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Why Don’t People “Trust The Science?” Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

Why Don’t People "Trust The Science?" Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used.

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Why Don't People "Trust The Science?" Because Scientists Are Often Caught Lying

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.us,

There has been an unfortunate shift in Western educational practices in the past few decades away from what we used to call “critical thinking.” In fact, critical thinking was once a fundamental staple of US colleges and now it seems as though the concept doesn’t exist anymore; at least not in the way it used to. Instead, another brand of learning has arisen which promotes “right thinking”; a form of indoctrination which encourages and rewards a particular response from students that falls in line with ideology and not necessarily in line with reality.

It’s not that schools directly enforce a collectivist or corporatist ideology (sometimes they do), it’s more that they filter out alternative viewpoints as well as facts and evidence they do not like until all that is left is a single path and a single conclusion to any given problem. They teach students how to NOT think by presenting thought experiments and then controlling the acceptable outcomes.

For example, a common and manipulative thought experiment used in schools is to ask students to write an “analysis” on why people do not trust science or scientists these days. The trick is that the question is always presented with a built-in conclusion – That scientists should be trusted, and some people are refusing to listen, so let’s figure out why these people are so stupid.

I have seen this experiment numerous times, always presented in the same way. Not once have I ever seen a college professor or public school teacher ask students: “Should scientists today be trusted?”

Not once.

This is NOT analysis, this is controlled hypothesis. If you already have a conclusion in mind before you enter into a thought experiment, then you will naturally try to adjust the outcome of the experiment to fit your preconceived notions. Schools today present this foolishness as a form of thinking game when it is actually propaganda. Students are being taught to think inside the box, not outside the box. This is not science, it is anti-science.

Educational programming like this is now a mainstay while actual science has taken a backseat. Millions of kids are exiting public schools and universities with no understanding of actual scientific method or science in general. Ask them what the equations for Density or Acceleration are, and they’ll have no clue what your are talking about. Ask them about issues surrounding vaccination or “climate change”, and they will regurgitate a litany of pre-programmed responses as to why the science cannot be questioned in any way.

In the alternative media we often refer to this as being “trapped in the Matrix,” and it’s hard to think of a better analogy. People have been rewarded for so long for accepting the mainstream narrative and blindly dismissing any other information that when they are presented with reality they either laugh at it arrogantly or recoil in horror. The Matrix is so much more comfortable and safe, and look at all the good grades you get when you say the right things and avoid the hard questions and agree with the teacher.

Given the sad state of science in the West these days surrounding the response to covid as well as the insane and unscientific push for forced vaccinations, I thought it would be interesting to try out this thought exercise, but from an angle that is never allowed in today’s schools:

Why don’t people trust the science and scientists anymore?

This is simple: Because many scientists have been caught lying and misrepresenting their data to fit the conclusions they want rather than the facts at hand. Science is often politicized to serve an agenda. This is not conspiracy theory, this is provable fact.

That’s not to say that all science is to be mistrusted.

The point is, no science should be blindly accepted without independent examination of ALL the available facts. This is the whole point of science, after all.

Yes, there are idiotic conspiracy theories out there when it comes to scientific analysis, but there are a number of scams in the world of science as well.

The usual false claim is that the average person is ignorant and that they don’t have the capacity to understand scientific data. I do find it interesting that this is the general message of the trust-science thought experiment. It fits right in line with the mainstream and government narrative that THEIR scientists, the scientists they pay for and that corporations pay for, are implicitly correct and should not be questioned. They are the high priests of the modern era, delving into great magics that we dirty peasants cannot possibly grasp. It is not for us to question “the science”, it our job to simply embrace it like a religion and bow down in reverence.

Most people have the capacity to sift through scientific data as long as it’s transparent. When the facts are obscured or spun or omitted this causes confusion, and of course only the establishment scientists can untangle the mess because they are the ones that created it. Let’s look at a couple of examples directly related to human health…

GMO Crops And The Corporate Money Train

The propaganda surrounding Genetically Modified Organisms is relentless and pervasive, with the overall thrust being that they are perfectly safe and that anyone who says otherwise is a tinfoil hat crackpot. And certainly, there a hundreds if not thousands of studies which readily confirm this conclusion. So, case closed, right?

