The False Claim: The Fox on Watch
Chapter Thirteen
THE MATH:
If we don’t participate by thinking it through we remain unprotected for the next assault.
+ The powerful force of the PR campaign can disconnect us from our own survival instincts and our allegiance to Natural Law.
+ Their Pattern of deception and concealment of harm leads to addiction, disease and death.
+ We must understand and memorize Their Playbook.
+ We must use the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
+ Cognitive dissonance has led to errors in our reasoning.
+ We must defend ourselves against those we thought were defending us.
+ Until we disable the corrupt revolving door we have an active breach in our defense.
+ Our over-reliance on external systems undermines our ability to defend ourselves or others.
+ The genocide in Gaza has illuminated the Pattern & Playbook for all to see.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us and keep us in Bad Wars for the past 70 years and counting.
+ The tactic of using False Claims was effective on enough of the public to get us to buy and use Bad Products that cause disease and death.
+ As the Watchdogs produce truth of the falsehoods, the opposition will bury and attack this evidence +
I almost could not summon the strength to write about this piece of Playbook strategy because the definition of self-regulation is just too ludicrous, given what we know and what we’ve seen:
Corporate self-regulation is when a company or industry voluntarily creates and enforces its own rules and standards, rather than waiting for government mandates. This can involve setting codes of conduct, monitoring compliance, and establishing best practices to address challenges, improve public image, and ensure ethical behavior. While sometimes viewed as an alternative to government oversight, self-regulation often works alongside it, providing a flexible way for industries to be responsive to new issues and stakeholder concerns.
Lolllll! Yet, it is not a joke, it’s 100% real and true and is our current system. As laughable as it is, conceptually, it is of course one of the major contributors to the gaping hole problem in our concept of personal defense and so we must understand the system fully in order to properly rebuild this structure ourselves.
There are certain elements of logic baked into our shared intelligence and one of those is you don’t let the fox guard the henhouse. If you do, it will be a massacre. We are living through that very massacre. After the last century of heartless Bad Companies creating products that harm and kill humans, our structure of security from all that still implausibly relies on their goodness. Yet, not once have they shown any evidence of the promised ethical behavior, or shown any concern for people or the planet.
For the past fifteen years, the government has allowed Boeing to conduct its own inspections related to the manufacturing and safety of its airplanes. During that time, government reports, experts, and whistleblowers have issued more than a dozen warnings that the self-inspection program has led to serious production and safety issues. During much of that period, federal regulators shifted an ever-larger amount of the plane-certification process over to Boeing, even as the plane manufacturer cut production corners and promised to focus on “removing layers that help us be faster.”
You’ll never guess—Boeing’s self-regulation failed. And you’ll never guess the reasons—the failure was due to a fatal combination of prioritizing profits over safety, inadequate oversight, and a corporate culture that ignored quality control issues. This led to critical flaws like the software on the 737 MAX being implemented without adequate pilot training or FAA knowledge, which led to two deadly crashes which killed 346 passengers.1 In the aftermath, ongoing quality lapses and whistleblowers’ accounts suggest that the self-inspection program continues to be deeply flawed.
This fantasy that a Bad Actor can exhibit self-control for the good of public welfare exists outside of the corporate arena as well. One of the most frustrating agonies of witnessing the starvation in Gaza, for instance, was the conundrum that the world’s major relief groups could not get food and essentials into the Gaza Strip to feed the hungry, when they had the experience and expertise to accomplish just that. This is because the responsibility had been given over to the fox itself—the Israeli military. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) was set up by Israel and the US to bypass the traditional aid system, promising to “feed civilians in desperate need”. Once in charge of the food distribution, they reduced the UN’s 400 distribution sites down to 4 sites. Three months after the GHF took over, a famine was declared in Gaza City. The reality we now know, affirmed by the UN and its partners, was that the system also channelled desperate people into unsafe militarized zones. According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, this self-policing mechanism led to the killing of over 2,000 Palestinians and the wounding of over 15,000 others while waiting for aid. A literal massacre. But what else would we expect from giving control over survival essentials to the very source of the region’s destruction?
