Brownstone Institute Articles ⋆ Page 53 of 207 ⋆ Brownstone Institute

$10 Trillion Stolen Right Under Our Noses

Mark Oshinskie / August 28, 2023 / Economics, Public Health / 6 minute read

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All of the “Covid Relief” numbers are far too big to understand unless one has a good numbers sense and sits quietly in a room with some blank paper and does some ciphering. People thought it was a good idea to spend limitlessly and futilely on Grandma without considering the costs to her adult children and grandkids. Hey, Grandma used to make us cookies; she’s worth whatever we’ve got. And even what we don’t got. Even if we can’t, through the full range of “mitigation,” keep her alive for another two months in a nursing home, where she’s seldom visited. If she has to live in isolation and die alone to “stop the spread,” so be it.

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We Are All Pretending There Is No Emergency

Richard Kelly / August 28, 2023 / Psychology / 4 minute read

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Perhaps we all know what just happened, but we are all pretending that it didn’t, from one of two perspectives – either pretending that everything is normal while actively suppressing one’s suspicion that it isn’t; or knowing everything is very very bad and actively disguising that knowledge with plausible cover stories when we encounter the other perspective.

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The Real Trouble with the Trump Indictment

Michael Lesher / August 28, 2023 / Law / 9 minute read

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Forget the media frenzy about the details: who spoke with whom and when, which Trump adviser is being charged for which “debunked” claim, and so on. The important point about this indictment is that lawyers are being charged with felonies for doing legal work. An American prosecutor is criminalizing the legal profession – a business that can only end with the “totalitarian form of government” whose first steps Justice Stevens identified with the elimination of lawyers.

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Pfizer Drip Feeds Data From its Pregnancy Trial

Maryanne Demasi / August 28, 2023 / Pharma, Vaccines / 6 minute read

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In January 2021, in the absence of any human data in pregnancy, the CDC stated on its website that mRNA vaccines were “unlikely to pose a specific risk for people who are pregnant.” Behind the scenes however, Pfizer was scrambling to conduct a clinical trial of its vaccine in pregnant women. By February 2022, Pfizer revealed it still did “not yet have a complete data set.”

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How My Views on Government Have Changed

Aaron Hertzberg / August 27, 2023 / Government / 8 minute read

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The government tried to dehumanize unvaccinated people, and largely succeeded according to polling showing that a significant percentage of people if not outright majorities held a variety of shocking views about unvaccinated people including that they are selfish; stupid; a danger to society; should be forcibly confined to their homes; have their children taken away; and be relocated to “quarantine facilities.” A considerable plurality of vaccinated people, in a word, overtly despised the unvaccinated.

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Long Covid Is the New AIDS

Steve Templeton / August 27, 2023 / Government, Public Health / 6 minute read

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If everything can be blamed on Long COVID, then nothing can be blamed on Long COVID. It’s all confirmation studies from here on out. But since the COVID pandemic has ended and HIV continues to threaten at-risk populations without access to medicine, the actual need for HIV research will remain greater, while concerns about Long COVID among the public will fade.

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Revisiting the Biden Legal Position on Masks

Brownstone Institute / August 26, 2023 / Masks / 3 minute read

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It’s not difficult to discern what we might call the Biden Doctrine of administrative rule-making. It means that the agencies can order whatever they want, whether or not there is any plausible basis in law or whether or not there is any rational basis for it at all. It is a doctrine of bureaucratic supremacy.

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Welcome to the Dying Earth

Haley Kynefin / August 26, 2023 / Philosophy, Psychology / 28 minute read

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There are always forces in this world that pull us down into the muck and mire. In our day-to-day pursuit of happiness, desire, entertainment, and survival, it is easy to forget what we have the potential to become. It is easy to get lost in technicalities, in ego trips and in reactionary indignation. If we are the victims of atrocities, it is all the easier to seek our justice in retaliation, viciousness, and brutal revenge. But in a world where everybody sees themselves as the primary and true victim, where does that ultimately leave us?

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The Great Game of Let’s Pretend

Jeffrey A. Tucker / August 25, 2023 / Government, Media, Society / 7 minute read

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It’s a very strange time in American political history, no doubt. We have one line of thinking sweeping through the population – which is based on mass incredulity and fury – and then another which is a veneer of normalcy that is slathered on top of our anger by all official institutions, which work hard to keep all these topics out of respectable conversations. Meanwhile, the whole of academic, mainstream social media, major mainstream media, and all of government seems to agree that all these obvious topics are too incendiary to be raised in polite company.

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CDC Now Refusing New COVID Vaccine Adverse Event Reports in Its V-Safe Program

David Gortler / August 24, 2023 / Pharma / 5 minute read

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In George Orwell’s 1984, characters were told by The Party to “reject the evidence of your eyes and [your] ears.” Now, the CDC isn’t even allowing that evidence to be collected for viewing (and prospective rejecting). It’s a terrible idea for any product, let alone novel mRNA technologies.

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The Positive Feedback Loop: How Totalitarians Instill Fear and Restrict Human Rights

Scott Sturman / August 24, 2023 / Policy, Society / 4 minute read

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We are informed that free speech is dangerous and that it leads to hate, instability, and mayhem. But this disingenuous argument is the argument of tyrants, who gaslight and use words as weapons to disable a free people. Free speech is the salvation of an open, prosperous, and civil society and the embodiment of the sustaining benefits of negative feedback loops.

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The Dangers of Self Censorship During the Covid Pandemic

Joseph Fraiman / August 23, 2023 / Censorship, Media, Society / 19 minute read

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To compound this any expert or publication that dared raise a challenge would be investigated by fact-checkers and predictably labeled as misinformation and subsequently censored. Everyday citizens, on the receiving end of this distorted information machine, were left without any previously respected outlet for any well-founded skepticism. A few spoke out and were virtually ostracized from mainstream society. Many others saw the writing on the wall and, wishing to maintain their relationships and avoid uncomfortable situations, kept their opinions to themselves.

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