Category: Pandemic that Ate a Planet

Progressive Logic, Demonstrated

The United States Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate on private businesses as unconstitutional. The three dissenting “liberals” on the court, however, objected that the majority’s decision constitutes judicial “overreach” because the anti-mandate justices were choosing to overlook the opinions of “experts.” This dissenting opinion represents a classic, almost perfect example of progressive thinking. Striking down or objecting to...

Humans Are Dumb

Today I found, on my MSN news feed, a typical fearmongering headline in these days of continuous authoritarian propaganda: “Omicron Patients Becoming ‘Really Sick in a Different Way.’” The quotation in that headline, as I discovered, is from a “leading ER doctor,” specifically an associate professor from Columbia University Medical Center. The linked news item is a short video report, in which scare...

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,...

Musings on the Mechanism

If governments explicitly spelled out the truth on all the “emergency measures” and “crisis responses” they have initiated during the pandemic — namely that not one of these new measures, powers, or mandates will ever be repealed, but rather, on the contrary, that every one of them will be expanded, and cited as convenient precedent, in perpetuity, to encompass an ever-increasing range of...

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...

Punishing the Noncompliant

Noam Chomsky has joined the rising chorus of those who would like to use the pandemic as an opportunity to push the world toward Chinese-style totalitarianism, suggesting that the most suitable way to manage the “problem” of unvaccinated individuals is for the community to isolate these people and, if necessary, let them starve. Referring to the prospective condition of the unvaccinated after they...

A World Without Souls

Many years ago, I spent several months engaged almost exclusively with this question: What is a face? The synoptic version of the conclusion I arrived at through those months of rumination: A face is the surface of a soul.  For nearly two years, we have lived in a world that has outlawed faces, which is to say that in the most profound sense,...