Brownstone Journal

By Bruce Pardy at Brownstone dot org. Last week, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced a referendum for October 19. It will ask Albertans a slate of policy and constitutional questions. Independence, she said the next day, will be added to the ballot if the requisite number of signatures is met in the petition drive, which is likely. Albertans will get their chance to say if they want to leave Canada. But Canadian federalists can relax. The Alberta premier is one of them. The referendum is the fix to defeat Alberta independence. It will undermine the separatist cause and split the independence vote. Smith's referendum will ask whether the province should exercise more control over immigration, social programs, and voter identification. And whether Alberta should pursue constitutional amendments. Give provinces the power to appoint judges to superior courts? Abolish the unelected Senate? Grant provinces the right to opt out of federal programs in areas of provincial jurisdiction without losing federal funding? Give provincial laws priority over federal ones when they conflict? These referendum questions lead nowhere. Alberta already has constitutional authority over the policy questions. It could exercise more control in these areas tomorrow if it wanted. There is no realistic prospect of amending the Canadian constitution on controversial matters. Smith and her advisors must know that. Smith has repeatedly said that her mandate is a sovereign Alberta inside a united Canada. But many of her fellow Albertans are fed up. They perceive that their province has long received a raw deal in Confederation. They tire of Ottawa throwing obstacles in the way of their primary industries. They resent having their wealth taxed and sent elsewhere around the country. A growing number of Albertans are determined to leave Canada. Recent polls peg it at about one in three. But even among restless Albertans, there's a moderate middle. They are unhappy with the status quo but have not yet resolved to ditch the country. Smith's referendum will give them a third way. Choose constitutional and policy reforms to create a fairer deal. It's a chimera, of course. In 2021, 62 percent of Albertans voted in favor of removing equalization from the constitution. "Equalization" means that the federal government will collect more taxes from wealthy provinces and spend it on poorer ones. Alberta is Canada's wealthiest province per capita, and the main source of equalization funds. Its equalization referendum produced no change. The rest of the country ignored it. Alberta will not get more constitutional powers, whatever the voters say about Smith's referendum questions. No constitutional amendments are coming. But many voters will not realize that when they mark their ballots. Smith's referendum will undermine the prospect for independence in another way too. An independence referendum requires a "clear question." That's what the Supreme Court of Canada said in its 1998 reference case about Quebec. It makes sense. Voters should understand, beyond a shadow of doubt, what they are voting on and what is at stake. But the Court did not say exactly what a "clear question" consists of. The proposed independence question is clear. "Do you agree that the province of Alberta should cease to be a part of Canada to become an independent state?" But a clear question becomes muddy when combined with other questions. If voters support independence but also other constitutional changes, what do they mean? Which should be pursued first? Which is the last resort? What if voters support independence but also support Alberta having the right to opt out of federal programs while retaining federal funding? Both of those things cannot happen. One requires that Alberta be a province, and the other requires that it not be. Any referendum result that requires interpretation is not clear. The federal Clarity Act legislatures the requirement for a clear question, but it does not give...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. [I wrote the following essay for a book celebrating the 100th birthday of Murray N. Rothbard (1926-1995). He was a dear friend and I'm proud to be part of this thrilling book, which will appear later in print. For now you can download it: Rothbard at 100: A Tribute and Assessment, Stephan Kinsella and Hans-Hermann Hoppe, eds. (Houston: Papinian Press, 2026)] My introduction to Murray Rothbard came when I was 20 and sitting in the office of my political philosophy teacher. The professor had on his shelf a two-volume blue book called Man, Economy, and State (1962). The title was so stark that I asked about it. He warned me not to read it because the author is an anarchist. Fascinating. I excused myself and hurried to the library to get the book. It consumed my evenings for weeks. Far from being an anarchist rant, it was a detailed defense of classic economics as it existed before John Maynard Keynes, alongside insights from Ludwig von Mises and some innovative theories concerning monopoly, utility, and other matters. It was sweeping, a real treatise on economic theory for which I had become intellectually desperate. I learned later that this book was commissioned as a commentary on Mises's own book Human Action (1949) but took on a life of its own. Reading it from the first page to the last was the beginning of a journey that would consume my entire career. Having only known him from these early works, I had this vision of Rothbard as a towering, all-knowing, and probably terrifying intellectual force. I was beside myself with nerves when I met him some three years later (1985 or so). I was astounded to meet a short man with a huge smile who seemed to find humor in everything. Though we had never met, he greeted me like an old friend. From then on, I treated him as a friend, and we remained close for the next ten years before his death in 1995. The phone calls were nearly daily, and the letters back and forth frequent. He remains my muse to this day. (Ironically, my time knowing him overlaps almost exactly with Hans-Hermann Hoppe's ten years with Murray over the same time period.) Far from being a dogmatic preacher of deductive truths—he came across this way in his earlier theoretical writings—the man I knew was liberally minded, radical and curious enough to entertain a huge range of ideas, broadly tolerant of a diversity of opinion, and endlessly and creatively curious. He was an absolute joy in any social framework, like a light that illuminated the entire room. To say something that sent him into uproarious laughter was a deeply satisfying achievement. And as Hoppe and others have pointed out, he had a singular genius, unlike any other I have encountered. Rothbard was a voracious speed reader, inspired by his unquenchable desire to know. I once dropped him off at a university bookstore to search for a parking place. Finding none, I was back at the front entrance in 20 or so minutes. I found him on a bench reading, sitting next to a stack of books. Getting in my car, he sat down in the passenger seat and was speaking excitedly about what he had found. Stopping at a light he showed me some passages, and I was astounded to see a third of the book already marked up. He had done this already with several books. I simply could not believe my eyes. He read books the way others eat fast food. He was often on deadline with my various projects. Once the fax machine came along—he loved it once he figured out how it worked—he would send in impressive works in under an hour. I can imagine his typing ferociously to get his ideas on paper. His mind worked far faster than any technology could record his thoughts. He always had long papers already composed in his head, complete with citations, and the only limit was finding the time to type. As for his social interactions, he had this way of extracting knowledge and information from every source. If he knew you to be an expert on mathematics or ...

