Rantburg

Today's Front Page   View All of Tue 06/11/2024 View Mon 06/10/2024 View Sun 06/09/2024 View Sat 06/08/2024 View Fri 06/07/2024 View Thu 06/06/2024 View Wed 06/05/2024
2023-11-30 Government Corruption
Orwell and Monroe got it right
[Washington Examiner] George Orwell, call your office. That’s my initial and slightly out-of-date response to news stories about the Biden administration’s efforts to stamp out "misinformation." It’s an interesting irony that covert censorship should be undertaken enthusiastically by those who call themselves "liberal" or "progressive" and who claim the opposition would threaten the survival of liberal democracy.

But Democrats seem unembarrassed by his reelection campaign’s program for blocking "misinformation" on outfits like Facebook and Google. It’s being run, as my Washington Examiner colleague Byron York points out, by the same folks who systematically pressured social media "to curb the spread of misinformation" during the COVID pandemic.

Some of that pushback is designed to improve Biden’s dreadful job rating on the economy, and many in media are happy to help. As radio talk host Erick Erickson writes, "Every major news organization except Fox News has done multiple stories on how great the economy is."

But as numbers cruncher Nate Silver points out, citing an egregious Washington Post story co-authored by reliable liberal cheerleader Taylor Lorenz using an apples-and-oranges comparison of McDonald’s, the administration line is contradicted by voters' own eyes and government statistics: inflation is up 16% and personal consumption expenditures up 25% since Biden took office. No American under 60 has experienced such inflation in their adult lifetimes, and they reasonably conclude that Biden’s gusher of government spending is at fault.
Taylor Lorenz is a vapid tool who doxxes critics and lies without shame
One reason is people have had some experience with the administration’s suppression of "misinformation" on COVID. Health officials Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins, for example, set about suppressing the theory that the pandemic resulted from a COVID virus leak from the lab in Wuhan, China, that their organizations had lavishly funded.

For a while, that suppression worked. The lab leak explanation was labeled a "conspiracy theory," and no one went back to examine Fauci’s support of Wuhan’s virus-strengthening "gain-of-function" research. Only in the past year have intelligence agencies and some science reporters determined that the lab leak is the likely, though not proven, source of the pandemic.

The government also clamped down hard on "misinformation" about mandatory masking and extended lockdowns initiated in this country. Once again, inconvenient truths were suppressed.

Thus, in February 2023, a leading research institution, Britain’s Cochrane Library, released a study of 78 randomized control trials with 610,000 participants that concluded, as the lead researcher put it, "there is just no evidence" that masking "made any difference" in the transmission of COVID.

Similarly, "there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic," as Joseph Nocera and Bethany McLean write in New York magazine, in an excerpt from their new book The Big Fail.

Lockdowns originated in China (whose captive media reported them as successful) and were imposed after hospitals were swamped with elderly patients in Bergamo, Italy. Initially designed to prevent hospital overcrowding, they soon got extended indefinitely.
Posted by Besoeker 2023-11-30 00:00|| || Front Page|| [21 views ]  Top

07:59 Skidmark
07:52 Besoeker
07:48 Besoeker
07:47 Besoeker
07:47 Besoeker
07:42 Skidmark
07:36 Skidmark
07:26 Procopius2k
07:23 Procopius2k
07:21 Procopius2k
07:18 no mo uro
07:13 Skidmark
07:12 NN2N1
07:10 Procopius2k
07:08 Anon1
07:08 Procopius2k
07:07 Anon1
07:05 Anon1
07:03 MikeKozlowski
07:03 Procopius2k
07:02 trailing wife
06:57 M. Murcek
06:56 NN2N1
06:50 NN2N1









Paypal:
Google
Search WWW Search rantburg.com