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The Covid Inquiry Has Failed to Ask the Most Basic Question: Why Were People Dying?

The explosion of mainstream media headlines following the release of the Hallett Inquiry module two report has concentrated on the conclusion that 23,000 deaths occurred as a result of governmental delays in enforcing lockdowns. While I admire the precision (not 22,000, not 24,000) the 23,000 figure is, as the inquiry states, an estimate based on modelling.

Whose modelling? If that of Neil Ferguson, who had previously been alarmist to the point of hysteria over a foot and mouth outbreak, then the model is fit for the dustbin. Garbage in, garbage out. But Baroness Hallett may not be so wrong – indeed the 23,000 may be an underestimate, but not for the reasons she has wrongly adduced.

SARS-CoV-2 was a novel virus. We now know, but not at the time, that it was accidentally released in China, but the exact mechanisms leading to that need not bother us. What mattered was that it appeared to be both very infectious and potentially fatal. However the fatality numbers are missing something (ignoring whether the figures were of deaths from Covid or deaths with Covid but from something else). Why was it fatal, leading to the acute syndrome of respiratory and other organ failure we now know as COVID-19?

I have read the lengthy report published on November 20th. It is a remarkable catalogue of governmental goings-on, but there is a glaring omission: there is nothing about medicine. There is science, epidemiology, statistics, models, but the fundamental question should have been: what is happening when people get suddenly sick, and how do we treat them if they do? If an infection does not kill people it is usually unimportant: we don’t go berserk over the common cold. If it does we need to know why and fix it. This is not an investigation for epidemiologists, scientists, statisticians, public health doctors, politicians and others who have no experience of managing acute medical emergencies. It is for clinicians – front-line doctors who see an illness, do investigations and arrange treatment.

Where were they? And why has this report completely failed to ask the question – where were the clinical experts?

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Rosie O’Donnell Admits She Has Given Her Autistic Son TDS — Says He Slams the Table in Anger at Trump’s Name

Rosie O’Donnell’s far-left politics appear to be rubbing off on her son.

In an interview with former CNN host Jim Acosta, the exiled comedienne admitted her 12-year-old Clay, who is both autistic and transgender, would often bang his hands on the table in frustration when talking about President Trump.

“My daughter is now saying, ‘D*mn him, d*mn Trump,’” O’Donnell remarked, referring to her son as a girl. “And smashing her hand on the table.”

“And I said, ‘Wow, honey, what are you thinking?’ And she said, ‘He made us move in order for our own safety! And it’s now he’s destroying the country!’”

“She lives here, she hears what I’m saying to you. Not that I go around speaking like this every day if it is not an interview. But I think to myself, ‘You don’t want to give this to her.’”

”Whatever this thing is, of me thinking that I somehow have to stand in defiance of him,” she continued. “I don’t, somebody can tap me out. I did 22 years, I don’t really need to do anymore.”

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An MIT Student Awed Top Economists With His AI Study—Then It All Fell Apart

Aidan Toner-Rodgers, 27, sprung to the upper tiers of economics as a graduate student late last year from virtually out of nowhere.

While still taking core classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he wrote a paper on artificial intelligence’s workplace impact so rapidly influential it was cited in Congress. He appeared in the pages of The Wall Street Journal in December as the very picture of a wunderkind, in faded jeans with tousled hair, in between two of his mentors, including Nobel laureate Daron Acemoglu. Toner-Rodgers’s work offered a surprising and even hopeful revelation about our high-tech future. He concluded that AI increased worker productivity and spurred innovation. Also, people didn’t like using it very much.

Within weeks, those mentors were asking an unthinkable question: Had Toner-Rodgers made it all up?

By the spring, Toner-Rodgers was no longer enrolled at MIT. The university disavowed his paper. Questions multiplied, but one seemed more elusive than the rest: How did a baby-faced novice from small-town California dupe some of academia’s brightest minds?

“There is no world where this makes any sense,” said David Autor, one of the MIT professors who had previously championed his student’s research. MIT, Autor and Acemoglu declined to comment on​ the specifics of the investigation into the research, citing privacy constraints.

Toner-Rodgers’s illusory success seems in part thanks to the dynamics he has now upset: an academic culture at MIT where high levels of trust, integrity and rigor are all—for better or worse—assumed. He focused on AI, a field where peer-reviewed research is still in its infancy and the hunger for data is insatiable.Expand article logo  Continue reading

What has stunned his former colleagues and mentors is the sheer breadth of his apparent deception. He didn’t just tweak a few variables. It appears he invented the entire study.

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Brother of DC National Guard Shooter Was Elite CIA Platoon Leader

The brother of Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old Afghani charged with the ambush murder of National Guard Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, served as a platoon leader in the same elite CIA-backed “Zero Unit” as his murderous sibling.

