"Never ruin an apology with an excuse." -Benjamin Franklin

Tonight I brought my chicken noodle soup to my desk and played a video that Steve Kirsch encouraged everyone to watch, "before it just disappears."

Steve Kirsch's newsletter

Watch this video now before YouTube censors it

It’s guaranteed that YouTube will censor this video. Watch it before it just disappears: My favorite comment was…

a year ago · 335 likes · 186 comments · Steve Kirsch

The image of this talk is a powerful one, with scores of doctors and scientists on screens ready to speak or willing to lend their weight to the message. It amused me to recognize a scientist I know whose home I was in last week sharing data work.

I was half paying attention to the video while trying to "clean" my 11 browser windows (not kidding) with 200ish open tabs back down to a more reasonable and manageable number (that's like a 2022 challenge goal). But my ears perked up when one of the speakers, Dr. Joseph Fraiman, made an exceptional apology to the authors of the Great Barrington Declaration for thinking that they were crazy and wrong when he now understands that they were right all along.

He didn't ruin it with an excuse either. He sounded embarrassed.

I'd never heard of Dr. Fraiman, but looked him up to find out that he is an emergency medicine physician, so I presume that he works for a hospital. That means that not only did he deliver one of the better apologies I've heard in years, but that he might have risked his job in doing so.

In other news, police in New Zealand are starting to share tears with protesters (via Tessa who fights robots).

Is It Over, Yet?

Ugly combat wages in Ukraine, shifting much of the world's attention. Historically, Russia throws troops into war the same way that billionaires throw money at problems, but perhaps modern life has changed the ability to wrangle up so many soldiers to run forward away from the machine gun fire? As a result, Russia is said to have lost 12,000 troops and a hefty pile of war machinery from a military force of 230,000.

Meanwhile, the internet has been shut off in much of Russia. Though just as Russia dumped U.S. Treasury bonds in 2018, they started architecting their own independent internet infrastructure in 2019. And China's UnionPay, started in 2013 as what I would call a "countermeasure" in the unacknowledged currency war, picked up the slack.

I sometimes ponder the notion that the world leaders might all have gotten together, shared their ugly war simulations, agreed about the utter chaos and destruction the next conflict would entail, and then scripted a series of dramas as their Noble Lie, complete with sacrificing some of their own citizens (mostly the "useless eaters" and inconvenient pre-robots). All because the Kunlangeta don't understand how to manage society without miseducating it, and then destroying it.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

The Narcissistic, Murderous Parent and the Malthusian Mind Virus

"There's a reason narcissists don't learn from mistakes and that's because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one." -Jeffrey Kluger At sometime around the age of ten, I recall opening a newspaper and reading a story about a father who murdered his wife and family. I recall no other details of the story, which is to say t…

a year ago · 113 likes · 29 comments · Mathew Crawford

Along that thread, I wonder if those of us willing to track the details and speak out are primarily guilty in their eyes of messing up the ordering of the scenes.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

Is it Over Now?

"Do not count your chickens before they are hatched." -Aesop A little while ago I found out about the most recent Project Veritas military document exposure…

a year ago · 185 likes · 133 comments · Mathew Crawford

I'm not saying that's the only hypothesis worth thinking through, of course, but it's one of them.

Rounding the Earth Newsletter

The Apology (for COVID Theater)