Not quite. Here is where critical thinking is so useful and where reality escapes the indoctrinated – Who paid for these studies, and do they have a vested interest in censoring negative data on GMOs?

Well, in the vast majority of cases GMO studies are funded by two sources – GMO industry giants like Monsanto, Dupont and Syngenta, or, government agencies like the FDA and EPA. Very few studies are truly independent, and this is the problem. Both the government and corporations like Monsanto have a vested interest in preventing any critical studies from being released on GMO’s.

Monsanto has been caught on numerous occasions hiding the dangerous health effects of its products, from Agent Orange to the RGBH growth hormone used in dairy cows. They have been caught compiling illegal dossiers on their critics. The industry has been caught multiple times paying off academics and scientists to produce studies on GMOs with a positive spin and even to attack other scientists that are involved in experiments that are critical of GMOs. Research shows that at least half of all GMO studies are funded by the GMO industry, while the majority of the other half are funded by governments.

There has also long been a revolving door between GMO industry insiders and the FDA and EPA; officials often work for Monsanto and then get jobs with the government, then go back to Monsanto again. The back scratching is so egregious that the government even created special legal protections for GMO companies like Monsanto under what is now known as the Monsanto Protection Act (Section 735 of Agricultural Appropriations Bill HR 993) under the Obama Administration in 2013. This essentially makes GMO companies immune to litigation over GMOs, and the same protections have been renewed in different bills ever since.

Beyond the revolving door, the government has approved many GMO products with little to no critical data to confirm their safety. Not only that, but in most cases the government has sovereign immunity from litigation, even if they’ve been negligent. Meaning, if any of these products is proven to cause long term health damage the government cannot be sued for approving them unless there are special circumstances.

If they could be held liable, you would be damn sure the FDA would be running every conceivable test imaginable to confirm GMOs are definitively safe without any bias attached, but this is not the case. Instead, the government actively propagandizes for GMO companies and uses hired hatchet men to derail any public criticism.

I, for one, would love to know for sure if GMOs are harmful to the human body in the long term, and there is certainly science to suggest that this might be the case. There have been many situations in which specific GMO foods were removed from the market in foreign countries because of potentially harmful side effects. Endogenous toxins of plants with modified metabolites are a concern, along with “plant incorporated protectants” (plants designed to produce toxins which act as pesticides).

There is data that tells us to be wary, but nothing conclusive. Why? Because billions of dollars are being invested by corporations into research designed to “debunk” any notion of side effects. If the same amount of funding was put into independent studies with no bias, then we might hear a different story about the risks of GMOs. All the money is in dismissing the risks of GMOs; there’s almost no money in studying them honestly.

The science appears to be rigged to a particular outcome or narrative, and that is lying. Science is supposed to remain as objective as possible, but how can it be objective when it is being paid for by people with an agenda? The temptation to sell out is extreme.

Covid Vaccines And The Death Of Science

I bring up the example of GMO’s because I think it is representative of how science can be controlled to produce only one message while excluding all other analysis. We don’t really know for sure how dangerous GMOs are because the majority of data is dictated by the people that profit from them and by their friends in government. The lack of knowing is upheld as proof of safety – But this is not scientific. Science and medicine would demand that we err on the side of caution until we know for sure.

The same dynamic exists in the world of covid vaccines. Big Pharma has a vested interest in ensuring NO negative information is released about the mRNA vaccines because there is a perpetual river of money to be made as long as the vax remains approved for emergency use by the FDA. It may be important to note that the FDA has said it will take at least 55 YEARS to release all the data it has on the Pfizer covid vaccines, which suggests again that there is a beneficial collusion between the government and corporate behemoths.

In the meantime, anyone that questions the efficacy or safety of the vax is immediately set upon by attack dogs in the media, most of them paid with advertising dollars from Big Pharma. These attacks are not limited to the alternative media; the establishment has also gone after any scientist or doctor with questions about vaccine safety.

