A few days ago, a group of employees at SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket company, wrote an open letter to their boss accusing him of being a “distraction and an embarrassment”. You can read a copy of the letter here, but the gist of it was that Musk didn’t do enough to pursue the sacred goals of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’. Now Musk has responded in typically swashbuckling style – and fired the five people who authored the letter. The New York Post‘s Karol Markowicz – a friend of the Daily Sceptic – has written a column congratulating Musk on his decisive action and pointing out that this doesn’t make him a free speech hypocrite.
The dam is breaking. The ‘listen to meeeeee’ millennials, who have had an overblown influence on corporations, and on our culture, are finally being told to sit down and be quiet. It is very much overdue.
But isn’t Elon Musk supposed to be a ‘free speech absolutist’, screech his critics. As I explain to my small children, freedom of speech under the First Amendment means the Government can’t arrest you for calling the president a doofus.
It doesn’t mean you can do the same to your boss and expect to remain employed. (Similarly, you can’t tell your wife she’s ugly and then plead “Free speech!” when she gets mad and leaves you for the pool boy.)
Free speech in America means you can go into the public square and say what you want, safe in the knowledge that you won’t end up in prison. Twitter should be included in that, which is why Musk feels so strongly about allowing open conversation on the app. As Musk has tweeted: “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy.”
The letters from his SpaceX employees sought to get Musk to stop speaking out about certain topics: “Elon’s behaviour in the public sphere is a frequent source of distraction and embarrassment for us, particularly in recent weeks.”
Yet there’s a difference between tweeting about a variety of subjects and maligning your employer. If your boss embarrasses you, find a new one. Your office is not the public square.
Nor can you tweet about how terrible your workplace is and expect your bosses simply to take it, as the Washington Post’s Felicia Sonmez recently found out. Sonmez was finally fired after a full week of non-stop tweeting about what a horrible place the Washington Post is to work at.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The Twitter board has unanimously approved Elon Musk’s offer to purchase the company, clearing away one of the biggest obstacles to the takeover. Fox Business has more.
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Cephas Alain: Legend
Early stage of development?
Bhakdi, Wodarg, Yeadon, Lee, Gupta&co and sites, contributors and commentators at LS, Lew Rockwell, CW, offG, Achgut, Tichy, Reitschuster, Rubikon&co publish their well researched criticism since March 2020.
Which is why I and more and more people, like Yeadon or Esfeld now, think that the authorities know about the flaws in their arguments and strategies as well, and that they therefore must deliberately be following a different, most sinister agenda.
I cannot fathom that what a civil servant friend told me yesterday was or still is true: that they still don’t know as much about the basic flaws of the PCR test and e.g. the importance of the ct no here as I do since, say, May, and are therefore still just stumbling forward and covering their ar*es.
Their responses to our criticism, their constant doubling down on lies, their refusal to change anything for over a year now here, and now also their outrageous, most unscientific and very open manipulation in the form of capping ct at 28 for the vaxxed only and reporting a vaxxed as a case only if hospitalised or dead in itself proves that they weren’t and aren’t ignorant and that they weren’t and aren’t acting in the interest of public health.
They will never know anything else about how flawed the PCR test until they run known negative samples through their labs. Of course Sage know this too so the fact that they obstinately refuse to do it just proves that all they want is dodgy “cases” to stoke up the fear.
It’s been all about fear since day one. Intelligent and educated citizen analysis of government edicts and the ramblings of SAGE et al and their US counterparts must really have got them very worried. We are being bullied and worse by criminals who occupy high office and long jail time is the absolute minimum these people deserve.
Maybe this is a wake up call for you and all of us too. That it’s not about facts. It’s about power. As long as you can get the really powerful to act on your say so, the masses will follow.
By disregarding that fact we sceptics may actually be expectant of a day that will in fact never come. We are naive enough to think that science is scientific, that we are governed by adults and that democracy exists. By remaining naive we will guarantee our defeat.
I am on the cusp of this kind of dilemma now. Maybe there comes a time where we accept it as so, and change tactic. We need to win or else it’s over. It truly is.
Indeed so, BeBop. Indeed so.
But the relation between real scientists and politicians has ALWAYS been corrupt. Think about it.
PCR itself is an amplification process that makes a large pile of gene gunk from a small pile. The inventor himself has stated this.
