Month: August 2020

After taking the unprecedented step of removing a post from President Trump’s page for having the audacity to include a snippet from a Fox News interview where the president exaggerated how children handle COVID infection, Facebook is taking yet another step to crack down on non-mainstream voices on both the left and the right.

Since hard-core progressives are pushing for Facebook to deplatform all conservatives and even some centrists, a decision that could have grave consequences for FB’s business, the decision isn’t a surprise.

A report in the Columbia Journalism Review drew attention to this trend of  "pink slime" local news earlier this month, and since the 2016 election, a team of researchers has uncovered more than 1,200 ‘fake’ local news sites that repackage community news with a political slant favoring the campaign that they are (often obliquely) backing.

The original Bernie Sanders Campaign helped mastermind this technique. But by blocking all such sites from accessing Facebook’s "News Exemption", the social media platform is effectively bringing the same level of scrutiny that it already applies to "national" news platforms to "local news" platforms.

It’s also notable because FB’s decision comes just one week after the NYT quietly scrubbed "sponsored" news posts paid for by the Chinese government that essentially inserted what appeared to be news stories with a slant that heavily favored the Chinese government.

A local news outlet will be disqualified as "political" if it meets any of the criteria below, courtesy of Axios:

• It’s owned by a political entity or a political person (definitions below).
• If a political person is leading the company in an executive position, such as a CEO, board member, chairman of its board, or a publisher or editor-in-chief.
• If the publisher shares proprietary information about any of its Facebook accounts or account passwords, API access keys, and/or data about their Facebook readers – like location, demographics, or consumption habits – directly with a Political Person or Entity as they are defined below.
• If the Page lists a political entity or a political person as its "Confirmed Page Owner" or "Confirmed Page Partner" on Facebook.

Meanwhile, Facebook defines a "political person" as "a candidate for elected office, a person who holds elected office, a person whose job is subject to legislative confirmation, or a person employed by and/or vested with decision-making authority by a political person or at a political entity." A "political entity" is "an organization, company, or other group whose predominant purpose is to influence politics and elections." These generally include PACs and Super PACs, and entities regulated as “Social Welfare Organizations” under Section 501(c)(4) of the US Internal Revenue Code.

Authored by Jordan Schachtel via ‘The Mass Illusion’ subastack,

Here in the United States, we have become inundated with tales of COVID-19 doom and gloom. In America, the mainstream narrative is rife with hopelessness. We are told that there is simply no way to stop this virus without repetitive lockdowns, healthy quarantine, even of asymptomatic individuals, and universal mask mandates. And even with all of those extreme policy measures put in place, the politicians and public health officials tell us that we will have to wait for a vaccine for the country to even think about our “new normal” following the COVID-19 pandemic.

There’s one country that they don’t seem to want to talk about – Sweden. And for good reason. Sweden debunks the hysteria.

Sweden shows how unnecessary all of the interventions to “fight” the virus are.

Sweden shows us that a rational, evidence-based approach to the pandemic is now thriving.

In Sweden, there’s no mandatory masks, no mandatory lockdown, no vaccine, and most importantly, no problem.

Life has largely returned to normal in Sweden, and it all happened without the economy-destroying non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPI) demanded by the “public health expert” class, who guaranteed that chaos would come to every country that disobeyed their commands to hit the self-destruct button for their nations.

The Swedish government has provided its advanced metrics on the COVID-19 pandemic to the public, and the data includes the ever-important statistics on actual day of death, and other useful information. I ran the numbers month by month so you can get a very clear picture of Sweden’s downward trend.

In August, Sweden has registered just one death (!) with/from the coronavirus. Yes, you read that correctly. One death so far. 

For the month of July, Sweden reported 226 deaths. They’ve accounted for 805 June deaths, 1646 in May, and 2572 in April. The deaths attributed to COVID-19 went from about a 50% reduction to falling off of a cliff.

The story is the same in the hospitals. COVID-19 is hardly registering as a blip on the radar. Sweden has reported just 4 new COVID-19 patients in their ICUs in August. The month of July saw only 52 COVID-19 patients in ICUs.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to come to the conclusion that the epidemic appears to have been wrapped up in Sweden for months. It’s unclear whether this is a result of having achieved the herd immunity threshold, or if the seasonality of the virus is providing indefinite relief. But it’s become absolutely clear that Sweden’s long term pandemic strategy is working.

Sweden did not do everything perfectly. Stockholm, like much of the West, failed to protect its nursing home population. The majority of the COVID-19 deaths in Sweden have come from the senior care population, with the average age of death (82) being the same as the average lifespan in the country. But remember, people in nursing homes are not mobile. They live in their own ecosystems and are not particularly impacted by COVID-19 policies. It was Sweden’s general population that was supposed to be plagued by their open society model to respond to the virus. We were told that the hospitals would be overrun, and that bodies of all ages would be dropping in the streets. This dystopian pandemia projection never came to fruition. Even during the worst months of the pandemic, Sweden’s general population never pressed their healthcare system. The same is true in the United States, but for whatever reason, many U.S. officials and “public health experts” have pushed the idea that everyone is equally impacted, which could not be further from the truth.

For this pandemic, the global public health expert class threw the pandemic playbook out the window, disregarding hundreds of years of proven science on herd immunity, in order to attempt to assert human control over a submicroscopic infectious particle. It hasn’t worked, to say the least. There is no evidence anywhere in the world that lockdowns or masks have *stopped* the spread of the virus. Sweden was one of the few places where cooler heads prevailed, and the scientists realized that attempts to stop the virus would be worse than the disease itself, in the form of economic and social ruin.

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