Finally we come to the biggest problem of all. What kind of society do we want to live in and build? Is it based on the presumption that freedom belongs to all and is the best path for progress and good lives? Or do we want the rights of the people always to defer to the mandarins in the walled-off bureaucracies who give orders and expect only compliance and no challenge to their rule?
The Next Ten Battles Continue Reading
The way things are going at this point, the most viable alternative seems to be to get working to build a parallel social structure which can exist alongside or even tunneled within the Fascist Imperial state, and which might eventually replace it. How could such an organization be structured?
Integrity Lost and Regained Continue Reading
Modern Orthodox Rabbinic leadership, both in the US and in Israel, were some of the earliest and most dedicated to the warped scientific framework and extralegal approach underlying obedience to the new rules of covid enforcement. Indeed, early on, the Rabbinical Council of Bergen County was one of the first religious institutions in the country to voluntarily cancel all religious services, claiming that Jews were religiously required to stay home, well before any government edicts were issued.
Modern Orthodox Judaism Failed to be Either Modern or Orthodox During Covid Continue Reading
There is a strange way in which US lockdowns and disease panic miraculously healed the US/China trade rift that had been developing for the two years prior. Most “personal protective equipment” and especially masks used during the lockdown period in the US was imported from China in a deal between Trump and Xi, brokered by Trump’s son-in-law. Trade recovered, beginning with pandemic-related goods.
Why Your Mask Came from China Continue Reading
The destruction wrought by the lockdowns has many fathers—computer-modelers who terrified federal policymakers with guesses dressed up as certainties; health officials who were given the levers of government without any sense of or care for unintended consequences; governors who ruled by executive fiat.
Seven Urgent Lessons of Lockdowns Continue Reading
As we celebrate the nomination and eventual confirmation of Dr. Bhattacharya, we will continue to hear “Fringe” describe him. This is nonsense. Lockdowns were a security state-driven pandemic response rooted in fear, panic, and authoritarianism. They were never mainstream.
Lockdowns Were Never Mainstream Continue Reading
So remember the lanternfly. Remember how silly and how ephemeral was the story of its threat to us all. And yet, how seriously we were lectured that the lanternfly meant the End of the World. Remember it the next time you’re told that the entire globe is about to burn because people are driving cars or cooking with gas stoves. Or that somebody’s sniffles are going to kill you. Or that censorship is meant for your protection. Or that democracy and freedom aren’t really in your best interest.
Where Have All the Lanternflies Gone? Continue Reading
Tufekci and Howard played a decisive role in affecting this vast shift in scientific guidance that so intimately affected the lives of every American, which the Cochrane review has now shown to have afforded no benefit at the population level, for dubious reasons such as “shaping new societal norms.” Throughout COVID, Tufekci pushed false information and harmful policies that were far afield of her expertise based on information from China, despite knowing such information was unreliable, without ever admitting or apologizing for the errors once the harms became manifest.
How Zeynep Tufekci and Jeremy Howard Masked America Continue Reading
Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that the eruption of irrationality and hysteria in America during 2020-2021 most resembled not 1954, when Senator McCarthy set the nation looking for communist moles behind every government desk, or 1919, when the notorious raids of Attorney General Mitchell were rounding up purported Reds in their tens of thousands, but the winter of 1691-1692. That’s when two little girls—Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams of Salem, Massachusetts—fell into the demonic activity of fortune-telling, which soon found them getting strangely ill, having fits, spouting gibberish, and contorting their bodies into odd positions.
Let the Real Investigations Begin Continue Reading
The 2019 tabletop exercise involved a huge number of public-sector agencies across all states plus many private-sector associations. It postulated a disease scenario in which a respiratory virus begins in China and spreads around the world by air travelers. It is first detected in Chicago. The World Health Organization declares a pandemic 47 days later.
What Is Crimson Contagion? Continue Reading
