Category Archives: Academia

The ‘Science’ of Manipulation: Researchers Craft Messages of Guilt, Shame to Foster Vaccine Compliance, by Ann Tomoko Rosen

Posted on February 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

How to brainwash people into taking killer vaccines. From Ann Tomoko Rosen at childrenshealthdefense.org:

There’s an entire field of research dedicated to developing messaging designed to persuade “vaccine-hesitant” individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine — and none of it has anything to do with facts.

There’s an entire field of research dedicated to developing messaging designed to persuade “vaccine-hesitant” individuals to get the COVID-19 vaccine.

None of the messaging examined by researchers involves conveying factual evidence that supports the claims — widely disseminated by Big Pharma, Big Media and public health agencies — that the vaccines are “safe” and “effective.”

Researchers last month published the results of a clinical trial involving two survey experiments on how to manufacture consent for COVID vaccines.

The Yale-sponsored study, “Persuasive messaging to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake intentions,” examined how different persuasive messages affected 1) intentions to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, 2) willingness to persuade friends and relatives to get the vaccine, 3) fear of those who have not been vaccinated, and 4) social judgment of people who choose not to vaccinate.

According to the study’s authors:

“Given the considerable amount of skepticism about the safety and efficacy of a COVID-19 vaccine, it has become increasingly important to understand how public health communication can play a role in increasing COVID-19 vaccine uptake.”

The paper did not address the underlying reasons someone might have concerns about the safety or efficacy of COVID vaccines but focused instead exclusively on how to persuade them to get the vaccine.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Civil Liberties, Governments, Medicine, Propaganda, Science

Tagged

These people hate you and think you are beneath them, by Marty Bent

Posted on January 25, 2022 | Leave a comment

The rulers always despise the peasants. From Marty Bent at tftc.io:

This is the epitome of what is wrong in the world right now

 
 

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Business, Crime, Cronyism, Economics, Economy, Governments, Horseshit, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged , , ,

Mandates Are About Political Control, Not Health, by Jenin Younes

Posted on January 23, 2022 | Leave a comment

The conclusion in the title has been clear from early on. From Jenin Younes at brownstone.org:

For two years, the political class’s ineptitude has been on full display. School shutdowns, business closures, and endless mask mandates have all proven relatively ineffective at stemming the spread of COVID-19 (never mind reducing hospitalizations and deaths), yet politicians continued instituting these harmful and useless measures in a desperate attempt to be perceived as doing something.

But over the past month or so, it has become inescapable that sheer incompetence and ignorance can no longer be the sole explanation for two years of bungled policies. Rather, the craven mindset of many of our leaders in both parties (albeit primarily Democrats) is manifest. They are using our bodies to score cheap political points, impervious to the injury they are inflicting upon us.

Worst of all are the vaccine mandates, which come in countless forms. Universities, including public ones, are requiring faculty, staff, and students to vaccinate against COVID-19 in order to remain employed or enrolled. Many, for example Washington and Lee University in Virginia, Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and the CUNY and SUNY state schools in New York, are now requiring boosters.

As an attorney who has filed a number of lawsuits challenging vaccine mandates coming from both public university employers and the federal government, I am contacted every day by myriad students, faculty and employees at these universities. Many now are double-vaccinated and COVID-19 recovered. A significant portion had recent bouts with COVID-19, which is unsurprising given that Omicron swept across much of the nation in a very brief time period. Yet, for students to continue their education at the universities they may have invested significant time, emotional energy and resources into attending, they are being coerced into getting a useless medical procedure that many legitimately fear could harm them.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Business, Civil Liberties, Collapse, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

Tagged

How Anthony Fauci Controls Science Globally, by Joseph Mercola

Posted on January 20, 2022 | Leave a comment

Anthony Fauci hasn’t been canonized because he’s a saint or a brilliant scientist or doctor. Rather, he’s got everyone by the balls and insists on being treated like a saint. From Joseph Mercola at theburningplatform.com:

Story at-a-glance

  • Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succinctly summarizes how Dr. Anthony Fauci wields his power to control and manipulate science across the globe
  • It’s Fauci’s job to conduct research on chronic diseases to figure out their etiology and environmental causes to protect public health, but instead he turned the NIAID into an incubator for pharmaceuticals
  • Fauci has a $7.6 billion annual budget that he uses to develop new drugs, which he then farms out to universities
  • Fauci’s control — in collusion with that of Bill Gates — has rendered the majority of global scientific research nothing more than pharmaceutical propaganda
  • Fauci shares drug patents with universities, sells them to drug companies, splits the patents with them, and walks those drugs through the FDA approval process, which he also controls; once approved, Fauci himself often profits

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. succinctly summarizes how Dr. Anthony Fauci wields his power to control and manipulate science in this riveting episode of The Jimmy Dore Show.1 Fauci has been painted as a hero throughout the pandemic, an image that is not only misleading but wildly inaccurate, as detailed in Kennedy’s best-selling book, “The Real Anthony Fauci.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Business, Cronyism, Government, Medicine, Politics, Propaganda, Science