Some other stories of corporate self-regulation somehow not succeeding:
The Enron scandal of the early 2000s highlighted a catastrophic weakness of corporate governance which allowed executives to engage in accounting fraud and conceal debts, creating false profits and misleading the public and employees. The energy giant’s board also waived ethics rules and ignored internal warnings, demonstrating that even a corporation’s highest internal checks can fail when driven by a desire to deceive.
You may remember Bernie Madoff, the American criminal financier who masterminded the largest known Ponzi scheme in history (and remarkably, the last American I can remember actually going to jail for any corporate crime, almost 20 years ago). A former board member of the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), the self-regulatory organization that oversees brokers in the U.S., Madoff ran all his schemes under their watch. Part of the farce is that the industry likes to publicly pretend that they are very dogged by the scrutiny of their own industry’s oversight, by praising its strength and vigor. Madoff boasted, “in today’s regulatory environment, it’s virtually impossible to violate rules…and this is something that the public really doesn’t understand…It’s impossible for a violation to go undetected.” This claim was refuted by any honest assessor, including the industry whistleblower Harry Markopolos who tried to warn the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for decades (but was only dismissed), when he described the self-regulatory rules as “broken every day, every hour; and everybody knew about it and nobody seemed to care.”’
Same industry, different schemes were rampant in the previously discussed 2008 financial crisis, which was the result of the entire industry largely left to police itself. The result was a proliferation of risky and deceptive practices and a general disregard for the public interest. This failure of self-regulation contributed significantly to the worldwide market collapse and a quarter of American families losing at least 75% of their wealth.2
In the mid-2010s, it was revealed that Wells Fargo employees had been creating millions of fraudulent accounts without customer consent. For years, the company’s internal controls failed to stop the misconduct, which was deeply embedded in the company culture. It was only after a public outcry and external investigations that the company faced scrutiny, fines, and federal restrictions. But, in June 2025, the Federal Reserve lifted the restrictions which they say marks a turning point in the bank’s long effort to recover from one of the most damaging scandals in recent financial history. Fingers crossed they’ve had a complete change of “heart” and can now be trusted to self-regulate once more!
For the industries who affect our physical health, self-regulation means they have in-house scientists to do their in-house studies. Yet we know that Dupont, 3M, Monsanto, and a long list of Pharma companies chose to do some studies but chose not to do others suggested by these scientists, and did not publish or share the disturbing results from any of the studies proving adverse effects. And we can never know how many in-house problems exist beyond the ones we’ve found out about.
Because Dupont executives were allowed to do the cost-benefit analysis according to their profit-driven standards, they made a conscious and rational decision to pollute. They understood the pollution violated environmental rules and carried legal risk, as well as of course health risks, but they were weighing the potential benefit to shareholders against the potential costs of removing PFOAs—all related to the probability of being caught. Abatement (the removal of the toxic chemicals) was relatively cheap and could have prevented the ensuing health problems to people and legal and reputational damages to the company. But, DuPont chose to continue using PFOA—and in fact to use twice as much of it. Honestly, my rational brain still can’t compute their decision to sicken humans when they could have easily corrected but this article attempts to explain the corporate calculus for why the toxic polluting was somehow better for them.
For Monsanto, the reason the International Agency for Research on Cancer was finally able to declare that glyphosate products were probably carcinogenic is that it avoided data from industry-funded studies. In contrast, the EPA allows the Bad Company to submit their own unpublished research and so it can continue to conclude that glyphosate is safe for humans.
In just one of many Big Pharma’s examples, we can scratch our heads wondering how no authority could know about asbestos in baby powder for over 50 years. The answer is self-regulation. Proper scrutiny of the product was delayed all that time because Johnson & Johnson was submitting insufficient and biased company data. One independent test from outside regulation would have detected it.
