Pfizer Execs doing what they do . . .

Jimmy Dore and Bret Weinstein give these two lying Pfizer executives what they deserve for these big lies. Then, when you think it's winding down, Bret brings up Nuremberg Code See below).

One can make an extremely strong argument that American's didn't have informed consent when they were coerced to line up for the COVID vaccination. How important is informed consent? Here's what the Nuremberg Code specifies about informed consent in medical settings:

"The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential."

What does this mean? Here's the explanation offered by Evelyne Shutter in her article at the New England Journal of Medicine: "Fifty Years Later: The Significance of the Nuremberg Code."

This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision. This latter element requires that before the acceptance of an affirmative decision by the experimental subject there should be made known to him the nature, duration, and purpose of the experiment; the method and means by which it is to be conducted; all inconveniences and hazards reasonably to be expected; and the effects upon his health or person which may possibly come from his participation in the experiment.

The duty and responsibility for ascertaining the quality of the consent rests upon each individual who initiates, directs or engages in the experiment. It is a personal duty and responsibility which may not be delegated to another with impunity.

Continue ReadingPfizer Execs doing what they do . . .

How Do I Choose the Topics I Write About?

I have a day job and a lot of other things that I pursue other than my writing at this website. Thus, I am selective about the topics I write about. How do I choose my topics? One of my rules of thumb is to avoid writing about the things that are already getting lots of attention by corporate media. I often have nothing to add to that coverage.

I write about things that concern me, especially things that are not getting much widespread coverage. I gauge that lack of widespread coverage by talking with friends and acquaintances, many of whom are quite busy with their jobs and raising their families. They don't have much time to tap into the "news." They tend to get their "news" by browsing headlines of corporate media. Often, when I mention something I've learned from social media, they are surprised or confused. This brings to mind a quote from the Stoics:

A highly relevant warning from one of the Stoics from Ancient Rome:

If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?

—Epictetus, Enchiridion , 28

[We interrupt this article with a public service announcement]

Browsing headlines and articles from corporate media (on either the left or the right) is "handing over your mind" to people with an agenda. They are often acting as the paid PR department for the Democrats or Republicans. What is their main quest? To get re-elected. What's the best and most efficient way to get re-elected? To lie to the public. To claim that they are doing a GREAT job. To claim that the other party is evil. To argue that it is an existential imperative to vote for them. To divide us. To refuse to admit that on most issues (e.g., warmongering and being obeisant to their corporate masters and to Wall Street) they serve as a uni-party.

And they are very good at fooling us, especially when they strike up close partnerships with U.S. security state (FBI, CIA, DHS) and social media corporations to censor U.S. citizens, which the Democrats have excelled at. This censorship has been proven many times over by the Twitter Files.

Therefore, a gentle reminder: Resist the temptation to hand over your mind to enticing headlines. Read widely. Read the "enemy." Read independent media, reporters who are financially supported by their readers, not by the people they are purportedly reporting on.

[Now back to the article]

Why do I write about the things I write about rather than other things? Jesse Singal recently published an excellent post on this issue: “Why Do You Write About This Rather Than That?” Is Almost Always A Lazy And Unserious Derailing Tactic." An excerpt:

One of my main critiques of left-of-center intellectual life is that it feels like there’s been a surge of energy spent not on developing and debating specific arguments and counterarguments, but on developing derailing tactics — ways to avoid even having potentially edifying conversations in the first place.

Some derailing tactics involve simply responding not to the claim being made, but to another, much sillier claim. A says “Some dogs bite people,” and B responds “A is saying we should euthanize all dogs in case they bite people!” Yawn. B will always get 100 times the retweets, unfortunately.

Other forms of derailing involve impugning someone’s very interest in the subject they’re talking about. One very common, very annoying version of this is to accuse them of being interested in the wrong thing — basically a form of zoomed-out whataboutism. I’ve obviously encountered this and you’ll see a ton of it everywhere. Maybe the most common version is lobbed at individuals on the left who are concerned about illiberalism on the left, who are accused of ignoring the more pressing threat of right-wing illiberalism or fascism or whatever...