By Nick Thompson at Brownstone dot org. You read the labels. You check the ingredients. You avoid seed oils, limit sugar, and side-eye anything with a barcode longer than a haiku. You subscribe to Substacks that dissect institutional capture. You understand, probably better than most, that "the science" can be quietly purchased by the people it is supposed to regulate. So let me ask you a question that might sting. What did you feed your dog this morning? If the answer is a brown pellet from a bag, you are running the same ultraprocessed food experiment on your dog that you have spent the last few years learning to reject for yourself and your family. And you are doing it for entirely understandable reasons, because the same machinery of institutional capture, industry-funded research, and reassuring pseudo-scientific language that once told you margarine was healthier than butter has been quietly operating in veterinary medicine for decades. I am a practising veterinary surgeon in the UK. I have spent over 30 years in clinical practice, and I am the founding president of the Raw Feeding Veterinary Society. I also lecture on canine nutrition at the University of Glasgow and around the world. I was in Florida last year and San Diego the year before. I am writing a book on ultraprocessed food for dogs, because someone needs to say plainly what the pet food industry would rather you never thought about: your dog has been subjected to the most sustained ultraprocessed feeding experiment in mammalian history, and almost nobody noticed. The Cleverest Marketing You Never Saw Here is how it works, and it will feel familiar to anyone who has followed the corruption of nutritional science in human medicine. The major pet food corporations do not merely sell food. They fund the university departments in the UK and the US where veterinary nutritional science is researched. They endow professorships. They provide free student packs and educational materials to veterinary schools. They sponsor the conferences where vets gather for continuing professional development. They supply the textbooks. They fund the bursaries. They stock the waiting room shelves and put posters on the surgery walls. They do this so quietly and so comprehensively that most vets do not even realise they have been swimming in industry-sponsored water since the first day of vet school. The result is predictable. Almost all large-scale nutrition studies published over the past 50 years have been conducted on extruded, grain-based diets produced by the very companies that funded the research. That research became what vets are taught. Raw and fresh diets, by contrast, have received almost no industry funding, which means almost no large-scale trials. Vets are then honestly told there is "no evidence" for raw, because nobody with money has paid for that evidence to exist. It is rather like sponsoring every study on buses and then declaring there is "no evidence" that bicycles work. The World Small Animal Veterinary Association's Global Nutrition Committee now explicitly warns that most pet nutrition studies are industry-funded and says conflicts of interest should always be declared. RCVS Knowledge, the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in the UK, which runs the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Network, notes that funding source is one of the strongest predictors of outcome in nutrition trials. JAVMA News has run pieces on corporate influence in veterinary education. This is in the official documents. It is no longer fringe grumbling. What Is Actually in the Bag Commercial kibble is manufactured through a process called extrusion: ingredients are forced through a barrel at extreme temperatures and pressures, then puffed, dried, and coated with fats and flavour enhancers to make the result palatable. The process is industrial and efficient, producing a product with a shelf life measured in months or years. It also does things to food that would alarm you if you thou...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. People are asking about the background to a major effort sponsored by Brownstone Institute and many partnering organizations. It is CovidJustice.org, a proposed Senate resolution on the entire epoch that condemns the bad science and coercion and pledges to do better next time. The petition has already attracted 20K signers in two days. What gave rise to this idea and what is its purpose? Two years ago, I was saddled up to the bar at an airport awaiting my departure time. The man sitting next to me asked about my bracelet. I said that it says "I Won't Be Locked Down." He asked why I would wear such a thing. I explained that just a few years ago, we were locked in our homes. People were sometimes arrested for going out. Business was forcibly shut. Proprietors were fined if they were caught opening their doors or giving haircuts. Indeed, getting a haircut required paying someone under the table and meeting in secret. Skateboard parks were sanded in and basketball hoops boarded up. That was just the beginning. The CDC announced that rental payments cannot be enforced. Churches on military bases were closed and then closed all over the country. Parking lots of hospitals and medical offices were empty coast to coast, as people missed diagnostics. Schools were shuttered and students were locked in their dorm rooms and policed for parties. Drones flew overhead looking for too many cars parked in residential homes and pictures were sent to the media which dutifully reported house parties. Weddings and funerals were out of the question. I stopped there but could have gone on for another hour. I didn't even get to the part wherein millions were forced to take an experimental injection that did not stop infection and ended up hurting and even killing people. He sat there in silence for a moment and took another sip of beer. "Yeah. We've not really had a reckoning over all that, haven't we?" "Nope." Those words have long haunted me. I don't see how the US or any nation can move forward past this grim period that harmed so many lives. Students were robbed of two years of in-person education. Millions of businesses were wrecked. Congressional authorization of multiple-trillions in spending turned into inflation that ate away 25-30 percent of purchasing power, gutting the value of savings and capital. This fiasco in the name of public health ended up harming health. People turned to substances to get by and put on 20 pounds from overeating and sloth. Families were shattered in arguments about the shot. Churches struggled to recover. Many civic groups from bowling leagues to garage bands broke up permanently. Countless numbers lost jobs, changed careers, and fled states that heavily enforced lockdowns and shot mandates. After a few years, the disastrous experiment in human control and messaging just gradually faded away. Media never really said much. Academia was quiet. Public health just hunkered down in silence. Suddenly we were all told to forget about it and think instead about things like partisan politics, AI, Russia-Ukraine, the Iran threat, the culture war, and so on. Just move on, we have been told. Think about a historical analogy here with the Great War. It was an upheaval without precedent resulting in shattered communities and nations plus death on a mass scale. It was a horror. Fully six years went by before literature started appearing that dealt with the topic. There was Mrs. Dalloway (1925) by Virginia Woolf, A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque, and many others. In politics, there were some efforts too, like Albert Jay Nock's The Myth of a Guilty Nation (1922), Merchants of Death (1934) by H. C. Engelbrecht and F. C. Hanighen ,and many others. People don't know that A.A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was also constructed as an attack on the war. Milne wanted to write a book about the realities of war. His pu...

By Natalya Murakhver at Brownstone dot org. There is a question that has haunted me since the moment I watched institutions fail children during the pandemic: Who will ask the hard questions if the agencies charged with asking them refuse to? I have spent the past six years trying to answer that question through film, through advocacy, through lawsuits, through grassroots organizing. Now, Restore Childhood is trying to answer it through science. Restore Childhood is a small 501(c)(3) nonprofit with no pharmaceutical backers, no government grants, and no institutional patrons with interests to protect. We were founded in the crucible of America's pandemic school closures by parents who watched decisions get made behind closed doors, decisions that cost children years of their lives, while the institutions entrusted with protecting them looked the other way. We documented those failures in 15 DAYS: The Real Story of America's Pandemic School Closures, a feature documentary examining how and why American schools remained shuttered long after the evidence demanded they reopen. It has now been viewed over 1,000,000 times in its brief run on X. Recently, we did something else. We funded independent, peer-reviewed scientific research. What that research found should trouble every parent in America. What the FDA Got Wrong — And What Our Team Got Right Prior to granting full approval of Moderna's mRNA-1273 Covid vaccine on January 31, 2022, the FDA conducted a benefit–risk assessment of the vaccine. That assessment concluded that vaccine benefits outweighed the risks of vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis — even for 18–25-year-old males, the demographic at highest known risk of cardiac injury from the shot. A team of independent researchers — mathematician Paul S. Bourdon, PhD, our own board member Ram Duriseti, MD, PhD, mathematician H. Christian Gromoll, PhD, immunologist Dyana K. Dalton, PhD, epidemiologist Allison E. Krug, MPH, and bioethicist Kevin Bardosh, PhD — set out to reanalyze that assessment. Their peer-reviewed study, published February 10, 2026 in the journal Vaccines, reaches a starkly different conclusion. When you account for what the FDA failed to account for, the math changes. Vaccine risks outweighed benefits for the general population of 18–25-year-old males relative to hospitalizations: those caused by vaccine-attributable myocarditis/pericarditis exceeded the hospitalizations prevented via vaccination — by between 8% and 52%, with the team's most likely scenario showing a 38% excess. Three Things the FDA Ignored First, prior Covid infection. By October 1, 2022, the CDC estimated that more than half of 18–49-year-olds had already been infected. The author team estimated (using CDC data) that by January 1, 2022 that approximately 70% of 18–25-year-old males had experienced a Covid infection. Prior infection confers meaningful protection — protection that substantially reduces the benefit of vaccination. The FDA's model treated the entire population as if every unvaccinated young man were encountering the virus for the first time, dramatically inflating the hospitalizations that vaccination could prevent. Second, age and sex stratification. The FDA assumed Covid hospitalization rates were uniform across all males aged 18 to 45 — contradicting the CDC's own modeling, which shows men 30–49 are hospitalized at roughly twice the rate of men 18–29. Lumping these groups together overstated the hospitalization risk facing young men, inflating the apparent benefit of vaccination for precisely the group most endangered by cardiac risks. Third, incidental hospitalizations. By January 2022, the CDC director had publicly acknowledged that up to 40% of patients hospitalized with a Covid-positive test were there for something else entirely. The FDA's hospitalization counts did not meaningfully account for this. On the risk side, multiple independent data sources — from Ontario, England, and the United States — sugge...

