The Case for Investigating Anthony Fauci

Elon's Musk has announced that his "pronouns" are "Prosecute/Fauci." This is over the top for me, yet Musk has the right to say this and I have the right to criticize Musk that it's over the top. That's how free speech works. We don't yet know enough to prosecute Fauci. Maybe we never will. Maybe Fauci is completely innocent of the things Musk wants to "prosecute."

I don't know all the facts about Fauci, but I know enough of them to be suspicious. There are a LOT of suspicious facts. I want very much to get to the bottom of this because COVID disrupted the lives of billions of people and hurt or killed millions of them. Since when do we ignore calamitous situations just because someone calls them a conspiracy theory, someone like David Frum (who doesn't understand the import of major media coordinating with the U.S. spy state to squelch the story of Hunter Biden's laptop)? Stevemur wrote an excellent response to Frum:

In invite you to walk through stevemur's thread, step by step, then ask yourself whether you too are suspicious.  Note stevemur's conclusions:

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Americans Who Approve of China’s Ghastly Lockdown . . .

Nellie Bowles writes:

China’s obsession with Zero-Covid: Chinese authorities have taken a brutal stance on Covid: They have welded people into their own apartments and locked building exit doors. Last week, an apartment fire killed 10 in China’s Xinjiang province, and many say the dead were locked in their building and fire trucks were slowed by road blocks that were the result of the draconian Covid rules. The result has been unprecedented protests across the country. In Beijing, people chanted “no to Covid tests, yes to freedom.”

Some on the American left were quick to defend the CCP. Being welded into your apartment, having all the exits locked in a fire, these are just the price of safety. One particularly wild example: When the Washington Post ran a news story about the CCP’s flawed Zero-Covid response, the paper’s most famous reporter, Taylor Lorenz, slammed her employer’s phrasing and defended the CCP. “Choosing not to kill off millions of vulnerable people (as the US is doing) isn’t a ‘critical flaw,’” Lorenz wrote.

I do have good news for America’s Pandemic Forever advocates: You’ve won. Yes, a few people still go to the movies, and you can always tweet about how selfish and evil they are. But take a look at this chart . . .

→ Americans’ staggering loneliness: We were already spending more and more time alone each year. Then Covid hit, and our isolation grew much deeper. Our social lives haven’t bounced back.

I got emphatic pushback when I agreed with Glenn Greenwald (in August 2021) that our COVID policies need to be based on sober cost-benefit analyses, the same type of analyses we use when we discuss traffic safety. I think it's clear that Taylor Lorenz has convinced many people that more lockdown is the best policy, but she (and her ilk) are ignoring the exponentially greater damage that lockdowns have caused.

Continue ReadingAmericans Who Approve of China’s Ghastly Lockdown . . .

The “News” Media is the Dying Canary in the Coal Mine

I have lost respect for many institutions over the past few years. Not so much the members, but the leadership (which causes many member to fall silent). Exhibit A is our so-called "news" media. I have been collecting dozens and dozens of examples at my website, Dangerous Intersection.

It often boils down to these organizations failing to be curious about what is going on. Failing to question powerful people. Failing to vigorously cross-examine the leaders of the political parties they obediently serve. Journalists should be out there pissing off ALL of our leaders with probing questions, but they are too often serving as stenographers and megaphones for highly questionable positions. This great danger to our country is invisible as long as you cling to one side or the other (democrat serving or republican serving) "news" media.

I challenge anyone reading this to start reading "the other side" and, better yet, independent journalists, in order to get a much better view of what is going on. You'll find many of those independent journalists have left mainstream news to strike out on their own (e.g., on Substack), disgusted with what has happened to their employers.

Here's a recent example: Why were reporters failing to grill Pfizer executives and our political leaders on whether the vaccinations would stop transmission of COVID? How many dozens of bad policies resulted because our "news" reporters decided to parrot public officials rather than vigorously question them?

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How Did the CDC Fail on COVID Information and Messaging? Krystal and Saagar Count some of the Ways . . .

How did the CDC fail the American people?  The CDC failed in many ways. Krystal and Saagar of Breaking Points review some of the main ways the CDC failed us and it is downright embarrassing. They applaud the CDC's willingness to finally decide to evaluate its many failures, but these failures are numerous and embarrassing.

To the extent that Americans (like me) have substantially lost trust in the CDC (no and in the future), the CDC has caused this damage. As Krystal Ball mentions, it was not the CDC's job to psychoanalyze Americans and try to manage our emotions. We wanted and needed straight facts, and that is where the CDC failed abysmally. They should have assumed that, by and large, Americans "can handle the unvarnished facts." Some of the main failures of the CDC:

A) Does the infection spread by surface contamination (no) or only airborne viral particles (yes). Not until May 2021 did the CDC acknowledge the basic fact that the virus was spread by airborne transmission. This was mid-vaccination.

B) whether Americans should buy or use masks. In Feb 2020, Surgeon General told the public to stop buying masks because they were allegedly not effective for the general public.  Even though health care workers needed masks.  This was absurd, oxymoronic and insane messaging that caused Americans to lose trust in the CDC.  The CDC later failed to acknowledge that some kinds of masks are essentially useless.

C) Testing.  The U.S. government refused to allow Americans to use effective and available testing because there bureaucracy of the CDC did not approve them.  We didn't have tests available until more than a year after tests were available in South Korea and other countries.  Americans were forced to "fly blind," according to Krystal.

There are many many other examples. For instance, whether lockdowns are effective.  Whether vaccination protects people from future infection and/or protects people from spreading the infection. Further, there CDC covered up the colossal risk factor of obesity. Excellent discussion.

Continue ReadingHow Did the CDC Fail on COVID Information and Messaging? Krystal and Saagar Count some of the Ways . . .

Matt Orfalea’s New Mashup on the “Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory”

My faith that legacy media outlets will take journalism seriously has plummeted in recent years. Matt Orfalea's "conspiracy theory" mashup explores one issue (of many recent issues) where media coverage has been abysmal.

The news outlets kept claiming that the virus could never ever have emerged in a lab, yet they avoided this Peter Daszak video like kryptonite. Whenever they pompously trumpeted that the lab leak was a conspiracy theory, they NEVER mentioned this 2016 video featuring Peter Daszak, president of Eco-Health.

Continue ReadingMatt Orfalea’s New Mashup on the “Lab Leak Conspiracy Theory”