The diagnostic criteria around the process were made up by Drosten in Germany.
https://www.achgut.com/artikel/bmi_publikation_bestaetigt_rosa_elefanten
As for Covid denier: the German Ministry of Health has unintentionally basically confirmed that Covid 19 doesn’t exist.
It is, as Wodarg said from the start, floating around since years and indistinguishable from flu and pneumonia cases without testing, and due to their abuse and misuse even with them, whose sums are equal or even lower in 2020.
And as for the censoring of criticism and the refusal to debate with and engage with scientific dissent due to an overriding, almost religious closed society goal X in the form of e.g. health or climate change, read Prof. Esfeld’s latest: the outcome even for that goal X has also always been and will always be a disaster due to that, as we are currently witnessing and will witness henceforth.
https://dasgoetheanum.com/impfpass-ein-weg-in-die-freiheit-oder-in-die-geschlossene-gesellschaft/
news @ 9: Sceptics have always been following “the science”.
This is the point. I – like others here – have known from early on that there is nothing exceptional about ‘Covid-19’ in terms of it’s impact on all-cause mortality. Such knowledge follows from absolutely basic data literacy and simple descriptive statistical analysis.
We have also known that any statement about ‘Covid deaths’ is fiction, since that data is simply unrecorded in any precise scientific terms.
All obvious to anyone with basic research/statistical skills and an interest only in the facts rather than a narrative to which to fit the data.
All the rest is fabrication and obfuscation.
Yep, anything else is distraction and/or obfuscation.
These lengthy debates about the statistics of ……. well, anything really, are pointless other that the self-gratification of the writer.
The measures are justified by a meaningless ‘test’, the government knows that, the debate is now how to get out of this mess.
“ the emergence of scientifically- and data-literate groups of non-experts”. What does he mean by “emergence”. Were the rest of you not already this way too?!
I wasn’t just reborn as someone who values empiricism, rationalism, integrity etc in 2020. Critical thinking is a life skill that I’ve been working on for decades and it makes me naturally skeptical about everything!
The groups are emerging. We have gathered as a group of existing sceptical thinkers to emerge and apply critical thought to the unprecedented amount of bullshit generated over the past 15 months or so.
I first saw this 16 years ago with the “diet wars”
Tom Naughton did a good speech called The Anointed vs The Wisdom Of The Crowds
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDlF-z_x7vc
Now The Anointed are using laws and censorship to impose their views. Before long we will have our diet mandated, of that I am certain. Covid has been the excuse to extend the influence of The Anointed, and I expect the Wisdom Of The Crowds will be further stamped on
For those who aren’t aware of the science here’s a piece on why information doesn’t change minds.
https://www.chrbutler.com/information-wont-change-anyones-mind
Today I stood outside a supermarket watching people wipe down trolleys and sanitise their hands before entering. The only thing they didn’t do was cross themselves.
The ability of emotion to outweigh reason in argument is well known. But it doesn’t contradict evidence based reality.
In the end, you can see that the earth isn’t flat, even if you’ve fallen for the tosser who persuaded you otherwise.
he confirms his own theory by linking people sceptical of lockdowns to flat earthers.
Im not surprised MIT came out with this bollocks.
Looks like they have taken money from Gates and the Gang:
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-connections-jeffrey-epstein-mit-donations-ronan-farrow-2019-9?r=US&IR=T
But all people want is an upwardy line before lockdown and downwardy line during lockdown. It makes their sacrifices worth while Mr Witty says so. People don’t need to explore the subject they just need to to be told by the government selected experts.
The fact that their arguments and data is so weak that the curious need to search further will hopefully undermine all this nonsense. Unfortunately to many are apathetic.
Follow the politics, not the science..