It does continue to make one marvel in awe at how little our own government regulatory system affects all of this. When it came to the opioid crisis, by fall of 2000, the problem had “grown to epidemic proportions”. In November 2000, federal, state, and local law enforcement joined forces to try and tackle the problem. They issued a warning letter to Purdue in 2000 and then again in 2003 about their false claims regarding OxyContin. During this “warning” time, the number of prescriptions of OxyContin went from around 300,000 where it was in the late 90s to more than 14 million in 2001 and 2002. Purdue’s sales went from $44 million in 1996 to $3 billion in the years after they received these letters. The best FDA could do, evidently, was to ask the Bad Company to pretty please self-correct this issue resulting in all this addiction and death. It would not be until May 2007 that Purdue settled with the DOJ for some of their millions and it would be another 12 years until they stopped manufacturing the drug.
The food and beverage industry has used self-regulation for many years to “message” concern for public welfare and to position itself as part of the solution to high and rising prevalence of obesity and other diseases. They successfully avoid or delay adoption of evidence-based policies that could actually lead to greater public health benefit and instead implement initiatives that have consistently proven to be vague, lacking accountability, and ultimately produce negligible positive impact. It’s one big scam so that they can continue marketing junk food to children and sell calorie-dense foods in schools which is robbing future generations of their right to a happy, healthy life. Unhealthy diets are the leading cause of major noncommunicable diseases worldwide, including obesity, heart disease, and type 2 diabetes.
Many of the Bad Industries use an especially comical system in self-regulation called GRAS (“generally recognized as safe”) for adding chemicals to the food supply. This loophole lets companies add new, potentially harmful additives and other substances to our food without undergoing any FDA safety review. It is a voluntary notification system. Companies can self-declare their chemicals as safe and never even inform the FDA of their existence, nor make their data public. And even if a company chooses to voluntarily notify the agency, it can withdraw the submission for review if the FDA starts asking too many questions about the company’s safety data—shutting down the review! Pretty sweet.
More than 10,000 chemicals, some of which are potentially toxic, are allowed in cereal, snacks, meat, drinks and many other types of food sold in the U.S. Almost 99% of food chemicals introduced since 2000 were green-lighted for use by the Big Food and Big Chemical companies who sell them rather than properly reviewed by the FDA. Many of these widely used chemicals are associated with major health harms, including increased risk of cancer, developmental harm and hormone disruption.
Biotechnology developers like Monsanto-Bayer also used the GRAS trick, which they refer to as “voluntary consultation”, for all bioengineered seeds and new genetically modified foods. Instead of being required to undergo mandatory pre-market safety testing for each new product, the policy required only a consultation (as opposed to actual scientific review) with the FDA, if they felt like it. They’ve only felt like doing this one time in the last decade, but they’ve used GRAS for 756 new unknown chemicals added to the food supply since the year 2000.3
You can forward to 22:35m in this documentary The World According To Monsanto to hear FDA’s rationale that genetically engineered foods were not “materially different” from real food and therefore did not require special regulation, which quite deliberately ignores any potential risks of the new technology.
Our current HHS is finally taking on this ridiculousness and attempting to reform or perhaps permanently close the GRAS loophole, as well as creating some post-market review process for existing chemicals never before reviewed for safety. They will surely face a formidable Goliath as they go up against the Food + Chemical Bad Companies.
In the meantime, here are a few resources from one of the best food Watchdogs—Environmental Working Group:
https://www.ewg.org/foodscores/
https://www.ewg.org/consumer-guides/ewgs-dirty-dozen-guide-food-chemicals-top-12-avoid
Using similar methodology as in the tactic discussed in last chapter—the limited hangout—corporations will attempt to make a public relations show of regulating some of their behavior, in the hope of extending the potential for them to continue selling the rest of their harmful products. When real regulation in the form of an all-out ban is looming, many manufacturers will use the preemptive “signal” of self-regulation to try to thwart stricter government rules.
