Baby Steps to Truth and Justice

At least the discussion has started

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Here is some content from this week. 

Small Steps Toward Truth and Justice by RICHARD KELLY. Did anyone really believe on the eve of the sixth lockdown that it would last only as announced? Or did we all suspect another lie? This is a much harder lesson to take – it opens up uncomfortable lines of enquiry such as “what else did /do they lie about?”  From there it is a short step to demanding that there be accountability for the lies – and further, that every future announcement is challenged. 

 Et Tu, PayPal? The EU’s Role in Defunding Dissent By ROBERT KOGON. Could the EU’s Code of Practice on Disinformation and its Digital Services Act (DSA) have something to do with PayPal’s skittish forays into “combatting disinformation?” Well, yes, they could, and you may rest assured that EU officials or representatives have already had a word with PayPal about them.

In Defense of My Friend Dr. Joseph Ladapo By STEVE KIRSCH. All studies have limitations. Science is all about open discussion of the limitations of the study and what you can learn from it so you can try to avoid mistakes the next time. Science is never about trying to deplatform and discredit people who are making an honest attempt to find the truth.

The Demonization of the Unvaccinated: A Look Back By MICHAEL SENGER. It was never remotely realistic for any government to expect every single person to get vaccinated, especially when the vaccine in question involved a novel genetic-based therapy. Thus, these proposals to impose draconian hardships on those who refused Covid vaccines would inevitably involve the state imposing draconian hardships on a sizable portion of the population.

A Big Picture Look at the Disastrous Public Health Response to COVID-19 By CARLA PEETERS, DAVID BELL. The global response to the coronavirus pandemic has revealed an ethical crisis in public health, in which the pre-pandemic norms of public health ethics have been cast aside. This has wrecked health, human rights and economies, whilst the people public health was supposed to serve it had to pay for its implementation, and will pay for its harms. It will be a long way back, and recovery will require public health to return to its servant nature, and leave the limelight where it caused such disaster.

Why Your Mask Came from China By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. 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.

New York City’s Hospitals Were Not Overwhelmed in Spring 2020 By JESSICA HOCKETT. No one denies that thousands of New Yorkers died needlessly in March – May 2020. Now we know it wasn’t because the city’s ERs were overrun.

Ben Bernanke Was the Crisis By JOHN TAMNY. Left alone, recessions are the cure. The problem was that the political class tried to medicate what was healthy.  Bernanke fell hard for the medication part. Fast forward to 2008, a falling dollar under the impressively inept President George W. Bush had instigated what Ludwig von Mises referred to in Human Action as a “flight to the real.” Yes, presidents get the dollar they want, Bush wanted a weak one, and a falling dollar drove massive consumption of housing over investment in new ideas. 

Australia Will Not Move On Until There Is Justice  By RICHARD KELLY. We’re already seeing prominent perpetrators and collaborators claiming to have, and to have always had, reservations about what happened. They are trying to create for themselves a revisionist backstory that absolves them from their abominable conduct. These perpetrators and collaborators cannot be redeemed without confession. That they must be forgiven is not in question, but apologies to and restitution for their victims are essential.

Inflation and Recession are Becoming Entrenched By DAVID STOCKMAN. A bad stagflation is here. Since the Fed will be locked in a battle to tame the price side of the equation even as real output falters for months and years to come, we seriously doubt that the economic contraction to be recorded on Joe Biden’s watch will be described in the history books as a “very slight recession.”

Cultural Differences Between Scandinavia and the US Could Account for Pandemic Approaches By STEVE TEMPLETON. They’ve apologized for killing the mink, which is another interesting thing about Denmark, the apologies. Which I love, even though it’s a little bitter, because like a lot of these things they should have known from the beginning. They also apologized for the child vaccinations by saying, “you know, we were wrong.” Well, they said it, and I think that’s part of the reason trust is so high in Scandinavia, it’s like a partnership between public health and the people. ~ Tracy Beth Hoeg

Colbert, Fauci, and the Externalization of Mental Illness By MARK OSHINSKIE. Life is hard. Everyone I know bears some burden or other. Most do so with equanimity and dignity, and without victimizing others. It’s been deeply wrong—and extremely selfish—for Colbert, Fauci and their groupies to have externalized their mental unwellness on hundreds of millions of others by insisting on society-wide, lastingly destructive Coronavirus interventions.

Private Sector Vaccine Mandates are Contrary to Free Enterprise By JOHN GARE. Maintaining a safe workplace is a legitimate business interest, but trying to attain it via COVID-19 vaccinations is not something a reasonable person would expect given the realistic concerns, and lack of broad acceptance about, the vaccine’s safety and efficacy.

