Brownstone Journal

Articles, News, Research, and Commentary on public health, science, economics, & social theory

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university-failures

Structural Reasons Why Today’s Universities Fail

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Administrative bloat has many other consequences, amongst which is that many university functions now follow bureaucratic rather than academic logic, ignoring the purely academic benefits to activities and focusing instead on finding and privileging reasons for the bureaucracy’s own existence. This leads to a perennial search for problems that can be exaggerated and turned into a justification for more administration (e.g., ‘Is there a problem I can pretend to solve by creating an additional compliance problem?’).

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essential reading

Essential Reading for the Dissident, the Disenfranchised, the Disillusioned

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Stapleton’s book is a tale of supreme political hubris and arrogance, enough arrogance to imagine that a riot squad can control an airborne virus. Lewis brought in the gods to resolve the finale; Stapleton, too, brings the supernatural out into the open, spirits portentously looming over the future of our once free land.

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truth telling

Tell the Truth No Matter What 

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The remnant of Western Civilization ultimately has a truth problem. On one side we have the fairy tale of happy pluralism that there is nothing substantive worth debating regarding the philosophical underpinnings of society. On the other side, there is the persistent temptation to either flirt with or fully embrace authoritarianism as a shortcut to suppress the conflict that is necessary to really arrive at truth. 

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Australia

The Australian Gulag Archipelago

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John covers all the important elements of the disaster befalling Australia: the arrogance of power, the delight of the bullies at having so many victims, the panic over trivialities, the desire for destruction, the suffering of the children and the lonely, the absurdity of the ever-changing rules, the corruption, the lies, and the oppressive sensation of being in a slow-motion disaster.

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illusion of effective covid vaccine

The Bias that Creates the Illusion of an Effective Covid Vaccine

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How could Covid vaccines have been highly effective in the frail and elderly? They were not. To understand why, we have to struggle with complicated biases in observational studies because we don’t have randomized trials with a mortality endpoint.

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ChatGPT

What People Overlook in the AI Debate

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As Dr Narayanan indicates, ChatGPT’s responses to some computer science examination questions he posed to it were spurious, but they were phrased in such a specious manner that their falsity was not immediately apparent, and he had to check them three times before being certain that this was the case. So much for ChatGPT’s vaunted capacity to ‘replace’ humans.

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campus closures

The Human Costs of Campus Closures

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In our unhinged pursuit of a covid-free fantasyland, we wreaked untold and immeasurable havoc on the entire higher education ecosystem. Whether this is reversible remains to be seen. But for the damage not to be permanent, we must at the very least resolve never to do it again. Another round of campus closures like the last one will likely permanently destroy higher ed as we know it.   

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pandemic puppets

Pandemic Leaders Were Biodefense Puppets and Profiteers

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When public health and medical experts blanketed the airwaves and Internet with “recommendations” urging universal masking, mass testing and quarantining of asymptomatic people, vaccine mandates, and other anti-public health policies – or when they promoted obviously flawed studies that supported the quarantine-until-vaccine biodefense agenda – they were not doing so because they were dumb, incompetent, or misguided. 

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Focused Protection: Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff

Let There Be Sound

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If all this makes you nervous, you can relax: for the time being, Amazon’s Audible platform, the industry leader and Brownstone Institute’s audiobook purveyor of choice, is sticking to real human narrators. We’ve started our audiobook program with our first book of 2023, Blindsight Is 2020, and plan to issue audiobook versions of our other 2023 books (Fear of a Microbial Planet and The Treason of the Experts) and beyond. We hope you enjoy them. 

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information

Informational No Man’s Land

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Under these circumstances, those who do their own independent research, rather than uncritically swallowing whatever “official authorities” tell them, are not the “cranks” and “conspiracy theorists” they are being made out to be, but citizens who actually understand the predicament they find themselves in, and have the courage to think for themselves, even when it draws down ridicule, censorship, and alienation from “respectable” society.

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eating disorders

Lockdowns Blamed for Sharp Rise in Teenage Girls With Eating Disorders Since 2020

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Who could have guessed that enforced isolation isn’t good for young people’s mental health? But why is the lesson the BBC draws always that Government needs to fund more services and never that maybe lockdown wasn’t such a smart move after all?

Lockdowns Blamed for Sharp Rise in Teenage Girls With Eating Disorders Since 2020 Read Journal Article