Gary:
If you are into devouring background information to get your head around what is going on in New Zealand right now and elsewhere, here is some reading for you.
In With Audio, Out With Google Spying
Two big changes to Brownstone in the last few days: we’ve added audio on selected articles and removed all Google Analytics tracking on the site. Everyone loves audio, and the first article linked below explains the second decision.
Here are some new features in the last week:
Your Privacy and Brownstone’s Digital Strategy. These are enormously stressful times for all. They require everyone to reassess and rethink our relationship to technology for reasons of preserving freedom, privacy, and independence. We need to do our best to avoid becoming part of the privatization of the state. We have taken an important step in that direction.
The COVAX Delusion Reinforces Pharmaceutical Colonialism BY DAVID BELL. COVAX is a vehicle by which a very powerful and wealthy group seeks to impose a new paradigm on global public health, with centralized, pharma-based interventions replacing community-driven healthcare and national health sovereignty. We cannot afford to leave it as a side issue to the local battles that we face, or our successes will be pyrrhic. The corporatist, centralized health paradigm that COVAX epitomizes is a fog of delusion that seeks to ensnare us all.
Skepticism as a New Way of Life BY JOAKIM BOOK. This is the story of a tribe of navel-gazing authoritarians imposing rules on the rest of us, rules that don’t make sense, that are routinely flaunted by their proponents, and in aggregate don’t achieve the goals they’re said to achieve. There is no reason to puzzle about the lost of trust and the rise of grave skepticism about elite plans for our lives.
Why it Is Ethical To Resist the Biosecurity Surveillance State BY AARON KHERIATY. The hour is later than we think; twilight is near. Continued compliance with manifestly unjust and often absurd mandates will not return us to a normal functioning society. Every good-faith or selfless act of compliance on the part of citizens has only resulted in more illogical pandemic “countermeasures” that further erode our civil liberties, harm our overall health, and undermine human flourishing.
Lockdowns Might Have Contributed to Myopia In Children BY ERIC HUSSEY. Experts in vision think online schooling during lockdown may well be increasing the speed of myopic eye growth. A host of possible sequelae from excess myopia include things like increased risk of glaucoma, macular degeneration and retinal detachment.
The Glorious End of DC’s Vaccine Mandate BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Perhaps for now, they won’t get their vaccine passport system, their newly segregated society, the erasure of bodily autonomy, and a permanent caste imbalance between the rulers and the ruled that the Enlightenment long ago condemned as despotic. It’s just one victory but it raises a point of light: maybe there is hope after all.
The Next Step for the World Economic Forum BY ROGER KOOPS. We can easily predict that the WEF’s call for a universal and mandated subscription plan for antibiotics – pushed with the overt intention of shoring up financial capitalization of major drug manufacturers – will meet the same fate: poor health outcomes, more power to entrenched elites, and ever less liberty for the people.
Who Is Served by Emergency Powers? BY ETHAN YANG. Covid-19 has been no different than any other disaster. Politicians made the most out of the situation based on the incentives at hand. Systems that incentivize public officials to do the right thing through sound checks and balances saw the least abuse of power. Conversely, those that afforded more discretion to executive figures saw more irresponsible and disruptive behavior.
I Will Not Force a Medical Treatment on Anyone BY LAURA VAN LUVEN. As I cleared out my desk, I came across infographics on the importance of babies seeing faces, the dangers of too much screen time, and notes from trainings that described the detrimental effects of social isolation. These were relics of a time when the well-being of children was the singular focus of my work, but that era in public health seemed to have passed.
And Now, It’s Economic Warfare BY JEFFREY A. TUCKER. Many of the world’s wisest minds have observed that the main means by which powerful states seize and retain control is through the realm of money. Guns help. Prestige helps. But in the end, it’s the control of money that keeps the people in servitude.
The Conscious Cultivation of Ignorance BY THOMAS HARRINGTON. The latest trick of the institutionalized elites in this serial game of curbing the proliferation of fresh interpretations of reality from below is to transform science, which is defined by its disdain for dogma, into a rigid canon of authoritarian prescriptions that do not admit dialogue or dissent.
Society vs State: Canada Reveals the Core Conflict of Our Age BY DAVID MCGROGAN. Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and profound. He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own legitimacy that would follow from it. The Five Labors of a Re-Enlightenment: A Practical Guide BY PAUL FRIJTERS, GIGI FOSTER, MICHAEL BAKER. Together, we can produce the force needed to generate a parallel society with a productive role on its own, but also a winning reformed society that will eventually attract most of the presently shackled majority, thereby delivering true reconciliation after this time of darkness.