Trawling through the internet for good quality commentary and analysis can be like looking for a needle in a haystack. I thought I’d put together a small selection of excerpts from material that is educational and stimulating, in case you’d like to take a look or have a listen. I’m not saying I agree with all of it, but it makes you think, and involves honest, serious, and informed reflection. Here goes, in no particular order…
1. Ukraine: how boycotting everything Russian – and blaming Russian society rather than Putin – is xenophobic
- Rachel Pistol
In scenes that directly echo the treatment of so-called “enemy aliens” during the second world war, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, Californian congressman Eric Salwell suggested “kicking every Russian student out of the United States” as a means of retaliating against Putin.
In the UK, the MP for North Thanet in Kent, Roger Gale, went even further. He called for all Russians to be “sent home”, even though he acknowledged that many “good and honest” people would be caught as “collateral damage”. During the second world war, much harm was inflicted on innocent bystanders because of policies like these.
2. Is marrying later always better? New report says No
- Michael Cook
Marriage works best if the guy and girl both have a degree, a job, financial security, and plenty of life experience, right? Early marriage leads to divorce, right?
Wrong. A major new American report finds no empirical reasons to favor later “capstone marriages” (over the age of 25) over “cornerstone marriages” (those who married between the ages of 20 and 24).
3. Transgender chaos: ‘Anything she can do, he can do better’ — especially swimming
- Kurt Mahlburg
In a free society, both Thomas and Levine are at liberty to identify as they wish. But the notion that all of reality must be curated to cater to their self-identity is narcissistic, oppressive and unsustainable.
Twitter can ban and block all they like. Woke activists can demand obeisance from the rest of us until they are blue in the face. But none of this will change biology, nor can it erase the private thoughts inside of my head or yours.
Here’s the rub: the only way transgender ideology can be adopted by an entire society is through totalitarian means. This is precisely the reason it must be resisted.
4. Is it Better to get COVID 4 times than 5?
- Vinay Prasad
I've never heard anyone claim that avoiding human contact or wearing a respirator is desirable because it can limit the number of colds you get from 22 to 21.
There is no evidence to suggest that the fifth time you get COVID will be more dangerous than the fourth time. If anything data suggest it will be milder with subsequent infections.
We have reached a strange junction where people seem to want proof to live normally, and create elaborate fantasy stories as to why they are justified in continuing to abide by severe restrictions on their own freedoms. These fantasy stories often involve COVID-19 doing strange things, even if it is entirely asymptomatic. In the history of medical literature has anyone postulated and asymptomatic respiratory virus can do all these things?
5. Should We Vaccinate Young Children?
- Vinay Prasad
We do not know the risk benefit balance in 4 year olds — because the data has not been reported— but the absolute risks are so vastly different, that certainly the calculus will vary. Prof Oster is absolutely right that we should relax about this age group….
For the folks who say we have to vaccinate very young kids because of the benefit to other people. I hope you know you are literally making things up. There is no credible data that vaccinating a 5 year old helps an 85 year old, and none that a 4 year old will help a 72 year old. The vaccine has diminishing effectiveness against symptomatic infection, which does not bode well for transmission, and at this point is clear that no matter what we do, every person on earth will have breakthrough infection. So please stop speculating.
6. Twitter tries to poison Elon
- Alex Berenson
This afternoon, Twitter said it had adopted a “poison pill” defense against Elon Musk’s $41 billion takeover bid. The details of the pill are tricky, but essentially Twitter is threatening to dilute Musk’s shares and raise his cost to buy the company.
Here’s the thing.
Poisoners almost by definition are in a position of weakness. They cannot win a fair fight, so they have to resort to stealth. And that’s exactly the position Twitter is in. The little bird has two very big problems in its race to escape Elon’s grasp.
The first is that Musk probably doesn’t have a lot of competition to buy Twitter, even if it does put itself up for sale.
The other major social media companies - Facebook and Google/YouTube - are big enough to buy it, but doing so would create huge antitrust problems.
