Tagged: coronavirus

Obsolete Man

In light of what all half-sentient humans now know about the origins of the Covid-19 virus (and what many of us who are slightly more than half-sentient were very confidently assuming all along), I just want to put this little human interest story out there for your consideration. On February 10, 2022, Luc Montagnier, one of the most renowned, admired, and honored virologists...

Dr. Fauci, All Too Human

If you had spent decades in a position of public authority, signing off on government funding for laboratories conducting dangerous research on certain types of infectious diseases, including funding for overseas laboratories conducting research so dangerous that your own government had once instituted a moratorium on allowing such research to be done on your own country’s soil, and then one day a new,...

From the “Who Was Dumb Enough to Believe This Was Ever About Public Health?” File

During the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, those of us naturally inclined to resist propagandistic media hyperbole and distrust tyrannical models of government “efficiency” spent a good deal of our time, and inordinate amounts of our nerves, arguing with some of the dumbest or most fear-driven humans we had ever encountered, over the strange new question of whether allowing the governments of...

Vaccination and Coercion, Fear and Freedom

A young woman I have known for many years, who has been my student and my teaching assistant, and with whom I have engaged in many lively discussions about philosophy, the Bible, and global politics, has reached a sudden impasse in her life plans and her career path — an impasse defined by vaccine mandates. We live in the era of mass intimidation...

Showing Your Papers

A few days ago, I took a student for lunch and enjoyed my first experience of being asked to present my proof of vaccination as a condition for being granted the privilege of eating soup in a restaurant. I took the opportunity to explain to my student, with whom I happened to be reading Brave New World that day, the special emotional significance,...

If They Really Wanted to Save Lives

Covid-19 may be debated for years on a number of levels, but there is one point on which no one — no scientist, no statistician, no philosopher, no policy maker — has ever been in doubt, whatever some of them may have said for the sake of their political vested interests: This pandemic, judged as a mortality risk, is primarily, overwhelmingly, and in...

Perspective Update: Covid-19 vs. Spanish Flu After Two Years

I know we have been down this path before. But just as I like to return, every so often, to my point about the tyrannical nature and results of government-controlled education, in spite of having already explained the matter exhaustively years ago (to no effect whatsoever, naturally), so I find myself compelled, periodically, to revisit the issue of proportionality with regard to the...

A Fluid Situation

Not every person who has been granted power over others necessarily wished to assume that power. But no person, once granted power, ever wishes to relinquish it. New excuses are always found to rationalize prolonging the new status quo of empowerment, or to expand it. To let go of one’s will to control may be of the essence of wisdom, but practical efficacy...

Out, damned spot!

Bill Kristol, who has chosen to express his disdain for the divisive and anger-infested rhetoric of the Trump cult that destroyed “his party” by throwing his support behind the Marxist front group that calls itself the Democratic Party today, has outdone himself, even by his own high standards of collegial, grinning, Harvard-man hypocrisy. Responding on Twitter — where the intellectuals gather — to...

Reflections on Fear

Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” As the human race has more than amply proved in recent times, Roosevelt’s warning was exactly correct — though not exactly in the sense that he intended.

For Roosevelt meant that men’s fear of paternalistic government and socialist legislation was the only thing preventing them from escaping economic depression…