Below is my column in USA Today on the aftermath of the Jussie Smollett verdict and what the case says about our state of both politics and journalism. As discussed yesterday, some figures and groups are still insisting that people need to believe Smollett regardless of the evidence or the verdict. Despite media figures calling his account “beautiful” and “brave,” seventy-five percent of the public believe that he staged the racist attack. The insistence by some that he is innocent shows how...

I have always had a bad attitude toward official secrets regardless of who is keeping them. That prejudice and John Kenneth Galbraith are to blame for an unauthorized withdrawal I made from the World Bank. When I lived in Boston in the late 1970s, I paid $25 to attend a series of lectures by Galbraith on foreign aid and other topics. The louder Galbraith praised foreign aid, the warier I became. His hokum spurred my reading and led me to recognize that foreign aid is one of the worst...

Julian Assange suffered a mini-stroke in October during the hearing for the US appeal of a UK court's ruling on his extradition case. "The WikiLeaks publisher, 50, who is being held on remand in the maximum-security jail while fighting extradition to America, was left with a drooping right eyelid, memory problems and signs of neurological damage," The Daily Mail reports. "He believes the mini-stroke was triggered by the stress of the ongoing US court action against him, and an overall decline...

If the Senate follows the House of Representatives lead and passes the Immunization Infrastructure Modernization Act (HR 550), Americans who do not get the recommended number of covid vaccines can look forward to receiving a text like this: “This is Dr. Anthony Fauci. According to government records you have not yet received your monthly covid booster shot. Until you prove you are following vaccine protocols, your vaccine passport will be revoked, resulting in loss of your privilege to work,...

Are the CIA and its contractors able to bully not only the U.S. Department of Justice, but also the UK judiciary? This is not hard to conclude after the High Court decision announced early Friday to bow to the US and extradite Julian Assange.Underneath the pettifoggery, the decision demonstrates that the British will lop the "juris" off jurisprudence and pay heed only to "prudence" in kowtowing to the security state in Washington and its junior partner in London.The objective, of course, is to...

No matter how you feel about the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex, you can’t help but be impressed at how they are able to successfully plunder and loot American taxpayers, no matter how much needless death, suffering, and destruction they wreak on people around the world. Think about it: They just exited Afghanistan after their 20-year failed war against the Taliban, a war that left thousands of American soldiers and countless Afghans dead and the entire country destroyed. On top...

This week's nationwide annihilation of Biden's Federal Contractor vaccine mandate at the hands Georgia Federal Judge R. Stan Baker has resulted in a landslide retreat of cowardly mega-corporations from their so-confident bullying of American workers. Biden's illegal gamble, the nationwide Federal contractor vaccine mandate, has like his previous Medicare mandate and OSHA if-you-have-100-workers-mandatory-vax mandate been ripped to shreds early on in the courts.Biden's mandates have always been...

If the pandemic policy response had taken the form of mere advice, we would not be in the midst of this social, economic, cultural, political disaster. What caused the wreckage was the application of political force that was baked into the pandemic response this time in a way that has no precedent in human history. The response relied on compulsion imposed by all levels of government. The policies in turn energized a populist movement, Covid Red Guard that became a civilian enforcement arm....

As an interdisciplinary researcher studying both epidemiology and economics, I worry that differences in evidentiary standards of these fields predispose us to harming people indirectly through the economy in the service of preventing harm in a pandemic. When SARS-CoV-2 infects a patient’s lungs and the patient tragically dies due to respiratory failure, it’s clear that the patient died because of SARS-CoV-2. If we follow the chain of causation backward before a patient’s death, there are...

A Republican senator who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee stated on a Tuesday Fox News appearance that he strongly supports keeping US military action on the table if Russia invades Ukraine, up to and including a first-use nuclear attack. “I would not rule out military action," Senator Roger Wicker told Fox News host Neil Cavuto. "I think we start making a mistake when we take options off the table. So I would hope the president keeps that option on the table.” “What does military...

A US district court in Georgia became the fourth court to enjoin a Biden Administration vaccine mandate this week. As with the other trial and appellate courts, District Judge R. Stan Baker found that President Biden has exceeded his authority in mandating the vaccine for all federal contractors. In the meantime, outgoing New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio has ordered all private workers to be vaccinated. All of these mandates are on course for a showdown in the Supreme Court where three justices...

Santa’s got a new helper. No longer does the all-knowing, all-seeing, jolly Old St. Nick need to rely on antiquated elves on shelves and other seasonal snitches in order to know when you’re sleeping or awake, and if you’ve been naughty or nice. Thanks to the government’s almost limitless powers made possible by a domestic army of techno-tyrants, fusion centers and Peeping Toms, Santa can get real-time reports on who’s been good or bad this year. Consider just a small sampling of the tools...

The war on a virus is long lost, and the sunk costs keep piling up. Whether you believe that this was all to bring about a Great Reset or some of the actors involved genuinely wanted to stop a virus, the result is now clear. The war on COVID-19 is over and it has resulted in colossal loss. Not a single battle was won. They lost the war, they know they lost the war, and now the losing side of the war — the global “elite” — is attempting to cover up this reality by any means necessary, even if...

What happened to Joe Biden could have happened to anyone. In fact, it happens all the time. Throughout human history. He (presumably) caught a cold from his one-and-half-year-old grandson. His theory is that his grandson “likes to kiss his pop.” As a result, he got a “frog in his throat.” It’s just a cold! No reason to freak out! Biden’s spokesperson says that he has taken recourse to therapeutics. He “is taking some over-the-counter medication and probably some cough drops and some tea, but...