Back in February 2020 I came down with a bad case of flu (or at least thats what I thought it was) I treated it as the flu – I stayed indoors for a few days and I got over it within a week. A couple of weeks later there were sensationalised headlines about a ‘deadly flu-like virus’ from Wuhan China called coronavirus that was going to kill us all … end of the world stuff. When I checked out the symptoms of this virus they were exactly the same symptoms that I had had a couple of weeks earlier (not the flu but flu-like with the continuous coughing being the most annoying aspect of having the virus for me personally) – so i was convinced I had already had the virus already. When rumours then started about a three week lockdown to ‘flatten the curve’ I went along with it – I wasn’t convinced by the arguments for a lockdown but I went along with a three week lockdown anyway – but then bit by bit the government began expanding its powers – the lockdowns got longer, mask-wearing was introduced, then it was restrictions on who you can and cannot meet, restrictions on travel not just abroad but in the UK too, now its vaccinations for everyone and possibly covid passports – basically the government kept moving the goal posts. So rather than just keep listening and just accepting what the msm and the BBC were telling me I decided to look into this thing myself – I read masses of articles and various medical papers on the covid virus and I watched hours upon hours of interviews with world renowned virus and disease experts from all parts of the world discussing covid19 and its affects on people and I come to the conclusion that (unless I were very elderly and/or with serious underlying health issues) then this virus was not a threat to me or anyone else I knew – if I knew anyone elderly and/or with serious underlying health issues I would have completely stayed away anyway – something I would have normally done anyway even if it were a common cold or seasonal flu … ie : eight years ago my mum was being treated for a very serious life-threatening disease that meant she was vulnerable to viruses during treatment so when I come down with a cold that same year I stayed away for almost a month until I was fully recovered … to me this is just plain common sense. Anyway after many hours of research I took the decision that according to the fatality rates this coronavirus was not a threat to me at all and anyone else I knew who was not very elderly and/or with serious underlying health issues and so I refused to accept the mask-wearing, the lockdowns, the social distancing mantra, the variants threat and all the other stuff that I was being fed continuously almost daily through the msm – if I had been convinced otherwise – that people were dropping likes flies around me on the streets and this was the modern-day Black Death then or course I would have gladly restricted my travels, even worn the mask (if they were proved to work) and also voluteered for the first batch of vaccines too … but all the research I read and the experts I listened to said otherwise – that lockdowns do not work, that masks are next to useless (these were the two major issues for me) – although life-threating to certain sections of society generally your chances of catching and dying from covid were absolutely tiny – overall my scepticism just grew and grew and the more I read and the more experts I listened to the more sceptical I became – this scepticism was not born out of some cult-like ignorance or flat-out refusal to accept scientific guidance for anti-government reasons etc but from informing myself of both sides of the argument and concluding that the sceptics were right and that the pro-lockdowners were wrong … not just wrong but colossally wrong too – the consequences of which will be felt for many years to come.
I suspect the majority of us here went through precisely the same thought process as you. What astonishes me now is the enduring level of belief in those ‘experts’, borne of course by fear, which those same people seem to not care, was purposely hammered into them in order to gain their compliance….
Exactly my experience: I am sure I had the virus in Feb last year—flu-like but with the main symptom being a very bad continuous cough that went on my chest. Felt like sh** for a week or so and wiped out for another two. Tested negative for antibodies last December but now I want a t-cell test. Why are these not available? Very very sinister and we are powerless…
This reflects my experience.
It’s so sad that fear has removed the faculty for critical thinking.
I’m amazed by how many still blindly believe the BBC and those who govern.
Very well said, this in a nutshell is our thoughts on the matter too.
I know this is not unique as it has been said many times by many people, but, 14+ months on, I STILL do not know anyone that has been ill with COVID19, and STILL do not know anyone that even KNOWS anyone that that has been ill from it.
Individual lives, buisinesses, the future of civilisation itself….trashed in an unrepairable way for nothing.
The people that support, promote, and propogate this state of affairs include family and people I regarded as friends.
I despair of my fellow citizens.
Down to a tee. Thank you, I really don’t think I could have put it any better in fact I know I couldn’t! And as Greyjaybee says below a lot of us probably went through the same thought processes.
Yes!
It;s impossible to believe it was all a cock-up. The efficiency of the propaganda has been alarming. It’s not hard to find information that contradicts all the bullshit – at the moment. Simple observation too, there have been previous winters when the old folks were dropping like flies but nothing like that this time around. I still know more people who had “pre-covid” than actual diagnosed covid.Despite that people who were previously sceptical have been lining up for the vaccine
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls…
When I was nowt but a lad, I was told that raw eggs would kill me.
When I was a little bigger, I was told eating British beef would kill me.
When I was an adolescent, I was told having sex would kill me (HIV AIDS etc).
When I was an adolescent, I was told that man is destroying the planet and killing me and my as yet only imagined children.
When I was almost out of my teens, I was told the new Millennium started on Jan 1st 2000.
When I was not far past my teens, I was told Saddam wants to kill us all and could do so inside 45 minutes.
Now I am told that others’ breath will kill me.
Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls:
YOU KNOW THIS IS ALL BULLSHIT
I KNOW THIS IS ALL BULLSHIT
BUT WHO THE HELL ARE WE?!
if you’re a train conductor then you’re going to be in trouble
It would make a great announcement…you’re right.