There are clear and openly admitted ideological agendas surrounding covid science which have nothing to do with public health safety and everything to do with political control. When you have the head of the World Economic Forum applauding the covid pandemic as a perfect “opportunity” to push forward global socialist centralization and erase the last vestiges of free markets and individual liberty, any rational person would have to question if the covid science is also being rigged to support special interests.

Luckily, the covid issue is so massive that it is impossible for them to control every study. Instead, the establishment ignores the studies and data they don’t like.

The virus is being hyped as a threat to the majority of the public and as a rationale for 100% vaccination rates, by force if needed. Yet, the median Infection Fatality Rate of covid is only 0.27%. This means that on average 99.7% of the population at any given time has nothing to fear from the virus. This is confirmed by dozens of independent medical studies, but when was the last time you heard that number discussed by mainstream government scientists like Anthony Fauci?

I’ve never heard them talk about it. But how is it scientific to ignore data just because it doesn’t fit your political aims? Again, deliberate omission of data is a form of lying.

What about the multiple studies indicating that natural immunity is far superior in protection to the mRNA vaccines? What about the fact that the countries with the highest vaccination rates also have the highest rates of infections and their hospitalizations have actually increased? What about the fact that the states and countries with the harshest lockdown and mask mandates also have the highest infection rates? What about the fact that the average vaccine is tested for 10-15 years before being approved for human use, while the covid mRNA vaccines were put into production within months? That is to say, there is NO long term data to prove the safety of the covid vax.

These are easily observable scientific facts, but we never hear about them from corporate scientists or government scientists like Fauci. Instead, Fauci argues that criticism of his policies is an attack on him, and attacking him is the same as “attacking science.” In other words, Fauci believes HE IS the science.

And doesn’t that just illustrate how far science has fallen in the new millennium. Real scientists like Kary Mullis, the inventor of the PCR test, call Fauci a fraud, but they are ignored while Fauci is worshiped. I can’t even get into climate change “science” here, I would have to write an entire separate article about the fallacies perpetrated by global warming academics (did you know that global temperatures have only increased by 1 degree Celsius in the past century? Yep, just 1 degree according to the NOAA’s own data, yet, institutions like the NOAA continue to claim the end of the world is nigh because of global warming).

The stringent bottleneck on science today reminds me of the Catholic church under Pope Innocent III when church authorities forbade common people from owning or reading a bible in their own language. These laws remained in effect well into the 13th and 14th centuries. Instead, the peasants were to go to church and have the texts read to them by specific clergy. Often the bible readings were done in Latin (bibles were only allowed to be written in Latin) which most people did not speak, and interpreted however the church wished.

It was only the invention of the printing press in the 1400s that changed the power dynamic and allowed bibles to be widely distributed and information to spread without church oversight. Much like the creation of the internet allows the public to access mountains of scientific data and methodologies at their fingertips. The free flow of information is an anathema according to the establishment; they argue that only they have the right to process information for public consumption.

Cultism requires excessive control of data and the complete restriction of outside interpretations. As information becomes openly available the public is then able to learn the whole truth, not just approved establishment narratives.

Science is quickly becoming a political religion rather than a bastion of critical thought. Conflicting data is ignored as “non-science” or even censored as “dangerous.” Government and corporate paid studies are treated as sacrosanct. Is it any wonder that so many people now distrust the science? Any reasonable person would have questions and suspicions. Those who do not have been indoctrinated into a cult they don’t even know they are a part of.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sun, 12/19/2021 - 17:25

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Spread & Containment

You can now enter this country without a passport

Singapore has been on a larger push to speed up the flow of tourists with digital immigration clearance.

Published

on

In the fall of 2023, the city-state of Singapore announced that it was working on end-to-end biometrics that would allow travelers passing through its Changi Airport to check into flights, drop off bags and even leave and exit the country without a passport.

The latter is the most technologically advanced step of them all because not all countries issue passports with the same biometrics while immigration laws leave fewer room for mistakes about who enters the country.

