Policy Articles at Brownstone feature opinion and analysis of global policy in economics, public health, public dialog, and social life. Policy articles are translated into multiple languages.
In a very real sense, Ukraine’s territory is the battleground for a proxy war between Russia and the West that reflects the unsettled questions since the end of the Cold War. This explains the ambivalence of most non-Western countries. They are no less offended by Russia’s war of aggression. But they also have considerable sympathy for the argument that NATO was insensitively provocative in expanding to Russia’s very borders.
No question that the administrative bureaucracies would lock down again under the same or new pretext. Yes, they will face more opposition the next time and trust in their wisdom has fallen off a cliff. But the pandemic response also granted them new powers of surveillance, enforcement, and hegemony. The scientism that drove the response informs everything they do. So the next time, it will be harder to restrain them.
Antidepressants like fluoxetine double the risk of suicide and aggression in children and adolescentso, they often lead to decreased quality of life, they cause sexual dysfunction in about 50% of users, and these harms may continue long after they try to quit. There seems to be no rationale for using fluoxetine in young people for treating depression – the new analysis concludes the drug is unsafe and ineffective.
The Biden administration will end the vaccine mandate for health care workers on May 11. But don’t expect politicians and bureaucrats to honor the “First, Do No Harm” rule in the future. Inside the Beltway, federal edicts will likely continue to be “close enough for government work” to sane health care policies.
The case for nuclear weapons rests on a superstitious belief of magical Realism in the utility of the bomb and the theory of deterrence. The extreme destructiveness of nuclear weapons makes them qualitatively different in political and moral terms from other weapons, to the point of rendering them virtually unusable. Like the emperor who had no clothes, this might well be the truest explanation of why they have not been used since 1945.
“Whole of nation” is closely associated with “whole of government” terminology. Both presented as feel-good ideas in plain text, but in fact these words signal a usurpation of power by the militarized executive branch of the government. Public private partnerships – so beloved by sellouts in academia, pharma, medicine and defense – are another closely associated term.
The excuse that we had to lock down because of freezer trucks does not hold water. The lockdown edict was issued on March 16, 2020, following the declaration of emergency on March 13, three days after Trump’s advisers convinced him to issue the lockdown. In that time, the funeral parlors and morgues closed too, as did most all medical services. The country was also in panic, which is not generally good for public health.
The last three years show us what happens when specialists are in charge. If you want to know whether it is a good idea to lock down a whole city, it helps if you can quickly see the many effects lockdowns will have among many different parts of the city’s population and economy. Only with a broad view of many factors do you have hope of making a reasonable judgment.
In 2020, rather than encourage the very wealth creation that has long been the biggest foe of death and disease (by far), panicky politicians quite literally chose economic contraction as a virus mitigation strategy. Historians will marvel at the abject stupidity of the U.S. political class, but not the Post’s editorialists or the authors of a report that the editorialists remarkably find insightful.
Continuing to exclude unvaccinated noncitizens, non-immigrants from entering the United States is a policy that puts politics over science. Politicians claiming the opposite to be true are funded by the very industries that benefit most from continuing with such a policy. Their pushback against ending the mandate is justified by their faith in the “best available science” yet that science cannot be produced by the very institution on whom the continuation of the mandate rests.
In an idle moment, I was looking through my emails, and came across this little exchange. In August 2022, the vax push was in full swing, despite the evidence of serious concerns. Here’s a trail starting and ending with an email from a medical provider I had visited once or twice in central Melbourne.
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