By Charlotte Kuperwasser at Brownstone dot org. I want to begin with a reminder that often gets lost in public discussions: the Covid mRNA vaccines are genuinely novel medical products. Prior to the emergency authorizations in 2020, mRNA vaccine technology had never been deployed at scale in humans. Only two clinical trials, one from Pfizer-BioNTech and one from Moderna, had ever tested this platform in people. Altogether, roughly 37,000 individuals had ever received an mRNA vaccine in the history of medicine (not including the earlier experience with rabies, CMV, and cancer vaccines limited to much smaller early-phase studies). That is not a criticism; it is simply a statement of fact. But it does mean that the long-term safety profile of these products was, and remains, incompletely understood. What follows is familiar to nearly all molecular biologists. It is complicated but I try to simplify it given the stakes. It's important to clearly lay out the molecular framework for everyone because how these vaccines are made directly determines what is inside the vial. And what is inside the vial, once injected, will travel throughout the body and activate a cascade of events that can lead to long-term health implications. In Vitro Transcription Is Not Just a Manufacturing Detail Modified mRNA vaccines are produced using a process called in vitro transcription (IVT). IVT is the method used to synthesize the modified mRNA that ultimately becomes the active ingredient in the vaccine. This is not a trivial technicality. IVT fundamentally shapes the molecular composition of the final product. Scientists at BioNTech, including those directly involved in developing the Pfizer vaccine, have published a detailed review1 describing how IVT reactions generate not only the intended full-length mRNA, but also a range of byproducts and impurities, how these are typically removed, and what their biological consequences may be if they persist. These manufacturing directions along with the byproducts they create were also described in detail by Moderna in their patents (US10,653,712 B2 and US10,077,439 B2). But more importantly, this molecular biology was well established long before Covid. None of this is speculative. The Starting Material: DNA Templates At its core, an IVT reaction begins with double-stranded DNA that encodes the desired protein. In this case, the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. The spike-encoding sequence used in mRNA vaccines is genetically modified to improve stability and cellular tolerance, including two amino-acid substitutions that make it distinct from the viral spike. That modification is intentional. The DNA template itself can take different forms. During Pfizer's early clinical trials, PCR-generated DNA fragments were used. However, the commercial manufacturing process relied on DNA derived from plasmids. This matters because plasmids contain additional regulatory sequences. In Pfizer's case, these include elements such as SV40 promoter and ori sequences, which raise concerns if they were to enter human cells. Once this DNA template is added to the IVT reaction, along with RNA polymerase and other components, it is transcribed into mRNA (Figure 1). While the desired output of IVT is the intended full-length mRNA product, the actual output is more complex. These include various byproducts in the form of (1) various RNA species including double-stranded RNA (dsRNA), (2) DNA attached to RNA (RNA–DNA hybrids), and (3) the free DNA from the original template (Figure 2). The formation of these byproducts is well-documented and unavoidable and is why downstream purification is absolutely essential for safety. Purification Has Known Limitations After manufacturing there are two purification steps needed to first remove the DNA and then the remove the RNA byproducts (Figure 3): To remove the DNA, an enzyme is added to the reaction mixture called DNase I, which is commonly used to degrade contaminating DNA. While DNase I is e...

By Roger Bate at Brownstone dot org. Over the past few years, quiet but extraordinary warnings have emerged from the US Treasury Department. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network reports that illicit e-cigarettes are being used as part of trade-based money-laundering schemes linked to fentanyl trafficking. Illegal vaping products are no longer just a regulatory nuisance or a youth-use talking point. They have become a financial instrument in the cartel economy. The finding matters because it exposes a reality many policymakers have spent years denying—prohibition does not eliminate markets, it reorganizes them. And when demand persists, prohibition reliably hands control to the most ruthless and well-organized suppliers. We are now watching that process unfold in real time in the US vaping market. And let's be clear where the blame lies: The CDC's Office on Smoking and Health and the FDA's Center for Tobacco Products have deliberately obscured relative risk and forced nicotine markets underground, where criminal supply now thrives beyond any meaningful oversight. From Regulation to Underground Supply Vaping emerged as a harm-reduction alternative for smokers. In the UK and New Zealand and other countries that allowed regulated products to compete openly with cigarettes, smoking rates declined rapidly. In the United States, by contrast, legal vaping has been squeezed by a combination of bans, frozen approvals, and enforcement-first regulation. The result is not a smaller market. It is a market that has largely gone underground. By the government's own admissions, only a small fraction of vaping products currently sold in the US are formally authorized. In practical terms, this means that most adults who vape are buying products that exist outside the legal framework, often without realizing it. In many local markets—especially convenience stores that I've personally investigated—illegal disposable vapes appear to make up the majority of sales. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a parallel national supply chain. What enforcement is actually finding Recent enforcement actions give a sense of scale. Federal agencies have seized hundreds of thousands—and in some cases millions—of illegal vaping devices in single operations. Entire warehouses have been cleared of products that were never approved and were often deliberately mislabeled to evade customs scrutiny. Authorities have acknowledged that thousands of distinct unauthorized vaping products are circulating in the US market. Most are manufactured overseas and enter the country through misdeclared shipping, freight forwarding, or informal cross-border routes. Once inside, distribution frequently overlaps with existing smuggling corridors linked to Mexico—routes long used for narcotics, weapons, and cash. In several cases, vape shops raided by law enforcement turned out to be fronts for broader criminal activity, including drug distribution and money laundering. This is what happens when a consumer market is forced into the shadows: it is absorbed into criminal infrastructure that already knows how to move goods and money at scale. Why Prohibition Fails—Every Time None of this is surprising. Prohibition has a long and well-documented track record. When governments criminalize supply while demand persists, they do not create safer markets. They create markets optimized for secrecy, intimidation, and profit maximization. Compliance-oriented firms exit. Criminal organizations enter. Oversight disappears. This is not a failure of enforcement. It is the economic logic of prohibition. Alcohol prohibition produced bootleg liquor, poisonings, and organized crime. The war on drugs professionalized trafficking and entrenched violent networks. High-tax cigarette regimes fueled smuggling and counterfeiting. Illicit vaping follows the same pattern, only faster. The Danger of Illicit Products One deeply uncomfortable consequence of this policy choice is now becoming harder to ignore: ...

