Tag: Fake News

Smokers up to 80% more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid, study says

Smokers are 60%-80% more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid-19 and also more likely to die from the disease, data suggests.

A study, which pooled observational and genetic data on smoking and Covid-19 to strengthen the evidence base, contradicts research published at the start of the pandemic suggesting that smoking might help to protect against the virus. This was later retracted after it was discovered that some of the paper’s authors had financial links to the tobacco industry.

Source: Smokers up to 80% more likely to be admitted to hospital with Covid, study says

Have we learnt literally nothing in this post-modern, guerillara-warfare, attention-and-tracking, profit-seeking economic environment? There are some people who get really upset that other people refuse to get a COVID vaccine. However, you have to understand that it’s precisely this sort of garbage “science” and garbage “reporting,” in the name of driving profits for some monstrous corporation, to the benefit of the new aristocracy of plutocrats, that causes people to distrust everything they read in a “serious” publication, including the truth, and turn to Facebook groups and conspiracy theories. So if you find yourself upset that the government can’t convince a huge slice of the population to get vaccinated, lay the blame at the feet of the tobacco and oil industries, and to all the sleazy mega-corps that have followed their playbook for the past 70 years, by producing fake “science” and getting fake “news” to report on it.

Carl Miller on Twitter: “Here’s a fake news merchant telling me how it actually works.”

This is a clip from a report by the BBC that creating, boosting, and then selling fake content has become a real job in other countries. This particular report has an interview with a man from Kosovo, and (thanks to the last election) the work in Russia is now well understood, but I remain convinced there’s an entire industry for it in China. The US is the fake-news chew toy for the rest of the world, and Facebook is ground zero. The election next year is going to be a mess.

The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

The amount of land impacted by an oil spill in North Dakota is almost 10 times larger than initially reported, officials say. The disclosure comes about a month after the Keystone 1 Pipeline leaked about 383,040 gallons of oil.

Source: The Keystone Pipeline oil leak is almost 10 times worse than initially thought – CNN

So I see the oil industry has learned the IT industry’s trick of initially underreporting the severity of breaches. Including the part about doing it by orders of magnitude.

Or maybe they both learned it from the government, which always over-reports economic growth, and under-reports joblessness.