Related: A country just went visa-free for visitors with any passport

That said, Singapore is one step closer to instituting passport-free travel by testing it at its land border with Malaysia. The two countries have two border checkpoints, Woodlands and Tuas, and as of March 20 those entering in Singapore by car are able to show a QR code that they generate through the government’s MyICA app instead of the passport.

A photograph captures Singapore's Tuas land border with Malaysia.

Here is who is now able to enter Singapore passport-free

The latter will be available to citizens of Singapore, permanent residents and tourists who have already entered the country once with their current passport. The government app pulls data from one's passport and shows the border officer the conditions of one's entry clearance already recorded in the system.

More Travel:

While not truly passport-free since tourists still need to link a valid passport to an online system, the move is the first step in Singapore's larger push to get rid of physical passports.

"The QR code initiative allows travellers to enjoy a faster and more convenient experience, with estimated time savings of around 20 seconds for cars with four travellers, to approximately one minute for cars with 10 travellers," Singapore's Immigration and Checkpoints Authority wrote in a press release announcing the new feature. "Overall waiting time can be reduced by more than 30% if most car travellers use QR code for clearance."

More countries are looking at passport-free travel but it will take years to implement

The land crossings between Singapore and Malaysia can get very busy — government numbers show that a new post-pandemic record of 495,000 people crossed Woodlands and Tuas on the weekend of March 8 (the day before Singapore's holiday weekend.)

Even once Singapore implements fully digital clearance at all of its crossings, the change will in no way affect immigration rules since it's only a way of transferring the status afforded by one's nationality into a digital system (those who need a visa to enter Singapore will still need to apply for one at a consulate before the trip.) More countries are in the process of moving toward similar systems but due to the varying availability of necessary technology and the types of passports issued by different countries, the prospect of agent-free crossings is still many years away.

In the U.S., Chicago's O'Hare International Airport was chosen to take part in a pilot program in which low-risk travelers with TSA PreCheck can check into their flight and pass security on domestic flights without showing ID. The UK has also been testing similar digital crossings for British and EU citizens but no similar push for international travelers is currently being planned in the U.S.

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The Virality Project’s Censorship Agenda

The Virality Project’s Censorship Agenda

Authored by Andrew Lowenthal via the Brownstone Institute,

In November 2023 Alex Gutentag and…

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The Virality Project’s Censorship Agenda

Authored by Andrew Lowenthal via the Brownstone Institute,

In November 2023 Alex Gutentag and I reported on the Virality Project’s internal content-flagging system, as released by the US House Committee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government.

Initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and led by the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO), the Virality Project sought to censor those who questioned government Covid-19 policies. The Virality Project primarily focused on so-called “anti-vaccine” “misinformation;” however, my Twitter Files investigations with Matt Taibbi revealed this included “true stories of vaccine side effects.”

A further review of the content flagged by the Virality Project demonstrates how they pushed social media platforms to censor such “true stories.” This was often done incompetently and without even a cursory investigation of the original sources. In one instance, the Virality Project reporters told platforms that reports of a child injured in a vaccine trial were “false” due to the timing; citing the dates of a Moderna trial when in fact the child had been in a Pfizer trial.

Trigger-happy researchers-turned-activists at the Virality Project went further, alerting their Big Tech partners (including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok) of protests, jokes, and general dissent.

Led by former CIA fellow Renee DiResta, the Virality Project functioned as an intermediary for government censorship. Ties between the US government and the academic research center were extremely close. DHS had “fellows” embedded at the Stanford Internet Observatory, while SIO had interns embedded at CISA, and former DHS staff contributed to the Virality Project’s final report.

The Virality Project also had contact with the White House and the Office of the Surgeon General, described the CDC as a “partner” in its design documents, and the California Department of Public Health had a login to access the Jira content flagging system, as did CISA personnel.

Kris Krebs and Alex Stamos – former directors of CISA and SIO, respectively – became business partners soon after leaving their positions.