By Naomi Wolf at Brownstone dot org. SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL It's snowing. Outside the big picture windows of the flat where we stay when we come to Brooklyn, a gentle snow falls. It gusts in the bare tree branches that reach up to the grey-yellow sky. The trees shake back and forth in the wind. The snow-laden branches stand between us and what are the usually chaotic backyards of the row of dilapidated late 19th century townhouses across from us. The backyards, and their everyday detritus, have receded under the snowfall, to reconfigure into a vague elegance. Plastic chairs and rotting wooden picnic tables have been buried under a thick blanket of white. There is about a foot and a half of snow resting across the roofs of the townhouses, gentling their outdated television antennas and their crooked skylights. Everything looks like frosting on a wedding cake. Everything looks like an old-fashioned Christmas card; the kind — are you my age or older? — that they used to have in the mid-1960s, that had silver glitter glued to the white snow, that came off a bit on your fingers. The snow layering the roofs and balconies and railings makes Brooklyn look like the archetypal German or Swiss village on Christmas cards, nestled in wintry softness, as seen far below Santa's descending sleigh. This blizzard — or "blizzard;" it seems to me better described as a "snowfall" — has been heralded by legacy media now for a couple of days. The language about it has been histrionic. It is a "bomb cyclone!" It is "SEVERE WEATHER" that requires an "ALERT!" A red rectangle on the weather sites, surround those scary words. You can't travel. But it's not just that you are being advised not to travel, as a sovereign person, as in the past. There are "TRAVEL BANS." CNN warns, "Blizzard Travel Bans Remain in Effect as Five States Have Over 2 Feet of Snow." The headlines' freakout conceals the fact that this snowfall is within the range of normal, for the Northeastern United States. While CNN has found that this is the biggest snowfall on record for one city — Providence, Rhode Island — you have to click through several links and read carefully to find out that the last time it snowed THIS MUCH in New York City was…five years ago. And this storm has dropped the MOST snow in NYC since that one in…2021. The New York Post headline calls this storm's snowfall "HISTORIC" — though the fine print shows that the last such storm was in…2016. Same with Philadelphia. This is Philadelphia's snowiest winter since…2018. So basically — if you read carefully and critically — you realize that the snow is falling well within, again, the range of what is normal for winter in the Northeast. In 1947, the snow measured over 26 inches in Central Park: Today at JFK Airport, in contrast, the snow is about 15 inches deep. In 1888, 21 inches of snow fell in 24 hours; eventually snow in that snowstorm accumulated to snowbanks almost five feet high. 1888: 1888: 1888: In spite of the fact that receiving up to two feet of snow in winter in New York City is entirely normal, the headlines drumming up hysteria have prepared the way for what is unfolding right now via City Hall, and via our still-new-on-the-job Marxist-Islamist Mayor, Zohran K Mamdani. A pure Marxist-islamist rights takeover; a trial run. In a press conference on Sunday February 22, 2026, Mayor Mamdani showed a range of sombre city administrators arrayed behind him, all of them wearing sad faces and holding their hands clasped in front of them. I note the flimsy branded sweatshirts and windbreakers, both zipped and unzipped, and the almost theatrically glum faces of Mamdani's "crisis team." I feel that this entire iconography is part of the Theatre of Humiliation to which Mamdani is deliberately subjecting our city, just as the Biden era's women's-luggage-stealing advisors, its obese health commissioners, its staffers with their publicly broadcast fetishes involving dog masks and leashes, and its pics of sex somehow ...

By David Thunder at Brownstone dot org. The Republican majority of the US House Judiciary Committee has just published a voluminous "interim staff report" (February 3rd), presenting documentary evidence of far-reaching digital censorship conducted by online platforms under the supervision of the European Commission. The report, entitled "The Foreign Censorship Threat, Part II: Europe's Decade-Long Campaign to Censor the Global Internet…", makes for sobering reading, corroborating the worst fears of critics of the Digital Services Act (DSA). It is worth underlining that the censorship regime enabled by DSA should be of concern not only to Europeans, but also to non-Europeans, since their practical effect, given the technical challenges and economic costs of instituting region-specific moderation regimes, is to restrict speech across the globe and not only in Europe. The DSA Paved the Way for Arbitrary Censorship In this blog, I warned on September 5th 2023, shortly after the Digital Services Act (DSA) was applied to "very large online platforms" (VLOPs), that "the net effect of the act would be to apply an almost irresistible pressure on social media platforms to play the "counter-disinformation" game in a way that would pass muster with the Commission's auditors, and thus avoid getting hit with hefty fines." And so, according to this report, it has come to pass. We do not need to read the House Judiciary Committee's interim report to understand that the wording of the Digital Services Act creates enormous discretionary power on the part of the European Commission in overseeing platforms' content moderation policies. For the Act places online platforms under onerous "due diligence obligations" to "mitigate" vaguely defined "systemic risks," including risks related to "disinformation" and impacts on "civic discourse" and electoral processes. The Act in itself leaves considerable room for interpretation regarding how the European Commission and its auditors will assess "systemic risks" like disinformation, threats to "civic discourse," and hate speech, and how they will evaluate the adequacy of service providers' mitigation efforts. This ambiguity gives enforcers of the Act broad discretion to interpret it as they see fit. The Commission has investigative and enforcement powers under the DSA, including the ability to impose fines of up to 6% of a platform's global annual turnover for non-compliance. The 160-page report makes a compelling case that the Digital Services Act is effectively the culmination of a decade-long campaign to give the European Commission ever-greater power over the content moderation policies of online platforms. The many twists and turns of this campaign, which includes earlier "voluntary" Codes of Conduct coordinated by EU institutions, are outlined in the report. Here, I propose to focus exclusively on what the report presents as some of the bitter fruits of the Digital Services Act, namely the censorship actions conducted under its oversight mechanisms. The report focuses overwhelmingly on interactions between the EU Commission and TikTok, and assuming the supporting documents can be authenticated, it gives us a disturbing glimpse of a deeply entrenched censorship regime that is completely opaque to the average citizen. This is just the tip of the iceberg. There is no telling what else might be uncovered if an investigator got access to similar evidence on other platforms such as Meta, YouTube, and LinkedIn. How DSA Oversight Works in Practice The mechanisms of control by EU officials over platform moderation policies, as outlined in the report, share a common pattern: the European Commission itself, or national regulators designated under the DSA (known as "Digital Services Coordinators" in each Member State), query platforms about their "risk mitigation" measures concerning a particular issue (e.g. vaccines, electoral disinformation, hate speech, or the war in Ukraine), either in written communicati...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org. Everywhere one looks today you see signs of the opposition between 'conservatives' and so-called 'liberals.' Sometimes conservatives are designated 'far-right,' and liberals 'left-wing.' Both terms appear to be self-explanatory, unless one keeps in mind that concepts do evolve historically. The term, 'amateur,' for example, used to have a very positive or affirmative meaning, namely someone who does something (like painting, or playing the piano) well, because they love doing it ('amateur' derives from the Latin for 'love'), but today its meaning is pejorative, contrasting with the term, 'professional,' which means more or less what 'amateur' used to mean; namely, that it applies to someone who excels at what they do. Similarly, the term, 'liberal' has arguably undergone a semantic shift in recent times – one that places it at a considerable remove from its original historical meaning. I have in mind the noun, with reference to a person; not the adjective, which means broadly 'being open to new, non-traditional ideas,' and 'supporting social and political change.' The Britannica Dictionary suggests that the noun means 'a person who believes that government should be active in supporting social and political change.' What did it mean when the concept of 'liberal' first made its appearance? It made its first appearance in the 14th century, when the term was employed as early as 1375 to describe the 'liberal arts' – a course of education intended for free-born individuals in medieval universities. Around that time, 'liberal' derived from the Latin liber, which meant 'free,' and denoted intellectual pursuits befitting a free person, as opposed to someone who rendered servile or mechanical labour. Accordingly, its etymological roots show that 'liberal' originally conveyed ideas of freedom, nobility, and generosity. The 18-century Enlightenmentsignalleda turning point, when 'liberal' began to assume its modern, affirmative connotations of support for individual rights, tolerance, and freedom from prejudice. In the late 19th century agreement largely appeared among liberals that political governmental power has the capacity to promote as well as protect the liberty of individuals. Accordingly, modern liberalism views the main obligation of government as consisting in the removal of obstacles preventing individuals from living freely and from actualising their full potential. There has been disagreement among liberals on the question, whether government should promote individual freedom rather than merely protect it. Today, however, events of particularly the last six years have made it difficult, if not impossible, to discern these characteristics in what, or who, presents itself – disingenuously, as it turns out – as 'liberalism' and 'liberal,' as I shall show below. First one should note that, what one might call the paradox of liberalism is clearly stated by Kenneth Minogue in Britannica online. He writes that it is the: …political doctrine that takes protecting and enhancing the freedom of the individual to be the central problem of politics. Liberals typically believe that government is necessary to protect individuals from being harmed by others, but they also recognize that government itself can pose a threat to liberty. As the American Revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine expressed it in Common Sense (1776), government is at best 'a necessary evil.' Laws, judges, and police are needed to secure the individual's life and liberty, but their coercive power may also be turned against the individual. The problem, then, is to devise a system that gives government the power necessary to protect individual liberty but also prevents those who govern from abusing that power. Given the disruptive events that have rocked the world since Covid in 2020 – but arguably since the 2008 financial crisis – the problem, as stated by Minogue, above, has been complexified beyond recognition, where 'comple...

