Articles

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

smart people failed

How Did the World’s Smartest People Fail So Miserably?

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It’s over, that phase of American history, when a bunch of people baptized in the values of the 1960s, could be expected to provide the intellectual framework necessary to move society forward. There is no recovery from what they did, they collaborated with the enemy when the fate of society was on the line. To use their favorite phrase — they became “constitutive of” the predatory system they once sought to critique. Our society is so corrupt that the term “intellectual” no longer has a coherent meaning. 

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big pharma

Big Pharma’s Co-Pay Coupon Racket

By / / , , / 4 minute read / Articles
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Drugmakers rely on shady promotional gimmicks to keep the cost of brand-name medicine high, and you’ve seen them in action. In the many, many, many television commercials you’ve seen for various drugs—and Big Pharma is the second largest advertiser by industry—consider how many mention a coupon the manufacturer offers. In fact, the share of brand-name prescription drug spending that included a coupon rose from 26 percent in 2007 to 90 percent in 2017.

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Albert Camus on the Denial of Freedom

By / / , / 17 minute read / Articles
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And then we realized that the separation was destined to continue, we had no choice but to come to terms with the days ahead. In short, we returned to our prison-house, we had nothing left us but the past, and even if some were tempted to live in the future, they had speedily to abandon the idea—anyhow, as soon as could be—once they felt the wounds that the imagination inflicts on those who yield themselves to it. 

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vaccine efficacy

The Final Brick in the Vaccine Efficacy Narrative

By / / / 10 minute read / Articles
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Two key bricks seem to have already fallen from the COVID vaccines’ narrative – the one about their fantastic efficacy against infections and the one about their superb safety. However, one stubborn narrative brick seems to stand still, leading many people to believe that the booster doses of the vaccines are capable of providing long-term protection against severe illness and deaths (despite their failure to protect against infections).  

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hundred flowers bloom

Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom – Always!

By / / , , / 15 minute read / Articles
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The pandemic has shown us that research outputs can be statistical artefacts, made to order for an agenda. The most blatant example of this is the claim that the vaccines are 95 percent effective, which continues to be made even though 95 percent of people in the US have been infected. Both these facts cannot be true. If this fundamental brick turns out not to be objective truth, what else can we rely on? 

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twitter substack

Twitter’s Extremely Dangerous Attack on Substack 

By / / / 5 minute read / Articles
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If this turns out to be deliberate and Elon sticks with it, the effect on chilling research, writing, and free speech will be even worse than when Elon took over Twitter. It will also seriously hurt Substack too. There are huge businesses that are thriving there. It is one of the few bright spots on the Internet today. A loss of reach here will mean the further cartelization of opinion and ideas. 

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Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

The Tragedy of the Brooklyn Literary Scene

By / / , / 11 minute read / Articles
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Because lies embraced our whole culture since 2020, and because public intellectuals for the most part did not stand up to the lies at the time, and because many even participated in the lies (hello, Sam Harris); since horrible things happened to those of us who did stand up to the lies — most public intellectuals at this moment cannot address the really important events of the recent past.

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platform censorship

Don’t Let Them Memory-Hole This 

By / / , / 6 minute read / Articles
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The tellers of tales can write stories but they cannot invent their own realities. There will be no restoration of liberty, rights, and truth until we come to terms with what happened, why, and how to prevent it in the future. Playing along with this conspiracy of silence surrounding a policy that effectively blotted out every advance in human rights since the Magna Carta is a disastrous error that could lead to the entrenchment of a new dark age. 

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darkness to light

Reflections on the Triduum: Can the Darkness Turn to Light?

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Three years ago I felt the depth of the darkness which had entered the world, and I was moved to choose defiance in favor of the light. This brought my path to be part of the good work being done here at Brownstone. A Happy Easter to all, and let us continue the good fight against weaponized fear which seeks to prevent us from experiencing our highest goods.

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congress

Congress Has a Leverage Point on Pandemic Policy

By / / , / 8 minute read / Articles
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Unlike the PREP Act and the other emergency pandemic powers, this one is set to expire at the end of September. In other words, absent any action, PAHPA and all its authority to wage biomedical warfare are finished, thereby providing House Republicans with tremendous leverage to clip the agency’s wings. How can Republicans move on from this disaster and reauthorize the agency that is responsible for the worst tyranny in American history?

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foreign traveler vaccine requirements

Visit the US by Sea or Land If Not by Air

By / / / 8 minute read / Articles
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The vaccine requirement for foreign travelers may be one of the most ineffective and capricious “public health” policies ever created. It still exists to the detriment of binational families kept apart by its draconian prohibitions and at a cost of billions of dollars in revenue to the US economy while not having any effect on preventing disease. 

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