Originally published on June 24, 2021, reposted with only the tiniest of edits. Notably, in recent months it seems that even many healthcare facilities in the US have by and large dispensed with masking or with any other form of COVID-19 protections. Given the insistence of the Biden White House that we must now learn […]
Originally posted on December 9, 2020. Reposted here without edits. On December 8, Anne Longfield, the children’s commissioner for England, published a briefing decrying the planned move to end-to-end encryption for their direct messaging (“DM”) applications by social media companies such as Facebook1. The utterly cynical interpretation of all this is that the government plans […]
It turns out that one of the first initiatives undertaken by the newly elected Republican majority in the US House of Representatives was to demonstrate its unswerving commitment to the still apparently ongoing fight against socialism by enacting a resolution, H.R. 9, entitled “Denouncing the horrors of socialism”1. This resolution was duly passed on February […]
Originally published on May 1, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical edits. There are press conferences, and then there are press conferences. In April of 2020, when the COVID-19 epidemic was raging across the state of New York, especially in New York City, the state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, began to hold daily press conferences updating the […]
Originally published on July 16, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical edits and spelling corrections. On July 15, 2021, the Guardian ran a front-page exclusive story based on a document purported to have been leaked from the Kremlin concerning Russia’s 2016-vintage plans to help Donald Trump win that year’s US Presidential election1. Essentially, the article relates […]
Originally published on September 21, 2021. Republished with minor grammatical corrections. Although the article at the heart of the piece is now rather dated, it nevertheless serves as a notable example of how the press routinely fails to contextualise statistical data for the sake of eliciting an emotional response from the reader. On September 20, […]
The Ukraine conflict is a sufficiently vast and complicated issue to merit its own series of posts at some point in the not too distant future. In the meanwhile, however, I wanted to respond to yesterday’s news that Germany has given permission to Rheinmetall to export 88 Leopard 1 main battle tanks from its remaining […]
To start with, when any given government is forced to confront an outbreak of any kind of disease, there are three and only three broad policy approaches to choose from: Ignore the epidemic. That is to say, adopt no special policies or additional public health measures to address this specific outbreak. Respond in force. This […]
Originally published on November 2, 2020, edited for grammar and better readability. As I have managed to pass the CISSP examination this past Saturday morning, on my first try, no less, I thought it worthwhile to set down my overall impressions of the thing. First, a general comment. Having sat for more university and professional […]
Given that the COVID-19 pandemic is still upon us, now more than three years after it first appeared, with well over a million already dead and hundreds more dying every day in the US alone, it seems appropriate to devote at least the first few posts of my revitalised blog to the topic. Before turning […]