“Eye-watering sums of money were spent during lockdowns, on furlough and business support schemes which helped mask the inevitable economic consequences we are now seeing. Many of our current problems could have been avoided had the government carried out an effective cost-benefit analysis of lockdowns and other restrictions.”
It’s nice of the New York Times to finally print this fact, but they would appear to be, euphemistically, a day late and a dollar short—the “dollar” in this case being as many as 200,000 young American lives.
Freedom of conscience is out. The real responsibility of the players, according to the Gray Lady, was to seamlessly parrot the wholly extraneous ideological line of their employer whether they believed in it or not. The truth is they should have never, ever been put in that position.
The covid pandemonium was a reminder that even rich, sensible, well-mannered, and well-educated societies can descend into the pits of hell faster than you can cry “emergency.” Society always balances on the edge of an unspeakably horrific abyss.
Mattias Desmet on the Totalitarianism of Mass Panic Read More
Let’s not be naive about the prospects for change. It is going to require far more than merely electing a new class of supposed rulers via the democratic process. The real rulers are too smart to subject themselves to the business of elections. Those are designed to keep our minds busy with the belief that democracy still survives and therefore it is the voters, not the government, that is responsible for outcomes.
The Origin and Operation of the US Administrative State Read More
Before the next public health crisis, we need to create a fair, forward-thinking, and reputationally robust institution to serve as a non-governmental alternative and foil to federal bureaucracies like the CDC. Privately funded laboratory research, an alternative framework for reputation analysis and peer review and influence-free conclusions could revolutionize the political approach to health and safety. Ideally, such an institution would be a gathering-place for those experts like the Barrington signatories who stood against the tide and prioritized real science over politics.
The Urgent Need to Break the Public Health Monopoly Read More
Social engineering appears doable only to those persons who, seeing only a relatively few surface phenomena, are blind to the astonishing complexity that is ever-churning beneath the surface to create those surface phenomena. To such persons, social reality appears as it does to a child: simple and easily manipulated to achieve whatever are the desires that motivate the manipulators.
If you tested yourself on a random day when you had no symptoms, your one test would probably say “You’re Negative,” and that wouldn’t change your behavior at all. Such a negative test used with a low pretest probability of being positive is like firing a bullet haphazardly into the fog, long before you see the whites of your enemy’s eyes with a low pre-shot probability of hitting anyone.
Participants wearing masks reported marked discomfort, such as feeling hot, humid, and breathing resistance and claustrophobia with higher exercise intensity. While other researchers could not measure significant detectable differences, these signs need to be taken seriously.
Wearing a Mask During Indoor Exercise Can Be Fatal Read More
The world that the lockdowns and mandates, and all that is associated with them, unleashed is dark, corrupt, duplicitous, dishonest, dangerous, tribal, and pervaded with nihilism and a loss of moral clarity and a resulting criminality both public and private. How easy it turns out to be to shatter trust, to disable a functioning social order, to spread corruption from person to person, institution to institution, to the point that the center no longer holds!
Part of the problem is that much of the evidence refuting the lab leak theory comes from scientists on the political left, who’ve so thoroughly debased themselves on this subject. It’s testament to the CCP’s dark sense of humor—riddled throughout the response to Covid—that they were able to convince the left it was woke to support the even-more-ridiculous theory that Covid came from some poor Chinese shopkeepers in Wuhan’s Huanan market selling pangolins.
China’s Culpability for Lockdowns Does Not Depend on the Lab Leak Theory Read More
Second-order effects on mortality were not measured in real time like SARS-COV2 cases. Why? What we measure matters. What we don’t measure might actually just matter even more. Months and years later we are still accounting for how the Covid-19 response disrupted life and cost lives in many other ways we simply chose to ignore.
Already in 2020, There Were Signs of Increased Non-Covid Mortality Read More
