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Shanghai

People of Shanghai Forced Into Hard Lockdown

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The Wuhan lockdown lasted only a handful of weeks, but its declared “success” in defeating COVID convinced the vast majority of the world to attempt to replicate the severe restrictions. For two years, China has claimed to have stamped out the coronavirus with a lockdown + “COVID Zero” policy, but attempts to replicate the measures have resulted in unprecedented disaster for humanity, as lockdowns catastrophically failed to stop the spread.

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The Expendables: The Biopolitics of Human Sacrifice

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If you are one of those who supported the separation of the unvaccinated from society, it is worth considering how your own life was diminished during the pandemic. The range of the homo sacer, those deemed expendable, has been broadened over time from traditional groups such as the homeless, up through the working classes in recent decades, and now large swathes of middle classes during Covid.

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How Signaling Turns Virtue Into Vice

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The moral problem here is that, regardless of intent, a participant in a declarative fad is knowingly and personally benefiting from an injustice without doing anything to put right the wrong from which that personal benefit is being extracted. To do so is to benefit slightly from the very injustice at issue without providing at least as much benefit to anyone else.

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A Physician’s Plea for Exemption: Full Text 

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Immunity offered by the vaccine is not long-lasting and the protection rapidly diminishes each month following the first 2 months after the second dose. With no randomized controlled trials evaluating the efficacy of the boosters on relevant clinical outcomes, and no data on safety given that the booster studies released did not contain a control group. A practitioner of science cannot be confident the potential rare benefit of hospital reduction in the younger healthy population outweighs repetitive dosing of a vaccine with limited safety data.   

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Tchaikovsky cancelled

The Cancellation of Tchaikovsky 

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The theme of Tchaikovsky‘s 1812 Overture is a truly horrific event that took place when a despot lost his sense of reality. Precisely because of this, performing it is never more fitting than now, when yet another despot has gone too far. The failure to realize this signifies we have lost our relationship with the very values by which we define our culture.

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Lockdowns Had a Devastating Impact on Religion

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Although individuals may be faring better, the profound damage to religious institutions is also quite remarkable. Charitable giving at many places of worship dropped precipitously during the pandemic. Many churches took government PPE funds to help weather the financial storm, but those funds only lasted for so long. 

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Why this Nonstop Fear Mongering?

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Maybe the reporters and editors at the Times believe they’re advancing the cause of public health by stoking panic, even long after it is justified by the level of the threat (if it ever was justified in the first place). Or maybe, to be a bit more cynical (or realistic?) about it, the reporters and editors know that fear and panic draw readers, especially around Covid, so they just can’t let go.

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Air Force Cadets Covid Vaccination Religious Exemption Denied

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In view of the sincerity of the cadets’ religious objections and the adverse risk-to-benefit profile of receiving the Covid vaccine, what is the purpose of forcing these cadets to subject themselves to a procedure that affords them and those around them no discernible benefit? Is the purpose to provide reasoned, compassionate medical care or simply demand submission or even to purge them from the ranks? 

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Nuremberg, 1947

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How and why was the bulwark of 20th-century medical ethics abandoned so quickly, and with so little opposition from the medical and scientific establishment? What were the immediate effects? What will be the long-term, consequences of the shift back to a crass utilitarian ethic governing science, medicine, and public health during a pandemic?

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The Missing Progressive Jewish Response

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Our response to the pandemic not only elevated false authority, built on ideas disconnected from the realities of human existence, and not only did it create a system of idolatry, of symbols which were used to mediate this authority; but furthermore that system of idolatry was welcomed in and installed within the very hearts of Jewish communities, and therefore in many ways we directly relived that destruction ourselves, which is so powerfully described in the Book of Lamentations.

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