Articles

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

chickens

Why Are the Chickens So Sick?

By / / , / 9 minute read / Articles
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The parallels between HPAI expert orthodoxy and covid orthodoxy are too numerous to mention. Fear porn is rampant in our culture. The HPAI worry feeds food worry, which makes people clamor for government security. People will accept just about anything if they’re afraid. Does anyone really think human cleverness is going to beat migratory ducks? Really? Think it through and then embrace a more natural remedy: well-managed decentralized pastured poultry with appropriate flock sizes.

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Georgetown Law

The Corruption of Georgetown Law

By / / / 22 minute read / Articles
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Most of all, this system benefits the people in charge, who maintain the status quo through the politics of personal destruction. The school serves as an incubator for the unimpressive rulers of tomorrow. Some classmates will go on to serve the party line in Congress, others as bureaucrats, and many more as faceless defenders of Wall Street. No matter where they land, they’ll internalize the dogma of Georgetown Law. 

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do you matter

Do You Matter?

By / / / 9 minute read / Articles
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Do facts matter? Of course they do. But facts, alone, will not answer the questions we really care about. The real ammunition of the COVID war is not information. It’s not a battle over what is true, what counts as misinformation, what it means to #followthescience. It’s a battle over what our lives mean and, ultimately, whether we matter.

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cochrane fact check

Cochrane Fact-Checked with Absurd Results

By / / / 14 minute read / Articles
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Considering how this seriously flawed article is now apparently used to suppress the dissemination of an important scientific paper, to press the Cochrane editor-in-chief into making false claims about the objective of the paper and downplay its results, and to censor a review of the findings by an important mainstream newspaper, there is clearly an urgent need to act strongly against the so called “fact-checking” industry.

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brainwashing japan

Brainwashing Versus Critical Thinking in Japan

By / / , / 6 minute read / Articles
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The overwhelming majority in all age groups in Japan got caught up in the panic generated by government officials, mainstream news media, and the medical community. For three years now masks have been worn continuously everywhere, including mountain trails and public parks. The widespread use of brainwashing here has been especially disheartening to me, since I have spent much of my time and effort over the last thirty years teaching, researching, and writing about critical thinking education in Japan.

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Occupy Silicon Valley

Where Is Occupy Silicon Valley?

By / / / 5 minute read / Articles
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Silvergate’s failure was not a scandal. SVB’s failure per se was not a scandal (except to the extent that our vaunted banking regulators failed to prevent the most prosaic type of failure). Again–the scandal is the politically tainted response that will have baleful consequences in the future, as the response virtually guarantees that there will be more SVBs in the future.

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Science is

Science Is Not to Be Trusted

By / / , , / 20 minute read / Articles
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Science is not a belief system, so it’s not something to be trusted. Science is a social process which anyone can join, it is a conversation with evidence to be examined, discussed, questioned, and tested. Science is not limited to Ivory Towers and people with PhDs. Anyone, no matter how anonymous or weird they are (in our idiosyncratic views of “weird”), can examine a paper, question some results, discuss them, and change our perspectives. Or at least, that’s how it should be.

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gordian knot

How to Cut Through the New Gordian Knots

By / / , / 13 minute read / Articles
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We can forget about seemingly simple fixes, like giving politicians the right to fire civil servants on the spot. Besides, giving clueless and corrupted politicians yet more power is not going to make matters better. Real reform will have to be dramatic, and it will come about only in dramatic circumstances.

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Covid Response Museum

The Covid Response Museum

By / / / 4 minute read / Articles
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The target inauguration date for the museum is March 25, 2023, which is the third anniversary of mass incarceration of one-sixth of humanity, i.e. India’s first lockdown. To start, the museum will be online. We also encourage people to setup physical museums using the material from this website, under creative commons license: free to share with attribution.

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bureaucratic doublespeak

Bureaucratic Doublespeak Gets People Killed 

By / / / 11 minute read / Articles
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Orwell argues that these language patterns destroy truth and beauty and clarity; they cloud thinking and collapse culture with their obfuscations. When reading or listening to such speech, we find ourselves mired in the muck of sloppy language that confuses, disorients, and depresses, and in the extreme, such language gets people killed, because if we don’t question it, allow it to frustrate and anger us, it lulls and numbs our minds.

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freedom is the answer

Regardless of Virus Origins, Freedom Is the Answer

By / / , / 4 minute read / Articles
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Lest the crowd that has long been properly anti-lockdown forgets, pathogens are as old as mankind is. Since they are, the accenting of where they come from is to completely miss the point. Instead, the always and everywhere expressed view should be that reality should not be used by the political, expert and medical classes as a pretext for taking our freedom. Freedom is precious, and authoritarians can’t have it regardless of a pathogen’s origin or its presumed lethality.

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sanitation

The Sanitation Power Does Not Permission Tyranny

By / / , / 6 minute read / Articles
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The enlargement of the term sanitation beyond its vernacular meaning is fraught with danger. Indeed, it threatens to undermine all the achievements of public health over a century. Perhaps, then, it stands to reason that the CDC, which got so much wrong during the pandemic, would now be trying to convince us that a power designed to protect us from foreign disease-carrying rubbish would entitle them to make us cover up our faces and inhibit our ability to breath or communicate through non-verbal signals. 

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