Norwood v. Harrison established that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.” Stamos knew this too and put it simply; the government “lacked the legal authorisation” and so they built a consortium to “fill the gap of the things the government could not do themselves.”

Judicial precedents regarding “joint participation” and “pervasive entwinement” between public and private entities make clear that the government cannot outsource to third parties like the Virality Project actions that would be illegal for the government itself to do.

The Virality Project had several unnamed partners that appear in the content-flagging system, including billion-dollar military contractor MITRE and a communications consultancy linked to the Democratic Party, Hattaway. Founder Doug Hattaway was an “advisor and spokesperson for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and provided strategic counsel to the Obama White House and the Democratic leadership of the US House and Senate.” Like the Virality Project, Hattaway worked with the Rockefeller Foundation during the pandemic on issues of disinformation.

The Virality Project does not declare any relationship with MITRE or Hattaway despite providing them access to their Jira system.

The Virality Project was partly funded by the Omidyar Network, which provided $400,000 to VP partner and Pentagon consultant Graphika. Much of the Virality Project’s funding however is unknown and is also not declared on their website.

This and much more have led five plaintiffs, including Harvard and Stanford professors, to accuse the US government of violations of the First Amendment with the Virality Project as one of the key proxies. On March 18, their case will be heard by the US Supreme Court.

The Virality Project and Murthy v. Missouri

The Murthy vs Missouri plaintiffs allege that, “CISA launched a colossal mass surveillance and mass-censorship project calling itself the “Election Integrity Partnership” (and later, the “Virality Project”). The Election Integrity Project (EIP) “monitored 859 million posts on Twitter alone.” 

The Virality Project used the same Jira system as EIP for flagging content and included the same core public partners: SIO, the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public, the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab, and Graphika, with the addition of NYU and the congressionally chartered National Conference on Citizenship.

The Virality Project had extensive contact not only with CISA but also with the White House and the Surgeon General. White House representatives sent direct censorship requests to Twitter including, “Hey folks – Wanted to flag the below tweet and am wondering if we can get moving on the process for having it removed ASAP.” And the more threatening:

 “Are you guys fucking serious? I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today.”

Flaherty also conveyed that his communications came with the backing of the very top echelons of the administration: “This is a concern that is shared at the highest (and I mean highest) levels of the WH.”

The Virality Project hosted a launch with the US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy as part of the Surgeon General’s campaign against “misinformation.” In the presentation, Renee DiResta also introduced Matt Masterson, former senior adviser at DHS, and now a “non-resident policy fellow” at SIO.

Murthy ends the presentation by telling Renee, “I just want to say thank you to you, for everything you have done, for being such a great partner.”

At that same time the White House, OSG, and others were on the warpath, claiming social media platforms were “killing people” for allowing so-called “misinformation” to circulate.

With access to the White House, the Surgeon General, CDC, DHS, and CISA, along with top-level relationships with almost every major Western social media platform, the Virality Project was a key, if not the key, coordinating node for Covid-related censorship on the Internet. 

The Content-Flagging System

When the Virality Project said it considered, “true stories of vaccine side effects” to be “misinformation,” it wasn’t joking, and it flagged content to its Big Tech partners accordingly. 

Perhaps the most egregious was that of Maddie de Garay. Maddie and her siblings were enrolled in the Pfizer vaccine trial at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. She was later unblinded and confirmed as being in the vaccine and not the placebo group. 

Within 24 hours of her second shot in January 2021, Maddie developed a host of symptoms, including “severe abdominal pain, painful electric shocks on her spine and neck, swollen extremities, ice cold hands, and feet, chest pain, tachycardia, pins and needles in her feet that eventually led to the loss of feeling from her waist down.” To this day Maddie continues to suffer from a lack of feeling in her lower legs, difficulty eating, poor eyesight, and fatigue among other persisting symptoms.

Virality Project staff logged a Jira ticket titled “Maddie’s Story: False claim that 12-year-old was hospitalized due to vaccine trial” and provided extensive documentation of offending “engagement” on social media, including the micro-policing of content citing Maddie’s story with just two likes and two shares.