Tagged ,

Tomorrowland Has Fallen! by John Michael Greer

Posted on January 6, 2022 | Leave a comment

The managerial class’s claims to competence and integrity are no longer believed. Covid is just the latest illustration. From John Michael Greer at ecosophia.net:

Has anyone else noticed just how odd it is that so many people on the progressive end of our cultural landscape are frantically trying to convince everyone that the Omicron variant, the latest mutation of the Covid-19 cold virus, really is the end of the world? I freely grant that a lot of people are ill just now—that’s what usually happens in the temperate zone’s winter, you know, when the latest respiratory viruses make their rounds.  I grant just as freely that hospitals are scrambling to keep up—many of them have laid off up to half their staff as a result of vaccine mandates, after all, and they’re being besieged by mobs of people who have been convinced by the media that ordinary cold symptoms mean they’re about to die.

The result is a collective frenzy being eagerly fed by a great many people. Of course it’s not surprising that the corporate media would push scare stories at full volume. Whoring out the news to sell advertising space is their stock in trade, and “if it bleeds, it leads” has taken precedence over responsible journalism since before there was responsible journalism.  Still, this isn’t limited to the media.  A great many people seem remarkably eager to insist that the pandemic can’t be winding down. In that eagerness I sense the approach of convulsive change.

Granted, a case can be made that there are practical if unmentionable reasons for this habit of sedulously cultivated panic. To begin with, as Freddie deBoer has pointed out in a trenchant post, being terrified of the Covid virus has become a venue for status competition among members of the privileged classes.  It’s an old story, at least as old as that fine fairy tale “The Princess and the Pea.”  Just as the princess in the story showed her royal status by being so hypersensitive that she could feel a single dry pea under seven mattresses, our current princesses—and princes, to be sure—display their status by insisting that they can contract a virus through seven face masks.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Banking, Business, Collapse, Government, Media, Politics, Propaganda, Psychology, Tyranny

Tagged , ,

The Ungracious – and Their Demonization of the Past, by Victor Davis Hanson

Posted on December 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

Demonize not those generations which preceded yours, lest yours is demonized by generations to come. From Victor Davis Hanson at townhall.com:

The Ungracious - and Their Demonization of the Past

Source: AP Photo/Ted Shaffrey

The last two years have seen an unprecedented escalation in a decades-long war on the American past. But there are lots of logical flaws in attacking prior generations in U.S. history.

Critics assume their own judgmental generation is morally superior to those of the past. So, they use their own standards to condemn the mute dead who supposedly do not measure up to them.

Yet 21st-century critics rarely acknowledge their own present affluence and leisure owe much to history’s prior generations whose toil helped create their current comfort.

And what may future scolds say of the modern generation that saw over 60 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, even as fetal viability outside the womb continued to progress to ever earlier ages?

What will our grandchildren say of us who dumped on them over $30 trillion in national debt – much of it as borrowing for entitlements for ourselves?

What sort of society snoozes as record numbers of murders continue in 12 of its major cities? What is so civilized about defunding the police, endemic smash-and-grab thefts, and car jackings?

Was our media more responsible, professional, and learned in 1965 or 2021? Did Hollywood make more sophisticated and enjoyable films in 1954 or 2021? Was there less or more sportsmanship among professional athletes in 1990 or 2021?

Was it actually moral to discard the “content of our character” and “equal opportunity” principles of the prior Civil Rights movement of 60 years ago? Are their replacement fixations on the “color of our skin” and “equality of result” superior?

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Entertainment, Government, Media, Propaganda

Tagged ,

Alumni Are Now Withholding Donations Over Too Much Censorship On Campus, by Tyler Durden

Posted on December 4, 2021 | Leave a comment

Why would alumni give money to a school that promotes values antithetical to their own? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

The censorship on college campuses is getting to such a fever pitch that alumni are now withholding donations in an attempt to get colleges to “enforce free speech”.

For example, the Wall Street Journal reports that when Cornell reached out to alumnus Carl Neuss for a seven-figure check, he responded by saying he was “worried about what he saw as liberal indoctrination on campus and declining tolerance toward competing viewpoints.”

So, it turns out it isn’t the snowflakes that head out into the real world and make the millions, we guess?

When the school put Neuss in touch with their “moderate” political staff, the staff complained that they were “humiliated” by the diversity training that the school mandates.

“If you say the wrong words, you could lose your position or be shunned,” Neuss told the WSJ.

Joel Malina, Cornell’s vice president for university relations, told the paper that “robust debate and a discussion of all views remain hallmarks of the Cornell experience both in and out of the classroom.”

Instead of donating, Neuss then helped start the Cornell Free Speech Alliance – described by the WSJ as “one of about 20 such dissident alumni organizations that have taken root on college campuses over the last couple of years.”