By Peter C. Gøtzsche at Brownstone dot org. The Cochrane Collaboration is a grassroots organisation founded in 1993. It publishes systematic reviews of healthcare interventions and was highly successful until British journalist Mark Wilson became CEO in 2012. A major medical journal expressed concern that someone with no health care experience was leading one of the foremost organisations dedicated to ensuring good clinical decisions. Wilson made the organisation highly ineffective and bureaucratic, and his actions harmed Cochrane's mission about ensuring high scientific standards. The problems mounted, and in April 2021, Wilson suddenly left his job, a week before Cochrane's largest funder, the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) in the UK, announced a major budget cut. The funder criticised the poor scientific quality of Cochrane reviews, "a point raised by people in the Collaboration to ensure that garbage does not go into the reviews; otherwise, your reviews will be garbage." Only four months later, the NIHR declared that the funding would stop in March 2023. When that happened, Cochrane was in big disarray, but the huge bureaucracy and the poor scientific standard continued nonetheless. Wilson left abruptly "after eight years of outstanding service," as Cochrane leaders called his destruction of the organisation. Cochrane's Editor-in-Chief, Karla Soares-Weiser, became acting CEO for a month until MBA Judith Brodie took over as interim CEO for a year. In July 2022, Catherine Spencer became CEO. The "full bio" on Cochrane's homepage does not reveal her education, and I couldn't find that out, as there are, for example, a historian and a rugby player with the same name. When Spencer left in March 2025, Soares-Weiser became acting CEO. Six months later, she became the CEO, and the chair of the Cochrane Governing Board, Susan Phillips, said that she "has the vision, experience and passion to lead Cochrane to a bright new future." I shall give my reasons why I don't think the Cochrane Titanic with Soares-Weiser as captain has a "bright new future" but is more likely to sink, which some people predicted would happen when I, one of the founding fathers, was expelled in 2018 because I had become a threat to Wilson's firm grip on power. I had been elected to the Governing Board because I wanted to save Cochrane from him. I shall discuss 11 cases that stem from my personal experiences and those of Tom Jefferson, one of my previous employees, starting in 2015 when Soares-Weiser became Deputy Editor-in-Chief and got a substantial say about the standard of Cochrane reviews (she became Editor-in-Chief in 2019). But first, I shall describe a stunning affair in 2013. 2013, Cochrane Review of Influenza Vaccines After Tom Jefferson had not found any effect of influenza vaccines on mortality in elderly people, a group of researchers "rearranged" the data "after invitation from Cochrane" and reported that the vaccines reduced deaths – an amazing statistical stunt considering that the risk ratio was 1.02 and only four people died. This misconduct foreboded later events. 2015, Cochrane Review of Chlorpromazine for Schizophrenia I submitted a comment to the Cochrane Library about this review. The authors included Soares-Weiser who is a psychiatrist. They mentioned in the abstract, without any reservation, that akathisia didn't occur more often on drug than on placebo, and that the largest trial even found significantly less akathisia in the active group than in the placebo group. I noted that, "Since we know that antipsychotics cause akathisia and that placebo cannot cause akathisia, this result speaks volumes about how flawed trials in schizophrenia generally are. What was seen in the placebo group were cold turkey symptoms caused by withdrawal of the antipsychotics the patients had received before randomisation." Cochrane replied that akathisia symptoms "are well recognised to also occur in people who have never been on medication....

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org. We keep hearing whispers that the Trump administration wants to get the spotlight off pharmaceuticals and vaccines ahead of the midterms. Instead, the focus should be on cleaning up the food as the path to great American health. The messaging around food polls better, they say, whereas the pressure on vaccine makers and culling of the childhood schedule is a political loser. So they say. We'll get to whether this is true (evidence is weak or non-existent) but first a comment on campaigning by polling. The Trump movement has defied the polls constantly for ten years, choosing populist instincts instead as campaign thematics. That has worked. How many times must conventional polling fail before the political class gets the message that they should not determine messaging? In any case, let's look at the evidence we have. Gallup has measured confidence in industry for a quarter of a century. During this time, the status of the pharmaceutical industry has only fallen. Now it rates second-to-last of 25 industries right above government itself. In 2020, 34 percent of those polled had negative or somewhat negative views. That is now 58 percent, with only 28 percent expressing some confidence. That's rock-bottom. A Gallup poll from 2022 reveals scant support for Covid vaccine mandates in schools, with only 13 percent of Republicans favoring them in elementary schools and only 18 percent for them in college. In general, more than 80 percent of Republicans oppose such mandates, which is exactly the reverse of Democrats, though this poll was four years ago and that has likely changed too. Independents are split. Back in 1992, the public overwhelmingly supported vaccination requirements in general: 80% for and only 17% against. Those numbers are on the verge of crossing, according to Gallup. Even with a vaguely worded question clearly biased toward positive answers, 45% now say government should stay completely out, while only 51% support vaccination requirements. We should be particularly struck by the trends in answers to the following absurdly biased question: "How important is it that parents get their children vaccinated?" The easy answer is it is important. Pollsters know that you would only construct such a question if you are going for an overwhelmingly positive answer. To say it is not important is to mark yourself as a radical with a sudden burden of proof to show the science. It's almost like asking if apple pie is American. And yet even here, we see dramatic declines in the numbers. This poll reveals a notable intensity on the subject. Republican parents are far less likely than Democratic parents to have high confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness (45% vs. 71%), safety testing (29% vs. 63%), and the vaccine schedule (27% vs. 58%), according to Pew. We are starting to see change even on the MMR vaccine that one might expect to be nearly noncontroversial with the public at large. Republicans in particular are less willing to endorse even this one. Meanwhile, a pharma-biased Annenberg poll shows "statistically significant erosion in support" for common vaccines based on concerns over safety. The results of a Fabrizio poll from February 2026 have not been made publicly available. But a memo released from Tony Lyons of MAHA Action reports even more salient facts. A plurality of all voters believe that families should be given a choice over vaccination. Also, the same poll shows overwhelming opposition to the liability shield that currently protects vaccine makers. Removing these protections from pharma is overwhelmingly popular among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents. The same poll asked "Are you concerned about any negative health impacts from any required or optional vaccines?" A strong majority of Republicans (67%) said yes. This figure rose to 79% when filtered for strong supporters of President Trump. In sum, we live in times of grave doubt about pharma, vacc...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org. Imagine a world where hospitals brim with cutting-edge technology, yet the surrounding community's health deteriorates. Despite the availability of advanced tools to manage human life, societies are seeing spiraling rates of illness, loneliness, and anxiety, with resilience on the decline. This alarming paradox highlights a troubling contradiction that has become increasingly apparent in the face of significant progress. While medicine has achieved greater precision, it has become less personal. Public health systems are increasingly centralized, yet often lack a humane approach. Institutions claim to protect, but frequently contribute to harm. These challenges stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of the human person, rather than operational shortcomings alone. The root cause lies in the degradation of moral ecology, understood as the network of moral, social, and communal factors shaping human well-being. Failure to integrate these elements perpetuates systemic failures in health and society. The central premise is that human flourishing is ecological in nature. It depends not only on physical health or material needs, but also on moral, social, and communal factors that, when disrupted, produce tangible consequences. Such disruptions affect individuals, families, and communities at multiple levels. For example, in the small town of Meadowville, the closure of gathering spaces and decline of community events led to increased chronic health issues and greater isolation. This decline in morale and resilience illustrates the profound interconnection between health and social environments. Science can describe the resulting damage, whereas theology provides explanations for its underlying inevitability. This essay facilitates a dialogue between two disciplines that are more recently considered in isolation. Medicine observes breakdowns that quantitative data alone cannot fully explain. Theology identifies foundational principles that science cannot measure, but often corroborates. Collectively, these perspectives demonstrate that when moral ecology deteriorates, technical expertise is insufficient to restore what has been lost. Humans Are Social Before They Are Statistical "Man is a political animal. A man who lives alone is either a Beast or a God." Aristotle, Politics Contemporary medicine now acknowledges a principle recognized by earlier societies: social connection is essential for health, not merely advantageous. Extensive and consistent data now demonstrate that social isolation is associated with increased all-cause mortality, with an impact comparable to that of smoking 15 cigarettes a day or suffering from obesity. Loneliness is correlated with elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, immune dysfunction, depression, cognitive decline, and metabolic illness. These effects are substantial and are observed across various age groups, disease states, and socioeconomic strata. However, quantitative data alone do not capture what clinicians observe daily: the human body perceives isolation as a threat rather than a neutral condition. Prolonged social disconnection activates stress systems intended for emergencies. Persistent activation disrupts hormones, weakens immunity, and increases inflammation, accelerating disease. Over time, this stress raises blood pressure, impairs blood sugar control, disrupts sleep, worsens mood, and slows healing. Clinicians observe that patients lacking stable relationships experience poorer outcomes, whereas those with support from family, faith groups, or local communities demonstrate improved recovery and greater resilience. Community involvement mitigates stress in ways that medical intervention alone cannot accomplish. Proven community buffering factors include regular participation in community activities, having a network of supportive peers, and engaging in volunteer work that fosters a sense of belonging and purpose. Practices such as communa...

