OTHER / MISCELLANEOUS
Bulk Post from Brownstone Institute
Regardless of Virus Origins, Freedom Is the Answer by John Tamny.
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.
The Sanitation Power Does Not Permission Tyranny By Jeffrey Tucker.
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.
Can We Still Trust the Doctor? By Alan Lash
A simple message to doctors and nurses: Our lives are better when we trust you. But right now, many of us are hesitant; we have been burned by the Covid nonsense in the last three years. Our loved ones have suffered, and we don’t see common sense from the medical establishment.
“Far-Right” – The N-word of Politics By Robin Koerner
When the facts are not with them, they have few options other than resorting to ad hominem attacks – and no such attack better fits the false inference of ill-intended opposition to state action than “far-right.” By the same token, no attack better fits the purposes of state actors with an interest in containing a minority opinion that threatens to expose their designs.
The Greatest Lie Told During Covid By El Gato Malo
Deaths in the US used to be more volatile. but since the advent of penicillin, that stopped. Pre-covid, I do not think there has been a single year in US history since 1945 where the age adjusted death rate exceeded something “normal” from within the five years prior to “pandemic” year.
Conspiracy Theories Become Conspiracy Facts By Ramesh Thakur
Interventions rooted in panic, driven by political machinations, and using all the levers of state power to terrify citizens and muzzle critics in the end needlessly killed massive numbers of the most vulnerable while putting the vast low-risk majority under house arrest. The benefits are questionable but the harms are increasingly obvious. The Johnson government in general and Hancock in particular revalidate Lord Acton’s astute observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Cochrane Ends the Masking Rage By Beny Spira
Even before the pandemic, the best available evidence – randomized controlled trials – already showed that masks are ineffective in containing respiratory viral transmission. Additional RCTs conducted during the pandemic support this conclusion. Therefore, the best available evidence does not support even the recommendation of wearing masks, let alone making them compulsory.
Are You Being Frightened Not to Travel? By Jeffrey A. Tucker
Let us hope that the lockdown years were aberrant but it would be wiser to see them as a possible template for what some sectors of elite society truly do have in store. And with Covid, the key to compliance is always and everywhere the same: fear.
Ron DeSantis’s Letter to Biden on Behalf of Novak Djokovic By Brownstone Institute
At present, it appears that the United States is one of only a handful of countries that requires foreign visitors to have received a COVID-19 vaccination. Indeed, in an interview on September 18, 2022, you personally declared that “the pandemic is over,” and your administration has already communicated to Congress that the COVID-19 emergency will formally end on May 11. The time has come to give up the fiction that COVID vaccines remain a necessary tool to promote public health.
The Vaccine Was “95% Effective” How? By Robert Blumen
The mis-translation of the message convinced the public that mass vaccination would stop the pandemic. And, it persuaded them to see the unvaccinated as a threat. Without this false belief, none of employment mandates, quarantine camps, vaccine passports to eat out or travel made any sense. If the vaccine did not stop transmission, then everyone was going to get exposed eventually, vaccinated or not. We might as well get on with it so we reach herd immunity sooner rather than later.
The UK Narrative Falls Apart with Leaked Messages By Michael Senger
The new leak is the most damning revelation to come so far from the Daily Telegraph’s recently-announced ‘Lockdown Files,’ which are based on an archive of over 100,000 messages sent between Hancock and other officials. Journalist Isabel Oakeshott ostensibly obtained the WhatsApp messages to assist with a book about Hancock, comprising the biggest leak of UK Government data in over a decade and shedding new light on the UK’s lockdowns, mandates, and fear messaging.
The Bio-Security Cabal: A 20-Year Entrenchment By Paula Jardine
It is startling how Dr Kadlec and his few associates have, over a period of more than 20 years, managed to orchestrate an undemocratic and unethical bio-security coup with global reach.
The Ruination of Children By Christine Black
With the flip of a switch, the real world they knew ended. When they were confined to their rooms and houses, friends and music, color and life, humor and competition, all lived inside screens. Why wouldn’t they turn there to those worlds when this world could collapse in an instant? No wonder screen worlds seem better than this one. Are fake worlds better? How will we repair this one?
Theorists vs. Practitioners By Jeffrey A. Tucker
Theory without a reality check can make the world unlivable. This is because theorists can build beautiful models that hide grave errors, intentionally or not, and there is no means by which their mistakes are revealed until you test them against the real world. You never want them in charge of the whole project.
The Fake Investigations of Covid Fraud By James Bovard
The most important lesson of the pandemic: Don’t trust politicians with boundless power. Exposing the profound bipartisan failure on COVID is the best vaccine that Americans can receive against being mercilessly plundered the next time pols proclaim a national emergency.
The Collapse of Women’s Health and Work By Carla Peeters
The pandemic policy resulted in the biggest setback in women’s participation in paid work and gender equality for a generation and undermines women’s security and resilience to shocks and ability to pay for health services when needed. An expected further collapsing health system, and at the same time an increase in disabilities and elderly people, suggests that even more women will leave the workforce in the near future to fulfill (unpaid) care and domestic work.
How Did All of this Happen? By Bill Rice
All the key stakeholders “bought in.” Even if some people eventually realized some of the narratives may have been dubious or false, they’d already risked their reputations and careers by zealously pushing or endorsing these narratives … so they weren’t going to suddenly admit they might have been wrong. In retrospect, how “they” made all the madness happen was surprisingly easy.
The Real Threat of 15-Minute Cities By John Mac Ghlionn
The word “smart” is really just a synonym for surveillance. These ultra-modern, tech-saturated monstrosities use hundreds of thousands of sensors to vacuum up copious amounts of personal data. FMC policies are currently being rolled out in cities such as Barcelona, Bogotá, Melbourne, Paris, and the dystopian wasteland known as Portland. What do these cities have in common? Surveillance technology.