When I see this coming from academics or journalists, which I do a lot, I find it quite frustrating and anti-intellectual. To the extent this claim is undergirded by any actual thought — and I do think the point is to derail rather than to raise genuine questions — the theory seems to be that intellectual or journalistic inquiry should be guided by utilitarian calculations. You shouldn’t spend your time, or at least not much of it, on a particular beat or concern if there are more “important” concerns elsewhere.

Jesse then sets out some of the problems with common derailing strategies:

What you decide what to focus on as a writer is based on a complicated swirl of variables." I follow my interests each day and I often pick from a vast set of notes and ideas that I have accumulated over the years. On other occasions, I comment on something interesting I spotted on Twitter.

"Journalists and academics also are concerned with finding a niche."

"Journalists and academics are also allowed to get tired of things! I’m tired of Trump. I don’t want to write about him anymore."

"[I]t isn’t always clear which stories will and won’t turn out to be important until journalists actually take the time to look into them."

"“Only a small number of people are affected by this” is, more broadly, a frequently callous argument."

"[T]here is often a fundamental level of bullshit — or at least hypocrisy — to these arguments, because the people making them often have rather niche interests themselves."

All of these thoughts resonate with me. Jesse is an excellent writing and his article is a good read - I recommend you go to Jesse's website to read his entire article.

Continue ReadingHow Do I Choose the Topics I Write About?

Sharyl Attkisson Discusses the Official COVID Narrative

Sharyl Attkisson is a five-time Emmy Award winner and recipient of the Edward R. Murrow award for Investigative Reporting. She's the author of two New York Times bestsellers including “The Smear How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What you Think and How you Vote.” For 30 years Attkisson was a correspondent and anchor at CBS News, PBS, CNN and local news and she is now the host of a weekly show, “Full measure,” which focuses on investigative and accountability reporting. Excerpt from her discussion with Steve Kirsch.

Steve Kirsh: How are people being misled and how can we tell when people are telling you the truth?

Sharyl Attkisson : I think some important trends started in the past 15 to 20 years and have become more visible as time has gone on. Now you have to dig deeper. When you hear a prevalent narrative on the news, if you understand how the news has been co opted--like virtually every source of information that we use--you have to almost think two layers beyond what they're trying to tell you.

Number one, you have to assume that when everybody's on the same narrative, typically, if they're using the same language, interviewing the same experts all on board saying everybody knows something, then that's your cue that there's probably a really important piece of the puzzle that's being hidden by some important interest that would suffer if we knew the truth. So as you hear these narratives, your first thought should be "Who wants me to believe this and why?" And I know that ordinary people, including me, when I'm just leading my normal life, we don't have time to deeply research, every question that arises. We are used to counting on the news to help us do that. But I'm telling you today, you kind of have to rely on yourself, because there are very few sources you can go to where you can trust the information as being unfettered and dual-sided, presenting all viewpoints.

A lot of it is just purely strategic for the past five or six years, dishonest, not just even out of context, but completely false. But you'll never know if you're trusting your traditional source that we used to look to for such things.

This has never been truer than when we look at the COVID pandemic and the vaccines. And I certainly didn't know at the front end of the pandemic, what the truth was any more than anybody else did about how effective the vaccines might be, how bad the pandemic would be. But as time went on, this began to take on hallmarks of every other scandal that I've covered, including many non-medical scandals, where there are important interests, trying very hard to shape and censor information, trying to control the landscape where we get all of our information online, on the news, any source that we have. And I think it resulted in a lot of harm, number one, but number two, maybe irreparable damage to the credibility of the institutions that we rely on political institutions, medical institutions, law enforcement, whatever you're looking at, Department of Justice, media. People, by and large as a good chunk of the population, don't believe--nor should they--take at face value, what comes out of their mouths in terms of advice, and their fact checks, and so on.

Steve Kirsch: So what is your trusted sources that you rely on today?

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingSharyl Attkisson Discusses the Official COVID Narrative

Jimmy Dore Offers Some History Regarding the Ukraine War

Jimmy Dore recently appeared on Ep 237 of the PBD Podcast with Patrick Bet-David. I transcribed a portion of his interview, in which is described the relevant history of Ukraine as it pertains to the ongoing war. He contrasts the vast military aid the U.S. if providing to Ukraine to the desperate economic situation of millions of Americans.