By Thomas Harrington at Brownstone dot org. Today, Barcelona is today one of the great tourist destinations of the Western world. Fifty years ago, however, it was a somewhat dusty backwater still smarting from the punishments inflicted on it by the Franco regime (1939-1975) for its citizens' stubborn refusal to abandon their attachment to the Catalan language and culture, and for having served as the nerve center of the defeated Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939) during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) eventually won by the Nationalist general. The city's dramatic transformation is rooted in actions taken under the leadership of Mayor Pasqual Maragall in the six or so years leading to the city's hosting of the 1992 Summer Olympics. While the mayor of every Olympic venue promises that the Games will enduringly change his city for the better, this actually occurred in Maragall's Barcelona, especially in the realm of public infrastructure. But unlike many big city mayors, Maragall understood that cities don't emerge into beauty and greatness on the basis of bricks, mortar, and ring roads alone, and that this was especially the case in a place like Barcelona where citizens had been largely stripped of their ability to express themselves in their own linguistic, symbolic, and architectural vernaculars for nearly 40 years. This awareness led Maragall and his collaborators to undertake a vigorous campaign of culture planning, designed on one hand, to remind citizens of their shared, if long-submerged, Catalan cultural heritage, and on the other, to introduce them to emergent symbolic repertoires from foreign cultural systems long obscured by regime censorship. At the center of this effort was the concept of the "legible city." Maragall believed that the language of architecture and place-making were every bit, if not more powerful, than purely textual communication and hence that the shape and character of the spaces we pass through every day exercise a considerable influence on our patterns of thought, our behaviors, and even on concepts of personal and group identity. Implied in this approach is the idea that a well-functioning city must, while never striving to impose a deterministic uniformity, nonetheless be able to transmit to its citizens a palpable sense of community and a spatial grammar that facilitates their ability to recognize themselves as sharing concepts of historical and political reality with those around them. It is an approach that, as the head of Maragall's architectural brain trust Oriol Bohigas made clear in 1999, runs directly counter to Margaret Thatcher's idea of cities and nations as a mere grab bags of self-interested individuals. Is there a risk in this approach? Most certainly. If, for example, the architects of such efforts are not people of balance and restraint, their top-down culture planning can easily devolve into a program of imposed partisan collectivism. And while few leveled this critique at the Barcelona city hall during Maragall's time in office, it has, I think, often been rightly hurled at the many city officials who have positioned themselves as heirs to his legacy during the last two decades. In the final analysis, however, critiques such as these ultimately miss the mark. And that's for a simple reason. No public space is ever free of ideological content imposed, in one degree or another by coercion, by a society's economic and cultural elites. For example, today most of us find the classic New England town green to be an elegant and calming place of beauty within our increasingly frenetic lives. This is not to say, however, that it is free of ideological directives. For example, almost all of them have a church, usually from a Protestant denomination, directly adjacent to them. Many also have memorials to those from the town or immediate area who have fallen in wars undertaken by the United States in the course of its history. While structures such as these do not force anyone to be ...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org. As the AI winter draws near, we must refuse to let any chance slip by to awaken our numbed senses. That means staying alert, at every moment, to welcome any sign. And a true labor of love is always one of those gifts that life, sometimes, brings when you are ready to receive them. That's what a strange, luminous film projected at the Kennedy Center did for me a few days ago. Directed by David Josh Jordan, the movie is entitled El Tonto Por Cristo, which means "The Fool for Christ." What signs are we seeking? C.S. Lewis, I think, captured it best in his dystopian novel That Hideous Strength, a parable about the birth of artificial intelligence and the technocratic order that paves its way. In the story, the protagonist Mark, an ambitious academic, is drawn into an elite institute called N.I.C.E., whose demonic aims are cloaked in the language of "objectivity," a preparation for the arrival of superior beings. As part of his initiation, Mark is confined to a room deliberately ill-proportioned, "not grotesquely so, but sufficiently to produce dislike," hung with paintings that at first seem ordinary, yet on closer inspection reveal "unaccountable details" that make each one "look like something seen in delirium:" an odd tilt of a foot, a strange grouping of fingers, too many beetles beneath the table at the Last Supper, a strange figure between Christ and the Lazarus. Doesn't this remind you of some AI-generated images? Instead of breaking him, the room has the opposite effect. Against its sour crookedness there rises, Lewis writes, "some kind of vision of the sweet and the straight." A sense of something else, "the Normal," that is "solid, massive, with a shape of its own," something "you could touch, or eat, or fall in love with." Mark is "not yet thinking in moral categories, yet he is having his first deeply moral experience: he is choosing a side." We live inside that same crooked room. The world around us is bent, and the question is always the same: where is the Normal to be found? El Tonto Por Cristo answers that question with quiet, stubborn grace. In the short introduction before the screening, Jordan described how the film came to be. Scrolling through the internet in search of a movie that might weave together Orthodox Christianity and the wild, strange beauty of Texas in the tradition of Bergman, Dreyer, and Tarkovsky, he was stopped by his wife: "Why don't you just make it?" So he did, with an investment of $36,000. The film unfolds in an Orthodox monastery on the Texas coast. At its center is Father John, the one-eyed, divinely illumined abbot of a ragged band of misfit monks seeking sanctity in this improbable place. Every character is drawn from the lives of real Orthodox saints, those wild, desert fathers who have always been Christianity's most compelling witnesses. For two hours and fifteen minutes we are drawn into the intimate, ordinary-yet-radiant rhythm of their days. The film never spells out what brought these men together, but it is unmistakable: each carries the scars of deep pain, each was an outcast before the monastery became home. What it does show, with extraordinary patience, is how the monotony of monastic life and the fire of spiritual intensity are not opposites, but the same reality seen from different angles, how Heaven and Earth dwell together in the same small room. The title points to the heart of the matter: the holy fool, a figure central to Orthodox tradition and to Dostoevsky, among other Slavic artists. As Jonathan Pageau explains, the holy fool exposes the limits of our tidy order. He turns everything upside down so that we might see the way out. The Holy Fool inverts the script until the Normal becomes visible again. El Tonto Por Cristo performs this inversion with rare subtlety. The opening eight-minute take alone is a threshold: we stand at the monastery door with Father John, his back to us, facing a man in a briefcase and Texas tie,...

