Americans access to these vital services based on their speech or viewpoints.
The concern: When these companies appoint themselves the arbiters of what speech and views are acceptable, shutting people and organizations out of the online financial ecosystem for wrongthink, they seriously undermine our culture of free expression.
Imagine you could no longer use PayPal, Venmo, or another online payment processor because you run an organization that defends free speech for controversial speakers, operate an independent media outlet that challenges mainstream narratives, sell erotic fiction or “occult” materials, or . . . tried to submit an article about Syrian refugees into a newspaper awards competition.
These are not hypotheticals. They’re real, and they illustrate why online payment service providers should stay out of the business of policing their users’ speech and views.
Follow the link for the entire article by FIRE. The article includes numerous examples of abuses by these financial services companies.
Pamela Paul is fearless in her writing. In her newest NYT article, she discusses the books that aren't: "There’s More Than One Way to Ban a Book." Here's an excerpt:
You can understand why the publishing world gets nervous. Consider what has happened to books that have gotten on the wrong side of illiberal scolds. On Goodreads, for example, vicious campaigns have circulated against authors for inadvertent offenses in novels that haven’t even been published yet. Sometimes the outcry doesn’t take place until after a book is in stores. Last year, a bunny in a children’s picture book got soot on his face by sticking his head into an oven to clean it — and the book was deemed racially insensitive by a single blogger. It was reprinted with the illustration redrawn. All this after the book received rave reviews and a New York Times/New York Public Library Best Illustrated Children’s Book Award.
In another instance, a white academic was denounced for cultural appropriation because trap feminism, the subject of her book “Bad and Boujee,” lay outside her own racial experience. The publisher subsequently withdrew the book. PEN America rightfully denounced the publisher’s decision, noting that it “detracts from public discourse and feeds into a climate where authors, editors and publishers are disincentivized to take risks.”
Books have always contained delicate and challenging material that rubs up against some readers’ sensitivities or deeply held beliefs. But which material upsets which people changes over time; many stories about interracial cooperation that were once hailed for their progressive values (“To Kill a Mockingbird,” “The Help”) are now criticized as “white savior” narratives. Yet these books can still be read, appreciated and debated — not only despite but also because of the offending material. Even if only to better understand where we started and how far we’ve come.