Much doubt has been cast on the veracity of Maddie’s injuries. Maddie’s mother, Stephanie de Garay, provided me with several doctor’s letters that confirm the link, including that of the emergency room doctor who discharged her on her initial visit. Their diagnosis was “Adverse effect of the vaccine.” Stephanie de Garay also testified under oath in front of the US Congress in November of 2023 regarding her daughter’s experience.

Most egregiously, the idea that the story was “false”rested on the claim that Maddie was in a Moderna trial. But she was in a Pfizer trial, as stated in the posts the Virality Project collected and linked to in the very same ticket.

“Dear Platform Partners,” the reporter writes as they bring the posts to the attention of Google, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Medium, Pinterest, and the aforementioned Hattaway Communications:

…very likely false due to issues in timing. The Moderna trial in children [began on March 16], when the participants received their first doses. However, the video claims that Maddie has an MRI scheduled for 03/16, and that these symptoms have been occurring for 1.5 months. Thus, Maddie would have had to have received the second dose of the vaccine during/before February, which is at least a month before the Moderna trials began.

“Ack – thanks for raising!” replies a platform representative. 

Not only are our self-appointed censorship overlords micro-managers, they are often incompetent. 

The posts were flagged “General: Anti-Vaccination” despite the de Garays volunteering their three children for the vaccine trial.

Some content flagged in the report remained up, and others were taken down. A video of Stephanie de Garay’s testimony was removed from Twitter. Whether or not this was specifically taken down due to the Virality Project report cannot be ascertained, but their intent was clear.

In another instance, the Virality Project wanted people circulating a mainstream media report censored:

“Platforms, this unconfirmed story of a healthy youth athlete who was hospitalized after being vaccinated continues to be used by anti-vaccine activists to spread misinformation about vaccines.”

“ack, thanks” responded a platform representative. 

Even a report by an ABC news affiliate, one of the biggest media conglomerates in the United States, fell into the category of “General: anti-vaccination” and “Misleading Headline.”

The main link provided, to a YouTube video, was removed. 

The Jira system was set up to track the actions the Big Tech partners took, as illustrated below:

The content was flagged to get platforms to take action.

“Hello Google team – sending this over as our analysts noticed that a google ad on a politico article this morning was peddling the antivax claims from the medical racism video you were monitoring. Is this against your policies?”

“Thanks for flagging – ack and sending for review.”

“Thanks for the heads up – we’re on it”

“Thanks for sharing! Our team is now tracking this.”

And follow-ups from the Virality Project team:

“Were the ads supposed to have been taken down? Just flagging for you, I just checked now and I’m still seeing another medical racism ad.”

Platforms were apologetic when they didn’t get to Virality Project’s flags quickly enough:

“With apologies for the delayed response (was in meetings) – we took action earlier in the afternoon, thanks again for the flags.”

This of course built on the Election Integrity Partnership’s more flagrant “recommendations,” which included

“We recommend that you all flag as false, or remove the posts below.”

“Hi Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter…we recommend it be removed from your platforms.”

And many more.

The Virality Project was a strategic intermediary between the US government and major social media platforms. As Murthy v. Missouri shows, in many cases the government dispensed even with their chosen intermediary and directly demanded censorship.

With their vast resources, why did Google, Facebook, and Twitter even need an external consortium to flag “misinformation?” The answer of course is they didn’t, the government did. Much like SIO Director Alex Stamos so helpfully reminded us, First Amendment jurisprudence states that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish.”

The First Amendment protects false speech. There is a cost to false claims, but the cost of censoring true claims is much higher. The alternative is a society where the truth is suppressed and powerful actors become even more unaccountable. The government cannot be made an arbiter of what is true.

In this inverted world, the role of academia and civil society isn’t to harness the internet to better pick up safety signals related to corporate products, it is to shield corporations from public scrutiny. In times gone by such ethical violations would see institutions shut down, but the Stanford Internet Observatory and their consortium partners continue with hardly a dent.