Lakanwal, who entered the United States in 2021 under Biden’s rushed Operation Allies Welcome program after claiming to aid U.S. forces against the Taliban, began his career in the Zero Unit in 2012 as a security guard.

He advanced to roles as a team leader and GPS specialist, operating in the volatile southern province of Kandahar.

His brother, who has not been publicly identified, reportedly held a higher position as a platoon leader in the unit and now resides in America, thanks to Biden.

The Biden administration allowed over 100,000 Afghans into the U.S. amid the 2021 withdrawal chaos. Lakanwal arrived with his wife and five children, and President Trump has not ruled out deporting the family, stating his team is “looking at that right now.”

A Kandahar resident identifying as Lakanwal’s cousin told the Associated Press that both brothers served in Kandahar with the CIA-backed force.

A former Zero Unit official, speaking anonymously, corroborated the brother’s leadership role.

The Zero Units were elite Afghan commando teams funded and trained by the CIA, known for high-risk operations against the Taliban but also criticized for alleged human rights abuses during the war.

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“We Are Everywhere” – Fort Bragg Psychological Warfare Group Posts Chilling Video

A secretive Fort Bragg operation that specializes in influencing people’s thoughts has released a hypnotic recruitment video that is laced with hidden meanings and strange images.

Known as the 4th Psychological Operations-Airborne, or 4th PSYOP, the group specializes in “using the power of the mind to persuade opinion and discourse” among the nation’s enemies.

The 1:17-second clip, posted Nov. 19 on social media, is a string of baffling clips, including old cartoons, masked figures hiding in plain sight and a group of people staring blankly at the viewer over the phrase: “We are everywhere.”

“There is another force applied in combat that we generally don’t think of as a weapon of war. That weapon is words,” the video says.

“Words are weapons… This is psychological warfare.”

The video then beckons: “Join PSYOP.”

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“Got To Be CIA Front”: Internet Sleuths Scour Web For Clues On DC Afghan Shooter

The ex-CIA-linked Afghan national who killed one National Guard soldier and critically injured another just blocks from the White House has set off alarm bells across the nation and in national security circles.

The attack – likely soon to be designated as terrorism – highlights how nation-killing open borders, reckless Afghan intake policies, and broader migrant inflows from hellish third worlds, combined with the Democratic Party’s suicidal empathy, have worked in unison to flood the country with tens of millions of poorly vetted people.

Former CIA targeting officer Sarah Adams has repeatedly warned about this threat: individuals with prior militant training or hostile intent have flooded the nation through these migrant inbound intake pipelines during the Biden-Harris regime years.

FBI Director Kash Patel has stated that Afghan national Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s brutal attack in DC earlier this week, which horrified the nation, is being investigated as an act of terrorism.

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The Dangers Of AI: Visualizing The Top Risks Companies Face

Companies are rushing to implement AI, but it’s not all smooth sailing.

More than half of businesses say the dangers of AI have led to at least one negative consequence.

But which issues plague businesses the most?

This infographic, via Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross, breaks down the most common risks.

It’s a preview of the brand-new executive guide from Terzo and Visual Capitalist, AI’s Illusion of Truth: The Data Behind AI Errors.

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Suicides And Delusions: Lawsuits Point To Dark Side Of AI Chatbot

Can an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot twist someone’s mind to breaking point, push them to reject their family, or even go so far as to coach them to commit suicide? And if it did, is the company that built that chatbot liable? What would need to be proven in a court of law?

These questions are already before the courts, raised by seven lawsuits that allege ChatGPT sent three people down delusional “rabbit holes” and encouraged four others to kill themselves.

ChatGPT, the mass-adopted AI assistant currently has 700 million active users, with 58 percent of adults under 30 saying they have used it—up 43 percent from 2024, according to a Pew Research survey.

The lawsuits accuse OpenAI of rushing a new version of its chatbot to market without sufficient safety testing, leading it to encourage every whim and claim users made, validate their delusions, and drive wedges between them and their loved ones.

Lawsuits Seek Injunctions on OpenAI

The lawsuits were filed in state courts in California on Nov. 6  by the Social Media Victims Law Center and the Tech Justice Law Project.

They allege “wrongful death, assisted suicide, involuntary manslaughter, and a variety of product liability, consumer protection, and negligence claims—against OpenAI, Inc. and CEO Sam Altman,” according to a statement from the Tech Justice Law Project.

The seven alleged victims range in age from 17 to 48 years. Two were students, and several had white collar jobs in positions working with technology before their lives spiraled out of control.

The plaintiffs want the court to award civil damages, and also to compel OpenAI to take specific actions.