What is Populism? By DANIEL KLEIN. Political discourse abounds with waywardness in word usage. It’s something you do not want to fall into. Falling into it has two sides, passive and active. The passive vice is going along with the wayward word usage in the discourse you read or listen to. The active vice is discoursing waywardly yourself. Try to be neither sap nor perp of word waywardness.

The Quarantine of Healthy Populations By AARON KHERIATY. From the lepers in the Old Testament to the Plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic, covid represents the first time ever in the history of managing pandemics that we quarantined healthy populations.

Introducing Brownstone Fellowships By BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE. In all times, intellectuals – researchers, writers, speakers, journalists – who defy imposed conventions of thought endanger their careers, at least in the short term. This is particularly true during a crisis or emergency, real or imagined, when the pressure to conform grows very intense.

A Nobel Prize for Moral Hazard By JEFFREY A. TUCKER. This is what the “experts” have done to the world, a crisis that began in the laboratories of intellectuals who believe they know a better way than freedom to manage the world. Now the rest of us are forced to watch as they all give awards to each other for a job well done, thus adding another layer of moral hazard: there are literally no professional consequences for being terribly wrong.

Intervention Needs Evidence; Disruption Needs Strong Evidence By BHASKARAN RAMAN. Disruptions have harmed children far more than the SARS-Cov-2 virus. The very first sentence of the writeup claims that children have been severely affected by Covid-19, whereas the entire remaining paragraph lists not harms caused by the virus, but by disruptive policies. Indeed, not only in the UK, but in most of the world, disruptive Covid-19 policies have affected children far more than the virus itself.

April Was the Cruelest Month By JESSICA HOCKETT. Further investigation and study is needed to determine what factors contributed to resident deaths, covid+ and otherwise. I suspect the virus — and Cuomo’s directive that said nursing homes shouldn’t turn away admissions based on a patient’s covid status – is being unintentionally scapegoated to some extent, i.e., blamed for deaths that were actually due to withholding treatment, neglect, cutting off visitors, isolation protocols, etc.

Why Did Covid Cause Thousands of Deaths in Spring 2020 Even Though it Had Been Hanging Around All Winter? By WILL JONES. There is now no shortage of evidence that the coronavirus had begun spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019 at the latest. So why did the virus suddenly become much more infectious in February 2020; why did it go from circulating at a low level alongside flu and other viruses to displacing them and infecting a relatively large proportion of the population in a space of weeks?

Why Is Pfizer Attempting Comix? By LAURA DODSWORTH. This is brave of Marvel and Disney. Mixing face masks and vaccines with super heroes is either very confident, or very profitable. Dress it up how you want, but bandaids on old men’s arms aren’t exactly superhero-ish. It’s a long way from muscular Thor and his hammer. And every adverse vaccine event stands to puncture the allure of the super hero like a needle through a cape.

What If the Truth Never Comes Out? By JULIE PONESSE. Anecdotes of the harms of the last two years are palpable but ignored. Patients complain of symptoms their doctors won’t acknowledge. Citizens tell stories the media ignores. Family members try to open dialogue only to be shut down. The stories are told but, for the most part, they aren’t being heard.

How the EU is Forcing Twitter to Censor (and Musk Can’t Stop It) By ROBERT KOGON. Does anyone really imagine that the Biden administration has anything remotely like this sort of capacity to direct the actions of online platforms? Make no mistake about it. Twitter censorship is government censorship. But the government in question is not the US government, but rather the European Union, and the EU is, in effect, imposing its censorship on the entire world.

How Many People Did Ventilators and Iatrogenesis Kill in April 2020? By MICHAEL SENGER. The importance of further study into the actual causes of excess deaths in spring 2020 and the source of the guidance that led to them can’t be overstated.

You’re Aggressive, but I’m Not By THOMAS HARRINGTON. As every great religious tradition reminds us, the proclivity to do ill to others is vividly present in everyone during the entire course of our lives on earth, and that the first and most effective step towards ensuring that this inner monster does not take control of our destinies is acknowledging its enduring presence within us. It is then, and only then, that we can shape effective and enduring strategies to keep it at bay.

The Attempt to Burn Me at the Stake By MATTIAS DESMET. Perhaps for this reason: people might start to take seriously the idea that the corona crisis was primarily a psycho-social phenomenon that marked the transition to a technocratic system, a system in which the government would attempt to claim decision-making rights over its citizens and, step by step, take control of all private space.