Dr. Aaron Kheriaty is a Murthy v. Missouri plaintiff and was the Director of the Medical Ethics Program at the University of California Irvine before he was fired for challenging the university’s vaccine mandate. Asked for his reaction to this censorship he responded: 

While causation in medicine is sometimes difficult to establish, and different evaluating physicians may reach divergent conclusions about a particular case, the Virality Project’s censors (who lacked even basic medical expertise) arrogated to themselves the authority to make veracity judgments about particular medical cases–even overriding the judgments of evaluating physicians. Such censorship is completely antithetical to medical and scientific progress, which relies upon free inquiry and open, public debate.

Much of what the Virality Project flagged was plausible; however, their internet hall monitors, who likely lacked even first aid certificates, deemed themselves arbiters of the truth, and coupled their arrogance with a complimentary laziness and incompetence.

The veracity of the content was of course always irrelevant to the Virality Project, given they considered “true stories” to be “misinformation.”

All told the DHS, CISA, the White House, the Surgeon General, a DNC-aligned communications agency, military contractors, academics, NGOs, and more combined to suppress the stories of real people, including children, who were plausibly injured by the vaccine. They sought to hide it not because it might be false, but precisely because it might be true.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Andrew Lowenthal is a Brownstone Institute fellow and co-founder and former executive director of EngageMedia, an Asia-Pacific digital rights, open and secure technology, and documentary non-profit, and a former fellow of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and MIT’s Open Documentary Lab.

Tyler Durden Thu, 03/21/2024 - 13:05

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International

This country became first in the world to let in tourists passport-free

Singapore has been on a larger push to speed up the flow of tourists with digital immigration clearance.

Published

on

In the fall of 2023, the city-state of Singapore announced that it was working on end-to-end biometrics that would allow travelers passing through its Changi Airport to check into flights, drop off bags and even leave and exit the country without a passport.

The latter is the most technologically advanced step of them all because not all countries issue passports with the same biometrics while immigration laws leave fewer room for mistakes about who enters the country.

Related: A country just went visa-free for visitors with any passport

That said, Singapore is one step closer to instituting passport-free travel by testing it at its land border with Malaysia. The two countries have two border checkpoints, Woodlands and Tuas, and as of March 20 those entering in Singapore by car are able to show a QR code that they generate through the government’s MyICA app instead of the passport.

A photograph captures Singapore's Tuas land border with Malaysia.

Here is who is now able to enter Singapore passport-free

The latter will be available to citizens of Singapore, permanent residents and tourists who have already entered the country once with their current passport. The government app pulls data from one's passport and shows the border officer the conditions of one's entry clearance already recorded in the system.

More Travel:

While not truly passport-free since tourists still need to link a valid passport to an online system, the move is the first step in Singapore's larger push to get rid of physical passports.

"The QR code initiative allows travellers to enjoy a faster and more convenient experience, with estimated time savings of around 20 seconds for cars with four travellers, to approximately one minute for cars with 10 travellers," Singapore's Immigration and Checkpoints Authority wrote in a press release announcing the new feature. "Overall waiting time can be reduced by more than 30% if most car travellers use QR code for clearance."

More countries are looking at passport-free travel but it will take years to implement

The land crossings between Singapore and Malaysia can get very busy — government numbers show that a new post-pandemic record of 495,000 people crossed Woodlands and Tuas on the weekend of March 8 (the day before Singapore's holiday weekend.)

Even once Singapore implements fully digital clearance at all of its crossings, the change will in no way affect immigration rules since it's only a way of transferring the status afforded by one's nationality into a digital system (those who need a visa to enter Singapore will still need to apply for one at a consulate before the trip.) More countries are in the process of moving toward similar systems but due to the varying availability of necessary technology and the types of passports issued by different countries, the prospect of agent-free crossings is still many years away.

In the U.S., Chicago's O'Hare International Airport was chosen to take part in a pilot program in which low-risk travelers with TSA PreCheck can check into their flight and pass security on domestic flights without showing ID. The UK has also been testing similar digital crossings for British and EU citizens but no similar push for international travelers is currently being planned in the U.S.

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