There are so many lies and liars, it’s hard to know where to begin, but here are my takes on this week’s unveiling of them.

Let’s begin with science. Seems like just yesterday Dr. Fauci and his crew were promoting “follow the science.” Well, I follow what passes for it and if you follow the direction it’s been heading in recent decades you’ll be trapped in a remote ditch.

SCIENCE

1) Neuroscience

Do you remember reading articles and books by Oliver Sacks? Perhaps the best known were Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat. From 1992 to 2024, The New Yorker, which boasts a fleet of fact checkers, published 28 of his articles. This week the publication admitted in a biographic article that much of Sack’s accounts of patient treatment were narratives lacking in veracity.

“I have some hard ‘confessing’ to do -- if not in public, at least to Shengold -- and myself,” Sacks wrote in his journal, in 1985. By then, he had published four books—“Migraine,” “Awakenings,” “A Leg to Stand On,” and “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” -- establishing his reputation as “our modern master of the case study,” as the Times put it. He rejected what he called “pallid, abstract knowing,” and pushed medicine to engage more deeply with patients’ interiority and how it interacted with their diseases. Medical schools began creating programs in medical humanities and “narrative medicine,” and a new belief took hold: that an ill person has lost narrative coherence, and that doctors, if they attend to their patients’ private struggles, could help them reconstruct a new story of their lives. At Harvard Medical School, for a time, students were assigned to write a “book” about a patient. Stories of illness written by physicians (and by patients) began proliferating, to the point that the medical sociologist Arthur Frank noted.” ‘Oliver Sacks’ now designates not only a specific physician author but also a... genre -- a distinctively recognizable form of storytelling.”

But, in his journal, Sacks wrote that “a sense of hideous criminality remains (psychologically) attached” to his work: he had given his patients “powers (starting with powers of speech) which they do not have.” Some details, he recognized, were “pure fabrications.” He tried to reassure himself that the exaggerations did not come from a shallow place, such as a desire for fame or attention. “The impulse is both ‘purer’—and deeper,” he wrote. “It is not merely or wholly a projection -- nor (as I have sometimes, ingeniously-disingenuously, maintained) a mere ‘sensitization’ of what I know so well in myself. But (if you will) a sort of autobiography.” He called it “symbolic‘exo-graphy.’ ” Sacks had “misstepped in this regard, many many times, in ‘Awakenings,’ ” he wrote in another journal entry, describing it as a “source of severe, long-lasting, self-recrimination.”

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker was shocked:   

Bombshell: Oliver Sacks (a humane man & a fine essayist) made up many of the details in his famous case studies, deluding neuroscientists, psychologists, & general readers for decades. The man who mistook his wife for a hat? The autistic twins who generated multi-digit prime numbers? The institutionalized, paralyzed man who tapped out allusions to Rilke? Made up to embellish the stories. Probably also: the aphasic patients who detected lies better than neurologically intact people, including Ronald Reagan's insincerity.

Why did The New Yorker, which perpetuates the myth that they employ an army of meticulous fact-checkers,  pollute our understanding of mind and brain by publishing these fabrications for decades?

2) Public Health

It was reported that the Food and Drug Administration is about to put a black box warning on Covid-19 vaccines. (Those which we were told would prevent infection and spread but which didn’t. Almost 40,000 deaths related to the vaccine are in the VAERS account.) Even though the adverse effects were seriously flawed and underreported, the connection to adverse effects remains clear. If the report is accurate the consequences of the black box warning are substantial: 

A black box warning is the FDA’s nuclear option. It’s the strongest safety label the agency can place on any drug or vaccine, reserved for risks that are serious, potentially irreversible, or life-threatening. The warning is literally boxed in black ink at the top of the drug label so it cannot be overlooked, skimmed, or buried down in the fine print.

Black box warnings are not suggestions, footnotes, or talking points. They are how the FDA formally announces: this risk matters. Black boxes are rare, reputationally toxic, and legally consequential. Once applied, they signal to doctors, hospitals, insurers, and courts that the risk is “material” as a matter of law, not opinion.

Once a black box exists, the ground rules permanently change. Even the most enthusiastic, guideline-faithful physician cannot realistically ignore it without stepping into legal quicksand. The warning must be disclosed to patients as part of informed consent; failing to do so is no longer a judgment call but a liability problem. “Following APA guidance” stops working as a shield, because FDA labeling outranks press releases and reassurance campaigns. [snip]

But diabolical jab doctor, former vaccine committee member, and pharma shill Paul Offit told a podcast host this week that “myocarditis was a very small price to pay. Behold the grandfatherly banality of evil.

OFFIT: “With the mRNA vaccines, there was myocarditis which is inflammation of the heart muscle … That was a very small price to pay … People have to have realistic expectations of the fact that you're going to learn as you go.” 

— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) December 12, 2025

How about that warm-spirited, scientific nuance? “We’ll learn about the risks together, as we go!” Now they tell us. Back when they were coercing people to take the shots -- jab or job! -- they weren’t nearly so nuanced. And, “it was a small price to pay,” Offit quite generously declared. Yes, but who paid the price? Do the people who paid the piper also agree how small the price was?

Easy for him to say.