I would add
“And if your surname is Hancock, Whitty or Valance, THEN GET OFF MY TRAIN.”
for those who are avoiding the so-called news:
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/lner-train-conductors-ladies-and-gentleman-complaint-non-binary-passenger-b935093.html
not sure why the response wasn’t “go fuck yourself” but we’re living in very strange times.
Ah, yes, I see…
While it’s moving
Professionally, I am Mr Data. I did my own number crunching (started in March 2020 by answering my own question “are any more people dying than normal – answer: not at all”).
I saw through Prof Neil Ferguson’s and Imperial’s BS before the start.
Years before.
But I didn’t need any data or complicated analysis thereof to know the danger of “the pandemic” was being hugely exaggerated, by several orders of magnitude; because there were no dead people in the streets… and still aren’t.
Is it “anti-mask” to point out that bacterial pneumonia – mostly caused by wearing masks – was the biggest killer during the Spanish Flu, not the virus itself.
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/bacterial-pneumonia-caused-most-deaths-1918-influenza-pandemic
Hystery repeats – mask wearing in 1918
“Anti maskers” and lockdown sceptics deal in data, not dates ( unlike Bozo et al).
I wrote in a post on Facebook on April 7th, 2020, ‘this whole pandemic seems like a massive social experiment ‘, meaning ‘in control’. How right I was, only a couple of weeks ago, a group of psychologists admitted that it had seemed like a psychological experiment.
Then on the 14th, in an article in the Telegraph the ‘Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour ‘ –
‘SPI-B’ – admitted that its ‘ work was unethical and totalitarian’. Wow! And yet those of us ‘critical thinkers’ who dared to suggest such an idea, were branded ‘conspiracy theorists’!
The truth is that anti-maskers are of a certain type of intellect, probably have an innate mistrust of politicians rhetoric, an enquiring nature, and do not just follow the narrative without investigating and questioning. But in doing so are deemed ‘selfish, and not thinking of others’.
The sad truth is that this type of intellect is the minority rather than the norm. My own family of well educated individuals, have accepted the narrative hook line and sinker. I truly despair.
Article in Friday’s Telegraph
Well, well well. Exactly what we so called ‘conspiracy theorists’have been saying all along!!
Full article below. WAKE UP PEOPLE!!
‘Use of fear to control behaviour in Covid crisis was ‘totalitarian’, admit scientists
Members of Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour express regret about ‘unethical’ methods
By
Gordon Rayner,
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
14 May 2021 • 9:00pm
One scientist said the Government ‘was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down’
Scientists on a committee that encouraged the use of fear to control people’s behaviour during the Covid pandemic have admitted its work was “unethical” and “totalitarian”.
Members of the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviour (SPI-B) expressed regret about the tactics in a new book about the role of psychology in the Government’s Covid-19 response.
SPI-B warned in March last year that ministers needed to increase “the perceived level of personal threat” from Covid-19 because “a substantial number of people still do not feel sufficiently personally threatened”.
Gavin Morgan, a psychologist on the team, said: “Clearly, using fear as a means of control is not ethical. Using fear smacks of totalitarianism. It’s not an ethical stance for any modern government. By nature I am an optimistic person, but all this has given me a more pessimistic view of people.
Mr Morgan spoke to author Laura Dodsworth, who has spent a year investigating the Government’s tactics for her book A State of Fear, published on Monday.
Ministers have faced repeated accusations that they ramped up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns and coerce the public into abiding by them – a claim that will be examined by the forthcoming public inquiry into the pandemic response.
Ministers have been accused of ramping up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns
Ministers have been accused of ramping up the threat from the pandemic to justify lockdowns CREDIT: Andrew Matthews/PA
SPI-B is one of the sub-committees that advises the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), led by Sir Patrick Vallance, the chief scientific adviser.
One SPI-B scientist told Ms Dodsworth: “In March [2020] the Government was very worried about compliance and they thought people wouldn’t want to be locked down. There were discussions about fear being needed to encourage compliance, and decisions were made about how to ramp up the fear. The way we have used fear is dystopian.
“The use of fear has definitely been ethically questionable. It’s been like a weird experiment. Ultimately, it backfired because people became too scared.”
Another SPI-B member said: “You could call psychology ‘mind control’. That’s what we do… clearly we try and go about it in a positive way, but it has been used nefariously in the past.”