JUUL, known as the biggest culprit in the youth e-cigarette epidemic, halted in-store sales of some of its sweet and fruity flavors just before the FDA was finally proposing restrictions of flavored cigarettes. But, the vaping giant continued selling one of its most popular flavors with young people: mint. And if you think their self-regulation of mango and cucumber flavors was an effective safety measure for anyone, I’ll refer you to the article from this year entitled Disposable E-Cigarettes More Toxic Than Traditional Cigarettes which points to a new study highlighting more hidden risk in these products—hazardous levels of neurotoxic lead and carcinogenic nickel and antimony. The researchers stress the need for urgency in enforcement while “the ever-changing complexity of the industry makes it too complex to realistically police, and easy for brands to evade regulation” according to this NPR article on why it’s still so easy for teens to buy the deadly e-cigarettes, despite the FDA’s stern warning letters sent to 200 retailers selling them. I know you are as shocked as I am to learn that these warning letters have not turned out to be an effective measure to protect the children!
Regular cigarettes had its own version of this PR ruse called the “We Card” campaign, launched 30 years ago. When faced with legislation, regulation, or litigation that they knew would actually reduce smoking, they launched their own so-called youth prevention campaigns designed to give the appearance of effort and concern but without any real substance. The tobacco companies’ own documents reveal that these retailer ID checks were merely part of their ongoing efforts to convince policymakers not to enact any policies and programs that actually reduce smoking. The industry has never once been able to produce evidence that any of its self-regulatory measures prevent kids from smoking or helps smokers quit.
So now we bring our attention to the present, and the crucial near-future, as we currently traverse the wild west of self-regulation within the Artificial Intelligence industry.
President Trump revoked the previous Administration’s executive orders on AI, replacing them with a call to “remove barriers to American leadership in artificial intelligence.”
Among the current administration’s initial actions in deregulating this industry is a Regulatory Freeze which halts all new rule proposals until approved by newly appointed agency heads. And the most nonsensical, The 10-to-1 Deregulation Initiative, which says that for every new rule, regulation, or guidance an agency announces, the agency must also identify a minimum of 10 existing rules, regulations, or guidance to be repealed.
And the headline from this week, Trump says he’ll sign an executive order restricting states’ ability to regulate AI is the most unnerving move to date to remove any barrier of protection against all the novel and unstable technology. States have been previously showing significant, bipartisan pushback against federal attempts to preempt their authority to regulate AI and protect their citizens—because their constituents (that’s US) have been very vocal about the potential dangers.
Tech companies are increasingly crafting their own self-imposed ethical guidelines around the use of artificial intelligence. Do we believe the Silicon Valley oligarchs are going to use all this new technology responsibly? Here’s a few videos to hear from the most powerful of that tiny handful of AI CEOs, those with hands on the levers of our destiny:
Questions like, “Can this AI make weapons of mass destruction?” beget answers like “Right now we’re at the stage of figuring out—can these models help someone make one of those (biological weapons)?” The answer from Anthropic’s Dario Amodei was definitely not “NO”, it was instead a rationalization of the weaponization potential: “If the model can help make a biological weapon, that’s usually the same capabilities the model could use to help make vaccines.” So, it all balances out. And these couple of guys will do all that benefit-risk analysis within their private companies. The episode ends with the statement: “Congress hasn’t passed any legislation that would require AI developers to conduct safety testing. It’s largely up to the companies and their leaders to police themselves”.
And here is one of the most disturbing interviews I’ve ever watched, with the CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman, considering the incredible impact this young man now has over the future of civilization. When asked basic questions about the moral considerations built into ChatGPT, you just need to watch him answer because I cannot do justice to the weakness and thoughtlessness of his responses.
(This interview has been watched by 2.4 million viewers, but I know some people get offended by the interviewer. I’m hoping we have evolved a little passed self-limiting content because of an individual personality. I’ve learned not to care as much about whose asking the questions, unless I discern they are being biased or deceptive, as I do that the questions get asked. Because in this case, these are the precise questions I want asked. And I’m extremely grateful they were because the answers were massively informative. By now you’ve probably guessed that I really value the importance of thoroughly understanding the opposition.)
