My latest in @Newsweek on Missouri v. Biden and government censorship.
newsweek.com/white-houses-m… "Free speech matters not to ensure that every pariah can say whatever odious thing he or she chooses. Rather, free speech prevents the government from identifying every critic as a pariah whose speech must be shut down."

1/ BREAKING: our lawyers were in court yesterday for Missouri v. Biden seeking a temporary injunction to halt the government's censorship industrial complex. In our petition, we explained how this regime has been functioning with the following analogy... 2/ Suppose that the Trump White House, backed by Republicans controlling both Houses of Congress, publicly demanded that all libraries in the United States burn books criticizing the President...

1/ Beyond the obvious political considerations, there are deeper reasons why the media resisted exploring the lab leak hypothesis, and continue to drag their feet. The Covid pandemic challenged the mythos of perpetual progress through science and technology. 2/ It was clear from the beginning of the pandemic that many things--including big, scary things--remain fundamentally outside of human control & technological management. We have not, and will not ever, completely conquer these threats to human security and material well-being.

How to buy compliance at Universities, brought to you by Pfizer. The company donated almost $365K to the University of California Regents in 2021, another $250K to various UC programs. Gravy after much higher amounts for pharma-sponsored research grants.
cdn.pfizer.com/pfizercom/resp… The University of California for their part has millions of dollars of our retirement fund invested in Pfizer. See how this works?

Sitting in the airport recently I spotted a billboard advertisement that read, “You don’t have a people problem. You have a ‘how you’re using your people’ problem. Automation can solve it.” The ad was sponsored by UiPath, a global software company that sells robotic process automation software.

In the biosecurity surveillance paradigm, the human being is reduced to bare biological life—a mere collection of muscles, tendons, ligaments, and bones—with regrettable energy and excretion requirements. In this framework, the human “machine” can be programmed to function with maximum efficiency: digital surveillance, sophisticated algorithms, and exquisitely refined behavioral conditioning turn human flesh into a productivity engine.

The biomedical security paradigm, embraced during the pandemic, had other consequences. The growing trend for public health to expand its scope of concern and supposed expertise worked hand-in-glove with power grabs facilitated by declared emergencies. Recall, for example, that thousands of public health “experts” rushed to sign a statement declaring racism a public health emergency during the BLM protests of 2020.

It is instructive to reflect on the chosen phrase, “social distancing”, which is not a medical term but a political one. A medical or scientific model would have deployed a phrase like physical distancing or personal distancing, but not social distancing. The term suggests not a new model for health but for organizing society, one that limits human interactions by six feet of space and by masks that cover the face—our locus of interpersonal connection and communication.

The full significance of what transpired in March of 2020 may have escaped our attention. Without realizing it, we lived through the design and implementation of not just a novel pandemic strategy but a new political paradigm... ...a system far more effective at controlling the population than anything previously attempted by Western nations. Under the biosecurity model...

By 2006, the emerging biosecurity paradigm was already distorting our federal funding priorities. That year, Congress allocated $120,000 to the National Institute of Health (NIH) to fight influenza, which kills 36,000 Americans in a mild flu year. By contrast, Congress allocated to the NIH $1.76 billion for biodefense, even though the only biological attack on our soil, the anthrax outbreak for 2001, killed just five persons.

Following 9/11, the influential jurist Richard Posner argued, in an ethically dubious analysis, “Even torture may sometimes be justified in the struggle against terrorism, but it should not be considered legally justified.” Posner was employing here the logic of the state of... ...exception, which is difficult to limit precisely because it sets aside legal constraint.

Biomedical security, which was previously a marginal part of political life and international relations, has assumed a central place in political strategies and calculations since the September 11th attacks. Already in 2005, the WHO grossly over-predicted that the bird flu (avian influenza) would kill two to fifty million people.

Recent history provides a broader context for governing under a state of emergency. Since World War II, the “state of exception” is no longer exceptional: in both democratic Western nations and elsewhere, declared states of emergency have frequently become the norm, continuing in some countries for decades.

President Biden’s letter of February 2022 renewing the state of emergency specified no end-date. The only covid statistic cited to justify indefinite continuation of the declared emergency was the total number of reported covid deaths in the U.S. for the entire pandemic—a cumulative number that increases monthly, even after the death rate has declined significantly.

In the new biomedical security state, the sovereign—the locus of political authority—is the person authorized to declare the state of emergency. At the federal level, with the backing of the President, that is now Xavier Becerra, HHS Secretary, overseeing NIH, FDA, and CDC, etc. Becerra, a lawyer and former an AG of CA, has neither training and nor public-health experience. In the state of emergency, which Becerra and Biden have renewed every 90 days for the last 3 years to almost no public notice or media attention, constitutional rights are suspended.

1/ BREAKING: Important update in our Missouri v. Biden case. The judge denied government defendants' motion to dismiss the case (except for claims against President, which are generally disfavored by the court). Upshot: the case will now move to trial. 2/ The court ruled that, contrary to the government's claims, we the plaintiffs (both the states of MO and LA and the private plaintiffs) have standing to bring the case: "The Court finds that the Plaintiffs have satisfied Article III’s standing requirements."

1/ My first Chat GPT query: "What are the dangers of AI?"

Here's the response... 2/ "Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a powerful technology with many potential benefits, but there are also some potential dangers associated with its development and deployment. Some of the main dangers of AI include:

Chinese technology. Pay attention. mirror.co.uk/news/world-new… “A swarm network is one in which large numbers of aerial robots directed by artificial intelligence can storm one common goal together.

1/ Regarding our lawsuit challenging CA's medical censorship law, I appreciate this endorsement of our case by the editorial board of the @ocregister and @ladailynews: "Judge right to halt California’s unconstitutional medical ‘misinformation’ law" msn.com/en-us/news/oth… 2/ "The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits any state from denying due process of law to any person. That includes any law that is so vague that people can’t possibly determine what is prohibited by it.

1/ Biomedical Security State, US Research University Edition: "Sprawling US intel project to improve long-distance biometrics on college campus" biometricupdate.com/202302/sprawli… via @BiometricUpdate 2/ "A face, gait and whole-body biometric recognition project begun in 2019 by U.S. national labs continues. Research teams across the nation are working on better ways to more accurately identify subjects outdoors and from a distance.

1/ BREAKING: Judge just granted our request for a preliminary injunction against AB 2098--the gag order on physicians in CA--in our Hoeg v. Newsom lawsuit. This effectively halts the implementation of this terrible law while our case is being tried. 2/ The ruling bodes well for our case: it indicates that our arguments that this law is unconstitutional have strong pre-trial facial plausibility. Not to get ahead of ourselves, of course, or try to predict the final outcome of the case, but this is a very positive development.