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Education, Politics, Propaganda

Tagged ,

The Rhodes Scholars Are Back, And They’re Still Proof Of America’s Laughingstock Elite, by Revolver

Posted on December 2, 2021 | Leave a comment

The Rhodes Scholar people have always looked for people who might be the next generation of world leaders. With woke ideology reigning among the ruling class, it’s no surprise they’re conferring their scholarships among up and coming wokesters. From Revolver at revolver.news:

Late last year, the Rhodes Trust capped off a cartoonish 2020 by naming the most preposterous set of Rhodes Scholars in American history. Twenty-one out of thirty-two scholars that year were “of color,” ten were black, one was an illegal immigrant, one was “non-binary,” and virtually all of them were distinguished by a fanatical commitment to left-wing ideological fads of the moment. It was a worthy end to 2020. In a year symbolized by “racial reckoning” and the visible decay of every American institution, one of the most thoroughly-gutted and skin-suited once-great relics of the old America delivered a worshipful tribute to open borders, reparations, and diversity über alles.

“I think last year’s class may actually have embarrassed them a little bit,” a former Rhodes Scholar told Revolver.

Embarrassed or not, this year’s class is once again a murderer’s row of “elite” college graduates whose chief interests are almost wholly aligned with the chosen values of the moment in the Globalist American Empire. And improbably enough, 2021’s Rhodes Scholars may be an even bigger indictment of the supposed elite that appoints them.

This year’s class is less in-your-face and less fanatically focused on Diversity, but thanks to that, they are more authentically diverse, and show the wide scope of America’s political obsessions. This year’s class is still amply racialized and LGBT, but it’s also more than two-thirds women (a record). And in a fitting marker of how real freedom of thought is vanishing from American public life, the Rhodes press release proudly trumpets the work one Scholar has done to suffocate speech even more.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Education, Politics

Tagged

Is College Worthwhile? A Two-Time Dropout’s Take, by James Bovard

Posted on November 11, 2021 | Leave a comment

Nothing learned in college is nearly as valuable as teaching yourself how to learn on your own. From James Bovard at lewrockwell.com:

President Biden is tub-thumping for Congress to create new federal handouts to make college free for the vast majority of students. But as Ryan McMaken and other commentators on mises.org have pointed out, college is vastly overpriced and overrated nowadays.

My view on college stems from my experience as a two-time dropout. I was frightfully bored in high school and had mediocre grades. Almost immediately after my compulsory schooling ended, my long-lost love of reading revived. A month before I began attending Virginia Tech, a kindly neighbor gave me the University of Chicago Great Books list, which became my road map to the best writings of Western civilization. Reading authors such as Montaigne, Voltaire, Nietzsche, Emerson, and John Stuart Mill awoke portions of my mind that I never knew existed. I was unaware that I was loitering in mental neutral until those classics jolted my mind into a higher gear.

Early in my first quarter at college, I aspired to getting all As. But, after a few hooey-laden tests, I recognized that professors were demanding something different than what I was seeking. Many of the textbooks felt like heavy blankets smothering my mind. I was confounded to see most fellow students never venture beyond the books professors assigned them. They acted as if a secret zoning mandate permitted using only government-approved building materials for their own minds.

I spent far more time reading old books unrelated to my courses that quarter than I did on class assignments. The more active my mind became, the less I could endure tenured droning. I believed that I was more likely to develop my potential on my own than by hunkering down in a classroom. After sloughing most of my teenage years, I felt like I was far behind mentally compared to where I should have been.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Education

Tagged

The ‘other’ deficit is near an all-time high, by Simon Black

Posted on October 1, 2021 | Leave a comment

Trust in America’s major institutions has evaporated. The alternative media probably enjoys more trust than most if not all of them. From Simon Black at sovereignman.com:

It’s only Wednesday, and yet it’s already been a terrible weak for America’s record-setting deficit.

And no, I’m not talking about the country’s record-high fiscal deficits, which include the eye-popping $50+ trillion Social Security shortfall, and the $28.5 trillion national debt.

I’m actually referring to an even bigger deficit– one of the biggest the country has ever faced.

It’s larger than the national debt, the Social Security shortfall, the COVID bailouts, and just about every financial deficit combined.

I’m talking about America’s trust deficit… the massive chasm of skepticism and doubt that stands between the citizens and their once-venerated institutions.

Just over the last few weeks, for example, we saw the disgraceful retreat from Afghanistan, followed by even more disgraceful finger-pointing that really widened the trust deficit.

Hunter Biden’s dad insisted that the intelligence community advised him that Afghanistan would NOT fall to the Taliban.

Then suddenly a number of classified documents were leaked showing that various intelligence agencies had warned about a Taliban takeover.

Hunter Biden’s dad then insisted that ‘the generals’ were all on board with a complete withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan by August 31.

But the generals themselves publicly disputed his assertion.

The lies are bad enough. But it’s the constant bickering, finger-pointing, and illegal leaks of classified information that make the trust deficit grow.

Two weeks ago we also saw revelations that Facebook has been lying to everyone; senior officials, going all the way to the top of the company, knew fully well that the company was selectively allowing certain personalities to violate content guidelines and post whatever they wanted.

Facebook has told everyone– its users, Congress, and even its own oversight board– that it treats all users the same.

Continue reading→

Leave a comment

Posted in Academia, Banking, Business, Collapse, Government, Media, Medicine, Military, Politics, Science

Tagged