On 3 February 2023, fifty cars of a train derailed in East Palestine, an Ohio town near the border of Pennsylvania. The train cars contained, among other things, vinyl chloride, a substance that raises the risk of developing several types of cancers. The derailment caused an enormous fire that required the evacuation of a three-square …
Category Archives: Politics
Hospitals STILL Not Separating Deaths from/with COVID-19, Mainstream Press Acts Shocked to Hear about This Issue
In January of 2022, New York’s hospital system released their data on COVID-19 hospitalizations for 2021. The data showed that only 58% of these hospitalizations were from COVID, meaning that the virus was the reason why these people landed in the hospital in the first place. The other 42% of COVID hospitalizations were from people …
Meta Fined $414 Million by EU Regulator for Privacy Violations
For online services, a general maxim to keep in mind is that if you don’t have to pay a fee for the service, then you are the product. Facebook certainly follows this rule, as the site makes most of its money by selling user information to companies that will then use it for targeted consumer …
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Big Pharma’s New Year’s Resolution: Raise Drug Prices
Happy New Year, to start off! Best wishes for 2023. This January, a host of pharmaceutical companies based in the US – including Pfizer and AstraZeneca – plan to raise the prices on more than 350 different drugs. Pharmaceutical companies have a history of hiking their prices at the beginning of the year, and this …
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Twitter Files Demonstrate Blatant Politically Motivated Censorship, Press Largely Silent
Earlier this month, Elon Musk released revelations about Twitter’s aggressive efforts to censor a true story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop. Subsequently, journalist and author Matt Taibbi published Musk’s findings in the form of a long thread on Twitter in order for the story to get a lot of exposure. Despite …
Department of Homeland Security’s Campaign to Police Online Speech
In April, the Biden administration announced the beginning of the Disinformation Governance Board, which had the stated intention of protecting national security by combating various types of misinformation. There was incredible backlash to the creation of the DGB, and the agency folded within three weeks of its announced birth. Yet it would be naïve to …
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No Pandemic Amnesty: Those in Power Need to be Held Accountable
Last week, an article published in The Atlantic titled “Let’s Declare a Pandemic Amnesty” argues for forgiving one another for what we said or did when we supposedly were ignorant of all covid science. The article was written by Emily Oster, a professor of Economics at Brown University. I entirely disagree with the article. Those …
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Voting: Comparing the Michigan and Columbia Models
Why do people vote? What factors contribute to people’s eventual voting choice, and which factors that seem like they should be relevant are actually meaningless in the aggregate? Political scientists have long investigated questions of how people end up at their eventual voting choice, and the relative strength of the decisive factors are still debated …
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New California Bill to Criminalize Doctors’ Free Speech
At the beginning of October, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed a bill to “designate the dissemination of misinformation or disinformation related to the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus, or “COVID-19,” as unprofessional conduct,” according to the bill’s own language. Thus, doctors in the state can now risk losing their licenses if they engage in spreading what the government …
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White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health Was a Disappointing Status Quo Fest
The first White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health took place in 1969, and conversations among policymakers at this vent led to some of the major food assistance programs still in existence today, such as SNAP, WIC, and school lunches. That was over 50 years ago. The second White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, …
Green Humanist 