The lawsuits demand that the company offer comprehensive safety warnings; delete the data derived from the conversations with the alleged victims; implement design changes to lessen psychological dependency; and create mandatory reporting to users’ emergency contacts when they express suicidal ideation or delusional beliefs.

The lawsuits also demand OpenAI display “clear” warnings about risks of psychological dependency.

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Pennsylvania Governor Signs Law Banning “Hair Discrimination”

Democrats continue to double down and pander to the woke demographic whenever they see an opportunity.  These gestures are usually designed to virtue signal and rarely have any significance in terms of political change, however, leftists don’t necessarily pass laws or make declarations because a problem actually exists.  Rather, they do these things in order to encourage false perceptions within the populace.

In other words, equality has been a legal fact within the US for decades, but leftists want people to believe racism is a never-ending battle that requires their perpetual activism and government intervention.  The more they demand “equity”, the more division and conflict they end up inciting. 

Democrat Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro insists that racism is an ongoing problem in his state and he has taken bold action to fight back by passing the “CROWN Act”, a law which prohibits discrimination based on a person’s hairstyle, type or texture.

CROWN, which stands for “Creating a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair”, is clearly aimed at placating the black voting base for Democrats in PA and is unlikely to be applied to any other group. 

For example, black female managers wearing wigs and weaves and appropriating white women’s hair styles will never be accused of racism, but a white manager at Taco Bell who fires a black worker for not wearing a hair net properly will probably face civil litigation for discrimination.  Woke laws are meant to create privileges and double standards, not equal protections.  As Shapiro notes:

“Real freedom means being respected for who you are – no matter what you look like, where you come from, who you love, or who you pray to…For too long, many Pennsylvanians have faced discrimination simply for hairstyles that reflect their identity and culture – that ends today…”

“This is going to help people by making sure that, wherever you work, or wherever you’re applying for a job, they can’t look at your hair and size you up – not based on your qualifications and all of the professional development you have and all of your education,” said PA House Speaker Joanna McClinton. “They will not look at your hair and decide you can’t work here. They will not look at your hair and decide you don’t belong in this C-suite. They will not look at your hair and say, ‘you can’t be in the boardroom.’” 

U.S. Rep. La’Tasha D. Mayes, a West Philadelphia native who now represents parts of Pittsburgh, was the lead sponsor on the bill and said the fight will help improve lives across Pennsylvania.  “Hair discrimination has taken confidence from our children, but that ends today,” Mayes said. “Hair discrimination has taken dignity from workers, but that ends today. It has taken access to economic opportunities, hopes and dreams, but that begins to end today.”

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Poland Resists EU Court Order To Recognize Same-Sex Marriage

Poland’s government and leading opposition figures have publicly pushed back against suggestions that the European Union can compel Warsaw to recognize same-sex marriages, despite a landmark ruling from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) requiring Poland to acknowledge a marriage legally concluded in another member state.

Interior Minister Marcin Kierwiński insisted on Wednesday that this week’s judgment does not equate to Brussels overruling Polish sovereignty.

“Since yesterday, many untruths have accumulated in this matter. Interpretations are already emerging that say: the EU is imposing its legislation on us. So no – it cannot impose its legislation on us,” he said, adding that the judgment alone “cannot force a change in Polish law in this regard.”

He stated that the government will outline how the ruling will be handled only “after thorough analyses by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Justice.”

The ruling — issued on Tuesday by the EU’s top court — found that Poland acted incompatibly with EU law when it refused to recognize the marriage of two Polish men who married in Berlin in 2018 and sought legal recognition upon returning home.

The CJEU held that while marriage legislation remains a national competency, a member state cannot obstruct EU citizens’ freedom to move and maintain family life across borders.

The judges concluded that denying recognition “may cause serious inconvenience at administrative, professional, and private levels” and would breach both free movement rights and the right to family life, enshrined in the European treaties and human rights legislation.

The judgment stopped short of requiring Poland to legalize same-sex marriage domestically, but it does obligate Warsaw to treat foreign same-sex marriages the same way it treats opposite-sex marriages for the purpose of recognition.

Under current law, transcription of foreign marriage certificates is the sole method for acknowledgment — a system the court said must now apply equally to same-sex couples. The move opens the door to same-sex couples in Poland, knowing they can return and insist upon the same rights as heterosexual couples.

Political fallout was immediate. President Karol Nawrocki, who has repeatedly taken a hard line against perceived EU overreach and is framed as a Eurosceptic within the Polish political landscape, was publicly defended by Przemysław Czarnek, deputy chairman of the opposition Law and Justice (PiS) party, who said Poland should not be expected to accept every directive from the EU.

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