For other media and technology companies, Twitter would be a politically explosive headache with a fuse getting shorter by the day. Would Microsoft want the hassle? Apple? Why spend $50 billion to get called before Congress at least once a year, no matter who’s in power? AT&T just got OUT of the media business.
7. Podcaster Joe Rogan interviews Maajid Nawaz (Spotify)
Fasten your seatbelt for a 3 hour in-depth interview with Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist turned counter-extremism activist, author of multiple books, and public speaker. Topics discussed include radicalisation, media control of the public narrative, and freedom of speech. You might listen to this one during your workouts or commutes. Quite eye-opening. Nawaz really knows his stuff.
8. Chris Anderson (head of TED) interviews entrepreneur Elon Musk
In this unedited conversation, Elon Musk — the head of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company — digs into the recent news around his bid to purchase Twitter and gets honest about the biggest regret of his career, how his brain works, the future he envisions for the world and a lot more. (This conversation with head of TED Chris Anderson was recorded April 14, 2022)
9. Shanghai Has Recorded More Than 130,000 Covid Cases—and No Deaths
- Michael P Senger
Since March 2020, every single pandemic policy—from the strict lockdowns and masks to the tests, death coding, and vaccine passes—has been imported from China based on the idea that these “extreme social-control measures” had effectively allowed China to “control the virus.” In an Orwellian “war on COVID misinformation,” those who pointed out that China’s data was obviously fake were vilified by their own governments as alt-right racists, neo-Nazis, and anti-vaxxers—even if fully-vaccinated. They were censored, professionally ostracized, and, as I experienced firsthand, had their social media accounts purged. Hundreds of millions were thrown into poverty, millions of small businesses were bankrupted, an entire generation of children was forced to isolate and cover their faces, and billions of life years were lost, all in service to the collective fantasy…
10. The New Normal: Lockdowns were not just an untested public health measure. They were a new paradigm of governance.
- Aaron Kheriaty
Lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. In 1968 1-4 million people died in the H2N3 influenza pandemic; businesses and schools never closed, and large events were not cancelled. One thing we never did until 2020 was lockdown entire populations. And we did not do this because it does not work. In 2020 we had no empirical evidence that it would work, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly off by several orders of magnitude.
11. The Specter of Asymptomatic Spread: Or how to destroy the social fabric in two simple steps
- Aaron Kheriaty
On June 8, 2020, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus announced that asymptomatic people could transmit covid. That same day, Maria Van Kerkhove, WHO technical lead for the covid pandemic, clarified that people who have covid without any symptoms “very rarely” transmit the disease to others. WHO then backtracked on their original alarmist statement one day later. Weeks later, Kerkhove was pressured by the public health establishment, including Harvard’s Global Health Institute, to backtrack on her statement that asymptomatic spread was very rare, claiming that the jury was still out. Her original claim that asymptomatic spread was not a driver of the pandemic was correct, as is now clear. Given that no respiratory virus in history was known to spread asymptomatically, this should not have surprised anyone.
But the damage was already done. The media ran with the asymptomatic threat story. The specter of people with no symptoms being potentially dangerous—which never had any scientific basis—turned every fellow citizen into a possible threat to one’s existence. We should notice the complete reversal that this effected in our thinking about health and illness. In the past, a person was assumed to be healthy until proven sick. If one missed work for a prolonged period, one needed a note from a doctor establishing an illness. During covid, the criteria was reversed: we began to assume that people were sick until proven healthy. One needed a negative covid test to return to work.
12. The illusion of Evidence-based Medicine
- Robert W Malone
Evidence based medicine depends on data. For the most part, the data gathering and analysis process is conducted by and for the pharmaceutical industry, then reported by senior academics. The problem, as laid out in an editorial in the British Medical Journal is as follows:
“The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.”
This ideal of the integrity of data and the scientific process is corrupted as long as financial (and governments) interests trump the common good.
Thanks for reading!
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Reader's and Listener's Digest
Nice! Great resource.