Jimmy Dore:

Well, it's obvious that they don't want you to know the real history. They don't want you to know that when Germany was allowed to reunify the promise from NATO to Russia was that we won't expand NATO. And then of course, it did. I think there's thirteen more countries that they put it into NATO. And now they wanted to put Ukraine into NATO or threatened to do that. That would be like if Russia got into a military alliance with Mexico and they wanted to start putting military bases in Mexico. We wouldn't allow that we wouldn't allow it. And just like what happened with Cuba with the missile crisis in the 60s, we wouldn't allow stuff like that. But we're doing that and they don't want you to know that NATO is not a defensive, it is offensive. This is a war that was started and provoked by NATO and the West. Zelensky ran on peace. He brought on bringing the country back together, right? The Russian speakers in the east, the Donbas. But he didn't do it. Why? Because he got threatened by NATO and the ultra right, the Nazis, in Ukraine. And so they'll threaten to kill--he knows he's a dead man--if he does a peace deal with Russia. So that's why he won't. They had a peace deal in March and that's when Boris Johnson from the UK flew there and said, Hey, you better you don't do this. And he he killed the peace deal. So Russia is the one that wants peace in this deal. And Ukraine and NATO do not. They want to bleed Russia economically. And that's why they blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. They've always said they were going to do it and they did it. For the life of me, I can't get why the European nations are going along with this. There was the foreign minister of Germany said I don't care about my people, if they don't want this. I care about the people of Ukraine. What leader of a country says they don't care about their own people, but they care more about somebody else's country? It's crazy what's going on.

People don't realize that NATO has provoked this. In fact, there was a peace agreement in 2014. The CIA helped overthrow the Ukraine Government. And then the people in the Donbas didn't want to go along with this coup'ed government, because the leader of Ukraine wanted to be friendly or economically with Russia instead of join, like the European Union, and that they couldn't have that right. So that's why they did a coup. And Russian speakers in the Donbas didn't want to go along with that coup. And so they kind of wanted to break away. The Ukraine Government started shelling the Donbas. And so they had a peace agreement called the Minsk agreements. That was supposed to give them independence. They were supposed to have their own elections and they were going to stop shelling them, but they never did. They ended up killing like 14 or 15,000 people in the Donbas over the last eight years.

And now it's been revealed that that peace agreement was never real. Merkel, the former prime minister of Germany, just admitted that the only reason they did that peace agreement was to give Ukraine enough time to build up its military. So when they finally did provoke an invasion, which is what they did, that they would have a military ready to fight Russia. People don't know this is what happens. They just think that one day Putin woke up and said, I want to go invade Ukraine, because I'm a maniac. And they think that he's the bad guy. He's acting rationally. We always knew he would do this. In fact, we were counting on him doing this. That's why we did what we did. And [Americans] don't know that Ukraine ramped up their bombing right before the war started last year. They doubled their bombing. They were really trying to provoke it. And they did it. They got it. They provoked it. And Russia would rather have a peace agreement and the rest of the world rather have a peace agreement. Not NATO. Not Joe Biden. Not the military industrial complex. That's where we are and people don't know that. That's what [Reporter Matt Lee] is saying: Hey, NATO's the one expanding. That's the reason why he said it. The reason why NATO's army is on the doorstep of Russia is because we moved, not Russia.

[More . . . ]

Continue ReadingJimmy Dore Offers Some History Regarding the Ukraine War

About Hamilton 68

Matt Taibbi replies in detail to Hamilton 68's belated response:

"A group of not-very-bright people rolled out a “dashboard,” hyped it as a magic Russian influence barometer to a stampede of willing reporters, and basked in every opportunity to speak on TV and to newspapers and at schools and think tanks and even congress, offering themselves as primary witnesses for a tale about ongoing “cyber attacks.” Then, once they caught blowback from Twitter and a reporter or two about the contents of their magic box, they retreated to an “attributable” model, but only after roughly 18 months of outright fakery. Now they’re trying to say they were misunderstood. To quote Yoel Roth, bullshit."

The whole backstory here.

Continue ReadingAbout Hamilton 68