My everyday experiences as a chemistry professor at an American university in 2021 bring back memories from my school and university time in the USSR. Not good memories—more like Orwellian nightmares. I will compare my past and present experiences to illustrate the following parallels between the USSR and the US today: (i) the atmosphere of fear and self-censorship; (ii) the omnipresence of ideology (focusing on examples from science); (iii) an intolerance of dissenting opinions (i.e., suppression of ideas and people, censorship, and Newspeak); (iv) the use of social engineering to solve real and imagined problems.
In the name of diversity, we must all think alike!
Anarchist unite!
Darra Goldstein "planned to talk about how Russia has historically used food as a political weapon, most brutally during the collectivization of the Ukrainian countryside in the 1930s."
Forgive the profanity, but you have got to be s–tting us.First, the New York Times decides more than a year later that Hunter Biden’s business woes are worthy of a story. Then, deep in the piece, in passing, it notes that Hunter’s laptop is legitimate.
Over the past decade, the global scientific community have begun to recognize the unmatched value of an extraordinary drug, ivermectin, that originates from a single microbe unearthed from soil in Japan. Work on ivermectin has seen its discoverer, Satoshi Ōmura, of Tokyo’s prestigious Kitasato Institute, receive the 2014 Gairdner Global Health Award and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, which he shared with a collaborating partner in the discovery and development of the drug, William Campbell of Merck & Co. Incorporated. Today, ivermectin is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary.
Ivermectin is an FDA approved drug for use in humans to treat a variety of parasitic infections including parasitic worms, hookworm and whipworm. It may also be used as an effective treatment for a wide range of other conditions and as a treatment of onchocerciasis, intestinal strongyloidiasis and onchocerciasis or river blindness.The antiviral activity of Ivermectin has been shown against a wide range of RNA and DNA viruses, for example, dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and others.
The latest trial conducted in Brazil involved 1,358 adults with COVID-19 symptoms. All study participants were at risk of developing the severe form of the disease with a history of pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, cardiovascular disease, or lung disease. Half of them received Ivermectin pills for three days, and the other half received a placebo.
As tends to happen when an online community descends upon a particular artifact, many concerns have been raised, some more valid than others. When it comes to the TOGETHER trial however, there has been a distinct signal of concern. According to one site cataloguing the online effort to understand the trial, there are currently 43 distinct concerns that have been raised about the trial, most of them with real validity:It’s easy to dismiss this litany of issues as a Gish Gallop. And indeed, it’s implausible that 43 or more distinct issues would exist in a single manuscript. So perhaps some will dismiss them as noise. This article will demonstrate that most of the issues listed are not actually distinct, but deeply related to a central failure of the protocol of the TOGETHER trial.
Now, we are quick to point out in this column that the government is generally incapable of doing anything right. Or at a minimum, incapable of doing anything quickly or efficiently.But I have been really surprised at how quickly and efficiently they’ve been able to commandeer total control of the narrative.They have the media and tech companies in line. They have major medical associations in line. They’ve convinced hundreds of millions of people that they are the only source of truth and information, regardless of their obvious lies and bias.And anyone who publicly expresses independent thinking, or dares to challenge this narrative (no matter how strong the evidence) is canceled off the Internet with a Chinese-level of efficiency.This is the topic for today’s podcast as we assess the incredibly bewildering year that we’ve all just experienced. You can listen in here.
In late 2019, a team executive for the NBA’s Houston Rockets Tweeted a very brief statement of support for pro-freedom protesters in Hong Kong.Hardly anyone should have noticed; he didn’t have much of a following, and it was an incredibly harmless comment.Yet that single Tweet caused a massive firestorm. The Chinese government lost its mind — how dare this American peasant say anything that’s counter to our interests?!?!And like that… poof… China’s government censors erased the Houston Rockets off the face of their Internet.
Peter Suderman and Patrick Eddington return to the podcast to discuss another bookâ€â€‹turnedâ€â€‹abysmal movie that has been banned, blamed, and lit aflame; Fahrenheit 451.Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel that was written by Ray Bradbury and turned into a film in 1966 and 2018. It’s a story about Guy Montag, a fireman, whose job it is to actually destroy illegal belongings, like books. Montag never questioned his job until he met his neighbor, Clarisse, who tells him about the past where everyone saw the world and its endless possibility through books.
Six signs that show you're not being criticized; you're being canceled.
Disinformation. Trolling. Conspiracies. Social media pileâ€â€‹ons. Campus intolerance. On the surface, these recent phenomenons appear to have little in common. But together, they are driving an epistemic crisis: a multiâ€â€‹front challenge to America’s ability to distinguish fact from fiction and elevate truth above falsehood.