One thing we know for sure is that Paul Offit didn’t pay the price. It’s not his heart. Just the opposite. It’s well known that Paul made millions off his rotavirus vaccine, which he sold to Merck. He currently hogs a Merck-endowed chair at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (ironically, ‘CHOP’), runs the school’s endowed Vaccine Education Center, and mints more money with grants related to vaccine development.

It’s pretty rich that he’s talking about the “price” that everyday people who aren’t compensated for injuries have to pay. [snip]

All in all, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Democrats’ long, failed experiment in coercive public health is finally, at long last, reaching a shuddering stop. As we’ve previously discussed, once the public finally grasps the horrifying extent of the fraud that was perpetrated upon us, it will crush into powder the last remaining shards of trust in the institutions. There’s no going back now.

3) Ezra Klein’s Pratfall

Now that it’s obvious that illegal aliens have been sucking up public health funds, Ezra Klein, a New York Times columnist, jumped in to call President Trump a liar and in the process self-owned himself as a fool:

Trump often lies about Democrats giving healthcare to undocumented immigrants. In California, Newsom actually did it. And defends it. "I'm proud of that. I believe in universal health care." But, he says, "we failed on the border. We need to own up to that." 

So, per Klein, Trump lied by telling the truth.

The Internationalists

Klaus Schwab

Klaus Schwab tweeted a self-encomium, promoting the organization he led -- the World Economic Forum -- and his new book. In it, he emphasizes how important open discussion is to him.

I have witnessed firsthand how bringing together people with different perspectives can foster innovative solutions, and I have always believed that progress is not inevitable – it must be shaped, guided, and achieved through collective effort.

The Forum’s success and impact have reinforced one of the key lessons of my life: nothing of great significance is achieved alone.

He cut off responses to his post.

European Opinion

I keep seeing opinion pieces saying that Trump is diminishing European opinion of the U.S. This week, Politico, reliably on the American Left, commissioned an interactive poll on this. Now, interactive polls are of dubious validity (actually, in my view all are) because only readers of that publication tend to participate. Still the results are worth mentioning.  

In Germany, 53 percent of people thought Trump’s election was more significant for their country than the election of Merz, compared with 25 percent who thought the German election was more important.

In the U.K., 54 percent said Trump’s return was more significant than Starmer’s Labour Party taking power and ending 14 years of Conservative rule, compared with 28 percent who said the change of national government last year was more important for Britain. 

French voters were a little less stark in their view, but still 43 percent thought Trump’s victory was more significant, against 25 percent who believed Macron’s election had a bigger impact on France.

They think their leaders are weak and I will not argue with that assessment.

Tim Walz

In Minneapolis, the loons are not only swimming in lakes. One inhabits the governor’s mansion.

Tim Walz says it's a "pretty hard reach" to expect the Somali community to not engage in the massive theft of tax dollars, criticizes @POTUS for calling them out: "Each community's got this... Donald Trump brought this to the attention... very dangerous." 

If he truly believed that the Somali community was prone to theft of public funds, he should have kept auditors to prevent that instead of ignoring Minnesotan whistleblowers who told him what was happening. Right now, the loss due to such fraud is estimated at a billion dollars, but some say it’s multiple billions.

What links the leaders of France’s biggest far-left party and the podcaster (still connected) to TPUSA and the Heritage Foundation? Demonstrable and risible lies about Islam. 

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the biggest far-left party in France, says that Muslim women are free and it’s Christian women who are oppressed: “Christianity is patriarchal, and women have to cover up and submit to men. In Islam, women submit to God only, therefore, their veil represents freedom and dignity.”

Tucker Carlson spreads pro-Qatar lies like this whopper, denies he receives Qatar money but brags he just bought a home in Doha:

Per @TuckerCarlson, Christians have it better in Qatar than Israel. The truth? There are 2x as many Christians in Qatar (~400K vs 188K), but they're almost all migrant workers. Despite Tucker's claim of "so many Christian churches in Qatar," there are SIX. Total. For 400K people. Meanwhile, Israel has hundreds of churches. Heck, there are more Baptist churches in Israel (17) than churches total in Qatar. Another key difference is that almost all of Israel's Christians are actually citizens. They vote, serve in the military, and hold elected office in the Knesset (Israel's parliament). By contrast, Qatar -- officially -- has NO Christian citizens. Why? Because in Qatar, it is illegal to convert from Islam. That's why Qatar closely monitors almost every significant aspect of Christian practice. All six churches by law must be in a single designated area, where the state holds ultimate control, and authorities force people to show ID in order to attend church -- a great way to ensure citizens aren't sneaking in. This is to say nothing of the reportedly horrific living and working conditions for the migrant workers, a system which many have likened to modern-day slavery. So to recap, Tucker took the only possible data points to show anything positive about Christian existence in Qatar -- the raw total number of Christians and the fact that they can attend church -- and obscured literally everything else. Even most paid propagandists would be a little squeamish with such open shilling. But not Tucker. Why?

Tucker also once again portrayed Israel as bloodthirsty warmonger. But his "contrast" was to Qatar, which bankrolls and/or provides diplomatic/media support to every Islamic terrorist group or regime targeting Israel. Stunning.

In the old days, calling out liars was something you could do only in small circles -- now all you have to do is go online.