By David Stockman at Brownstone dot org. Trump's cancellation of the so-called "endangerment finding" with respect to CO2 made by the Obama White House back in 2009 is so profoundly important as to make up for a legion of Trump's spending, borrowing, easy money, and tariffing sins. Among countless others. The entire notion that fossil-fuel-based industrial civilization threatens to boil the planet alive is sheer crackpottery. Actually, as we reprise below, the geologic and climatic history of the planet so clearly refutes the Climate Crisis nonsense as to point to an even more malefic force at work than just an egregious policy mistake. In fact, the entire Climate Crisis Hoax was a deliberately Manufactured Lie, which emanated from the permanent political class and career nomenklatura domiciled in Washington, the UN, London, and Brussels. Their purpose was transparent: Namely, the propagation of an entire gestalt centered on an existential threat to the very life of the planet, thereby implicating sweeping emergency expansion of state power to override and supplant the very rudiments and rhythms of our fossil-fuel-based industrial society and the free market-rooted lifestyles and prosperity it enables. Stated more bluntly, the Climate Change Hoax was the most blatant grab for state power in human history to date (possibly exceeded only by the Covid-era attempt to control the microbial kingdom). And, now, perhaps with no more intentionality than that of the proverbial blind squirrel which stumbles upon an acorn, Trump has struck decisively at the entire prosperity-endangering predicate of this great lie. Not only will the cantilevered green energy regulatory and subsidy structure predicated on the Obama endangerment finding now rapidly fall by the wayside, but the whole absurd religion of mankind's alleged sinful stewardship of the planet will be up for honest refutation for the first time in three decades. Perhaps it will take a year or two, or even a decade or more, but the phony "science" and risible economics on which the climate scam was based will now unravel into a heap of discredited propaganda and modern-day witchcraftery. With some luck and leadership from now emboldened dissenters in government, industry, science, and the public conversation alike, we may even benefit from a "never again" syndrome in our national politics capable of keeping the statists at bay for at least a few decades longer. Perforce, therefore, the foundation myths of the Climate Crisis scam needs to be eviscerated limb-for-limb in order to document that the entire story was and is bogus. The truth is, the equipoise of the planet is not remotely in danger from burning fossil fuels or other human endeavors that make modern life more pleasant and tolerable. In the first place, there never has been planetary equipoise! What there's been is 4.5 billion years of wildly oscillating and often violent geologic evolution and climate disequilibrium owing to manifold natural causes including: Plate tectonics which have sometimes violently impacted climate systems, especially the assembly and breakup of Pangaea between 300 million and 175 million years ago and the continuous drift of the present day continents thereafter. Periodic asteroid bombardments. The 100,000-year cycles of the earth's orbital eccentricity (it gets colder when it's at maximum elongation). The 41,000-year cycles of the earth tilt on its axis, which oscillates between 22.1 and 24.5 degrees and thereby impacts the level of solar intake. The wobble or precession of the earth's rotation which impacts climate over the course of its 26,000-year cycles. The recent 150,000-year glaciation and inter-glacial warming cycles. The 1,500-year sunspot cycles, where earth temperatures fall materially during solar minimums like the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, which occurred at the extreme of the LIA when sunspot activity virtually ceased. The natural climate change now underway is therefore the pro...

By Sinead Murphy at Brownstone dot org. Mattel has launched Autistic Barbie. Because children with autism should be visible, including to themselves. 'Every child deserves to see themselves in Barbie.' So goes Mattel's blurb. It is a theme of our times: being visible, seeing ourselves, coming-out into the light. Launched in the domain of what is called 'sexuality,' it is now a general possibility with multiple pathways. And everything gives way before it. There can be no objection to coming out. It can only add to the supply of what is good. It is a lie, destructive of health and happiness. Out is truth, and promoting of health and happiness. But while we busy ourselves with one or other modes of coming out, we overlook the usefulness of coming out, not to us who do it but to those who seek to manage us who do it. Because coming out implies a number of useful effects. First. Coming out implies that there is something in, something that shrinks from the world, something there – not discerned by the senses or the sciences but divined by new-style experts appointed by fiat for the task. These experts – psychologists, educationalists, therapists of various kinds – describe for us our modern soul, our 'identity.' In doing so, they arrogate to themselves a power to invent characters for people that are allegedly defining but that do not necessarily manifest themselves at all. There is something there, though there is no sign of it. The more there is no sign of it, the more there it may be said to be. Second. Coming out implies that there is an essential in-ness, an essential invisibility, about what is there. This can denigrate any or all visible evidence of a situation or condition – its possible causes as well as its symptoms – as inessential or beside the point, not linked to what is there with any necessity. Third. Coming out implies that strategies that elicit what is there are neutral in themselves and acceptable in their outcomes, for they merely uncover a truth and uncovering a truth can only be true. Fourth. Coming out implies that in whatever mode what is there ventures forth, with whatever attributes it roams abroad, it cannot be offensive or destructive but only healthy and right. The power to dismiss existing evidence of a condition is matched by the power to promote manufactured evidence of a condition. As a device for the insertion and normalization of any number of effects, the conceit of coming out could not be more useful. And Autistic Barbie is a case perfectly in point. Autism in its true form comprises exclusion from the conditions for involvement in human life, as I have argued in What Autism Is and What Autism Is Not. The US CDC reports that 1 in 31 American children now receives a diagnosis of Autistic Spectrum Disorder by the age of 8, an almost four-fold increase since the beginning of the century. This epidemic of autism points to the poisoning of children on a scale heretofore unknown. And social and political strategies to address autism typically exacerbate its destructiveness, amplifying the most anti-human characteristics of autism under the aegis of its inclusion. But laundering autism through the rigmarole of coming out neutralizes what is a crime against humanity – more than neutralizes the crime, it actually washes it in a kind of virtue. First. As what must come out, autism is framed as something there, where its there-ness is prised away from the many ways in which autism is painfully evident to the senses and to the sciences, and made the province of pronouncements by experts in the fields of education, psychology, and various therapies. Autism is thereby grafted onto the modern soul, with all the specialness, the truth, that that involves, transformed from a physical and social harm from which our children suffer to a divergent form of identity from which our society can only benefit. In this regard, that Mattel's first autism-themed doll is Barbie and not Ken is significant. Autism is a co...