The problems with fast-tracking anything without adequate study and regulation are completely illuminated by Sam Altman’s “hmm, haven’t thought about that yet” vibe. He’s pondering and wrestling with, major, MAJOR questions of safety and morality and ethics, after the technology has been adopted and while it is being utilized by 700 million active users every day. Honestly bone-chilling to watch how casually he admits, “I don’t actually worry about us getting the big moral decisions wrong—but maybe we will get those decisions wrong too…”
It is very precarious—the “coulds” and “mights” and “perhaps” and “we can’t say yet” and “the trajectory could change and we’ll have to adapt to that” and my favorite from Amodei—”we are thinking hard about how to mitigate these models, than can design bioweapons, from engineering another Covid-style pandemic”. Thinking = in the process of = have not completed this process yet—when the product has already been released and is following its numerous trajectories.
One of those worse-case projections is already the basis for one of the current lawsuits against OpenAI. This most tragic trajectory is not a future hypothetical concern but the first but surely not the last actual real life fatality resulting from ChatGPT guidance.
Self-regulation is theoretically set up to empower industries to take ownership of their own standards and practices. That’s great, in theory. This does not work in the real world if the company is Bad.
There has always been a push from the Libertarian-minded for less government interference in our lives and in our capitalist system, from the Ayn Randian type of laissez-faire capitalists all the way to current progressive-Democrat “Abundance” types who are now formerly declaring that deregulation is required to achieve growth and innovation. And much of all this I can relate to, theoretically and philosophically, as a “release the creative energy of individuals” type gal. The pitch for industry self-regulation is always that it offers this “sensible” middle path that provides accountability without excessive government oversight.
But—because of the reality of our lived experience, we can’t afford to solely navigate by these hopeful ideals. We’ve been burned—many, many times. So, are we able to describe the new and improved oven mitt we now wear in this reality?
We may now be better able to point out which companies are Bad, like we’ve been able to do with Big Tobacco for decades, but I’ll reiterate this has not yet altered or limited any of the trajectories toward bad consequences. There are small arms of the watchdog family working tirelessly to get harmful products better regulated or removed from market, and many more of we the people are understanding the dangers and demanding more answers. But at present, both systems of government regulation and industry self-regulation are giving us only a false claim of protection.
Letting companies with multiple felonies or hundreds of thousands of criminal lawsuits govern their own oversight is ridiculous. Big Tobacco removing fruity flavored cigarettes but continuing to sell minty flavors is ridiculous. The Agrochemical argument that genetically modified laboratory food is “substantially equivalent” to natural food, asserting they have the same properties despite the DNA splicing, is ridiculous. Letting the future of humanity’s morality rest on the hunched shoulders of a sleep-deprived Sam Altman is ridiculous. It’s all so ridiculous that we can’t even deign to pay attention to it, like that dumb movie getting so much dumber that we just have to walk out of the theater.
Why waste our time watching such a weak plot so full of holes? They’re not even trying to spackle over them. The answer is because this plot we are watching, or not watching, is our actual existence. And those holes—those false claims—those lies—are causing tremendous damage. They don’t become less dangerous because their ridiculousness is obvious. If walking out of the theater fixed the holes, then that would be a wise move. But the plot continues, as will the damage, whether we feel it deserves our attention or not. We can laugh at it, we can roll our eyes at it, we can refuse to dumb ourselves down to treat it seriously—and we will still be technically fooled by it and most definitely harmed by it, because none of those actions address the problem.
The “everything is broken; we might as well give up” mindset is the underlying presupposition of our current personal defense strategy. If all we can do is throw up our arms in disgust—They continue their winning streak and our kids don’t have a chance. But, that’s not all we can do.
Going through all the years of all the tricks in the opposition’s long undefeated run may seem repetitive—(It is! My point!)—yet, tedious or not, it has to be the foundation for our defensive structure. We have to fully know and understand the moves of our adversaries before we can create countermoves. Knowing some of them but not all of them means They still achieve their goals despite us being keen to a few limited parts of their scheme. Just like playing any board game—you don’t just start moving pieces around before you’ve thoroughly read all the rules. The Bad Companies know the rules backwards and forwards, and how to break them, and how to keep us from reading them. We’ve got to acknowledge that the overload of stupidity is another tactic to keep us from reading and assimilating to the real rules of the game.