One warned that “people use the pandemic to grab power and drive through things that wouldn’t happen otherwise… We have to be very careful about the authoritarianism that is creeping in”.
Another said: “Without a vaccine, psychology is your main weapon… Psychology has had a really good epidemic, actually.”
As well as overt warnings about the danger of the virus, the Government has been accused of feeding the public a non-stop diet of bad news, such as deaths and hospitalisations, without ever putting the figures in context with news of how many people have recovered, or whether daily death tolls are above or below seasonal averages.
Another member of SPI-B said they were “stunned by the weaponisation of behavioural psychology” during the pandemic, and that “psychologists didn’t seem to notice when it stopped being altruistic and became manipulative. They have too much power and it intoxicates them”.
Steve Baker, the deputy chairman of the Covid Recovery Group of Tory MPs, said: “If it is true that the state took the decision to terrify the public to get compliance with rules, that raises extremely serious questions about the type of society we want to become.
“If we’re being really honest, do I fear that Government policy today is playing into the roots of totalitarianism? Yes, of course it is.”
Thanks for posting extracts of that!
Of course nothing about the Government’s campaign of terror should surprise anyone who looked at the SAGE documents regarding plans to ‘encourage’ compliance early last year; they were available online to anyone interested enough to dig them out.
The concern is surely that so few of us were interested. I forwarded and even printed pages to show friends what was becoming evident – all met with an indifference I found hard to believe then. Some are friends no longer.
That indifference has now become the commonly accepted fear itself. When I think of a supposedly rational neighbour walking home in an almost empty street, face enwrapped in two masks as witnessed yesterday, I know that people have been made mad.
If you can smell a fart when wearing a mask, then your mask isn’t working.
It’s that simple!
I was out walking through a local park a while ago. It was a still day. I caught the distinct whiff of ‘whacky backy’. I couldn’t see anyone near me so I looked around. Eventually I saw the smokers about 75 feet away. Odor molecules and virus particles have a similar size, so the aerodynamics will be similar. The ‘2m spacing’ is a political statement, not a medical or scientific statement.
I would love to put 25m between me and the COVID-cultists. At a minimum.
Or roasting chicken in tesco
There is one thing number crunching (or data literacy) will not be able to reveal: whether the extreme deceptiveness and mendacity of our governments is due to the secret intelligence information available only in the highest circles that Covid-19 is an engineered bioweapon of untold destructiveness, ever more dangerous mutations and long duration. If our governments told their populations this, they would not be able to control the reaction and society would come to a total standstill with calls for warfare against the engineering country. Has anyone ever combined lockdown scepticism with the lab-leak/bioweapon theory and determined if reasoning this through gets you to a more plausible explanation of what’s happened (still happening)?
It is highly unlikely that the virus was deliberately concocted given it has been observed in sealed water samples from early 2019, that there were mysterious cases of respiratory disease in vapers mid 2019, and people in the west had the disease in late 2019.
One thing is totally clear. It has been used as a political weapon of mass destruction. The incident has been exploited politically to impose authoritarianism in the west, to enrich the Big Pharma outfits, to give insiders an opportunity for financial looting and enable the destruction of small business in favour of multinationals (a modern-day enclosure act). Deeper ‘explanations’ remain conjecture.
Is this a sneak preview of the next load of lies?
That’s exactly why there aren’t so many DD’s (Double Digiters) amongst the “anti-mask groups”, hence non-DD types aren’t your average person. they are, as a rule, TD’s Triple-Digit and in the minority. The majority of (not necessarily all, by any means) DD’s range from RT, (Room Temperature) to 99 and tend to be part of the most recent in evolutionary process Homo Bovinus. Does that make me a Digitist or even an anti-Bovinusist?
I don’t think so really, just “data-literate” and pro a bit of levity now and then.
It’s worth a look at this feature from the Daily Expose. Some of it has already started to take place. God help us all if as I anticipate, the rest of it follows the predicted path. And that ain’t the path out of lockdown.
https://dailyexpose.co.uk/2021/05/15/government-insider-says-uk-gov-has-a-plan-in-place-to-continue-lockdown-and-the-mainstream-media-are-in-on-it/
Self-fulfilling prophecy. The government officials hid and obscured the data from day one. Those who knew how to understand the data became the premiere skeptics and cynics from day one.
Wasn’t the WHO an anti-mask group until – when was it? Still under a year ago.
Why is Lockdown not on Mewe, Gab and Minds?