In the war in Gaza, for instance, up until very recently most casual observers perceived the dangers of the situation to be Hamas, a terrorist organization, and the Israeli military’s overly aggressive retaliation, as we could see the visible evidence of harm from both. But now, the perceived dangers also include the unrestrained power of the Israel Lobby over American decision-makers and influencers. What was once overlooked and ignored in the small print of the rules of that game, this perfectly-legal component of our government structure making their perfectly-legal moves across the board, is now something recognized by the People as a specific adversarial tactic, and the countermoves are finally materializing as a result.
And so, this is the aim of our examination—to widen the scope of our perception so we can build defense against every component of the weaponry used to kill people. As pedantic as it might seem to read about every last piece of the Playbook, we need to view each tactic just as treacherous as a sharp-toothed alligator swimming straight at us. Because each little part—like the pledge to self-regulate—is just as deadly.
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies is a very scary title of a best-selling book, making all the Best Books of the Year lists for 2025, that can help society to face what must be faced about the reality of our environment at present.
It’s a scary title because this truth is spells out is scary and we should be scared. A flock of ducks sitting on the water should be scared of a huge alligator swimming toward them. If the fear was removed they would just sit there defenseless and be eaten. The ducks don’t ever ignore their own fear, but humans do. Our species can choose not to pay attention to a threat heading toward them, because it’s so frightening.
There is an immediate threat to the children of this world, just like traffic in the street. We don’t pretend like it’s safe for our children to play in traffic because we are too afraid of them getting hurt in traffic. We caution them to fear speeding cars, because it’s a real danger that they must understand well.
It is wise for us all to wholly comprehend the dangers of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). There will be no second chance to learn a lesson the hard way from this over-reliance and under-regulation.
This video explains how the current AI “arms race” is creating a General AI system that modifies its own code—and how this would be the mother of all self-regulation catastrophes. Please watch and please join thousands of others in signing the Statement on Superintelligence :
I passed a billboard recently that said “1 in 10 kids vape—a conversation can help”. At first I was offended—now they’re just dumping all the responsibility on the parents?WTF is the FDA for if it still cannot regulate tobacco products? What was that giant Settlement Agreement for, forcing the industry to implement anti-smoking measures for youth, if they’re not enforcing any of it? But then, I had to turn that spotlight around and shine it in my own eyes. This campaign which I thought was the most offensive of all, was probably the most honest thus far.
Kids are vaping and Big Tobacco will not rest until they’ve addicted every last replacement smoker. Big Ag will not rest until there is no more natural food grown outside their control, free from their pesticides and laboratory manipulation. And, I may as well get it all in now and relay the news that Big Chemical has been adding forever chemicals to the pesticides sprayed on our food! So the final message is—BUYER BEWARE.
This means—No one is going to protect you and your family but you. This means—Shields up everyone! If everything is as clearly broken as it is, we the people must adapt and develop new systems to address the inadequacies. We surrendered control over our defenses because we trusted in their system, but now we know better.
What does your shield look like? And how does it safeguard you and your family from all this deception? Is there something you can do to protect yourself more?
We will complete the audit of all Playbook moves and thereupon conceive the most effective countermoves to combat theirs. By the end of this book, we will have the formulation of a new and improved strategy.
We can do a lot to change our side of The Pattern and yet it still won’t be enough for the warmongers to ever relinquish control of the killing machine that led to Gaza and to the next Gaza. It might only be enough to let us never again believe the claims from any so-called representative who votes to supply and fund the wars over the will of their constituents.
It might only be enough to add our voice to the push-back mandate against executive orders to deregulate the entire AI takeover.
It might only be enough to protect just one household from Bad Companies’ toxic products—our household.
It might only be enough to make sure all responsible adults recognize when a trick is in play, and can pass along that intelligence to the younger generations.
And though it might only be enough to protect just our bodies from sickness and just our minds from irrational thinking, this will make us far more fit for duty in the greater global fight for health and peace than anyone still listening to liars or robots and relying on them to survive and teach our children well.
+ Bad Companies pledges to self-regulate obstruct actual protection of public welfare. =
We are all in this together! I’m not the first to say it! See you next chapter….
Hey PS -- there are some pops in the audio on this one, my apologies. I'll try to re-record a better version when I sort out the issue.