By Dana Ullman at Brownstone dot org. Harris Coulter has written an academic and fascinating four-volume set of books on the history of Western Medicine, brought back into print by Brownstone Institute: Volume I: The Patterns Emerge: Hippocrates to Paracelsus Volume II: Progress and Regress: J.B. Van Helmont to Claude Bernard Volume III: Science and Ethics in American Medicine: 1800-1914 Volume IV, Part One: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era Volume IV, Part Two: Twentieth-Century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era Each volume is important to those who wish to understand the roots of modern medicine and to learn how and why many "unorthodox" practices did not gain general acceptance in the health care system. The four books are of particular importance to those involved in holistic approaches to health because Coulter traces the history of the holistic (AKA "empirical") practices that are often ignored or criticized unfairly in most medical history texts. Ultimately, books on history are written by the "victors;" that is, by the dominant political or medical paradigm, and such books give an inadequately accurate view of true history. The books written by Dr. Coulter are therefore a refreshing and even compelling review of medical history. Coulter's books show that what we call "scientific medicine" today isn't really scientific but "reductionistic;" that is, these conventional medical treatments tend to provide short-term a highly limited assessment of health benefits from treatment, often ignoring the fact that such treatments provided only short-term benefits while creating many side effects that later led to chronic and deeper diseases. The four volumes are scholarly written and are thoroughly footnoted with references to thousands of original writings. Volume I describes the era from Hippocrates (400 B.C.) to Paracelsus (1600). Volume II discusses medicine in Europe from 1600 to 1850. Volume III covers medicine in America from 1800 to 1914. Volume IV covers Twentieth-century Medicine: The Bacteriological Era (this volume is itself separated into two volumes, Part I and Part II). The title, Divided Legacy, refers to the two predominant schools of thought or traditions that have dominated Western medical history (college courses in "philosophy" typically describe these two dominant schools of thought, and Coulter's books describe how these two different philosophies manifest in medical thought and practice). Although the two schools were not formalized with every practitioner aligning him/herself with one or the other school, Coulter's analysis shows convincing evidence how some of the best physicians and healers believed and practiced mainly in one or the other tradition. One school was known as the Rationalist school, while the other was the Empirical school. The Rationalist school sought to understand health, disease, and the treatment of disease in an analytical fashion; It sought causes of disease and methods of treatment in a systematic and rational manner. It focused on the anatomical and biochemical nature of the human being as ways to understand the parts of the organism and how to make them function properly. The Empirical school of thought held different assumptions about the ways of acquiring knowledge on health, disease, and the treatment of disease. It did not look for nor seek to understand the causes of disease. It sought and developed ways that worked whether or not the practitioner understood at first why the methods worked. Although Empirical practitioners usually had theories on how and why their methods worked, they recognized that their theories were always secondary to the fact that the method worked. Over long periods of time and through close observations, empirical practitioners developed their own time-tested and systematic health practices that were not based on an analytical understanding of cause and effect. The Rationalist school, of which modern medicine is the latest develo...

By REPPARE at Brownstone dot org. The G20's High Level Independent Panel (HLIP) on pandemic preparedness convened through 2025 to provide a report entitled Closing the Deal: Financing our Security Against Pandemic Threats to the November G20 Leaders' Summit in South Africa. The report was as a follow-up to the HLIP's 2022 report on A Global Deal for our Pandemic Age where the panel outlined their financial estimates for pandemic preparedness and response (PPPR). In the face of funding cuts for development assistance for health (DAH), the 2025 report was intended to reiterate the necessity of its financial request and to increase the pressure on all countries to allocate more public money to save humanity from the scourge of pandemics. As noted by the HLIP: "pandemic risks continue to rise – fuelled by our connected world, zoonotic spillover, humanitarian crises, and the increasing likelihood of both accidental and deliberate threats. Outbreaks emerge ever more frequently…" (HLIP, p. 9). Indeed, it would seem a good cause, but a recent report from REPPARE at the University of Leeds finds quite the opposite. The problem with the statement, as we summarize in the report and here, is simply that it is disconnected from the world in which the G20 operates. Policy, at least good policy, must be based on reality. The Risk of Pandemics A "connected world" indeed allows certain pathogens to spread more quickly, but with no real difference in expected outcome. New variants of influenza and other respiratory viruses have routinely spread across the world for well over a century – not necessarily a new problem. Global integration also ensures that these viruses avoid landing upon large populations with complete lack of immunity. In other words, the catastrophes of measles and smallpox in the time of colonization of the Americas, Australia, or the Pacific Islands will not recur, at least not due to natural outbreaks. Put simply, the big killers of the past will remain in the past. We have good yellow fever vaccines, smallpox is eradicated, we know how to avoid cholera, and antibiotics address bubonic plague and typhus as they would have also prevented most Spanish flu deaths. None of this is seriously challenged, with the greatest risk of reemergence due to either a major lack of access to known measures or from anti-microbial resistant strains driven largely by the inappropriate use of medicines. Will a new pathogen arise from natural spillover to cause a sudden, catastrophic global outbreak? SARs-CoV-2, the worst in a hundred years, was mainly a threat to the unwell elderly, and its origins look increasingly uncertain. Will they arise from a laboratory? Perhaps, but that is another story with a very different prevention strategy. A strategy completely ignored in the 2022 HLIP report on financing PPPR and with just a brief mention in its latest 2025 report (perhaps a weak, but newfound acceptance of laboratory escape risks). These days we 'see' outbreaks like MERS, SARS, avian flu, Nipah virus, and Zika because we can detect them. Before 1980, we simply did not have the major methods to do this – namely, PCR tests, genetic sequencing, point of care antigen, and serology tests. However, this oversight is almost undoubtedly the main basis for a rapid (or "exponential") increase in reported outbreaks (particularly in the mid-1980s after the invention of PCR) that drives the international pandemic agenda. It explains why this increase first happened in industrialised countries and only later in those that were technologically less developed. Not just the G20's high level panel, but reports from the World Health Organization and the World Bank ignore this reality in order to improve their chances of getting funding for PPPR from countries. It is also possible to produce frightening estimates of the average number of people dying from pandemics each year – such as 2.5 million (twice total tuberculosis deaths). A US-based company, Ginkgo Biow...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org. As the entire world is having a temper tantrum over the most recent Epstein case revelations about our discredited elites – obsessing over the power networks, the private jets, the bank accounts in the Virgin Islands, the French ministers, the European royalty, the foreign intelligence agencies, etc. – I'm having an entirely different epiphany. And, strangely, a flicker of hope. The rot on display is hard to take your eyes away from, but I find myself thinking more about what might rise in its place. I'm not talking about another faction of whip-crackers wearing better suits or pushing slicker slogans, but a quieter bunch, who appear to have the capacity to generate moral assent to a new political formula. That new elite prototype has started to take shape inside the MAHA movement. It might not yet be a fully formed counter-elite, but it certainly looks like a promising kind of one. I cannot say it enough: MAHA's foundational event is the Covid crisis. For many people, it represents the most frightening moment of our existence. What happened between 2020 and 2022 was not merely a policy disagreement or a partisan shouting match. It was the moment when the state, legacy media, Big Tech, pharmaceutical giants, and a large segment of the professional class all eagerly agreed that the normal rules no longer applied, that they could do virtually anything they wanted to people's bodies, force any injection into children's arms, arbitrarily decide who would be allowed to earn a living, and that these acts were not merely permissible but morally required. The violation was so deep that it felt physical. That visceral reaction many of us felt – and continue to feel – was the ultimate offense to what George Orwell called common decency, by which he meant the basic virtues of ordinary people, as opposed to ideologues or men of power. The closest Orwell came to a definition appeared in his 1944 review essay Raffles and Miss Blandish, where he contrasted two literary works, E.W. Hornung's Raffles series and James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish. Raffles, the gentleman burglar (a kind of British Arsène Lupin), operates by an unspoken code defined by the very simple injunction that "certain things are 'not done,'" and the idea of doing them scarcely arises. Devoid of religious belief or a formal ethical system, he follows certain rules semi-instinctively. To give but one example: Raffles will not abuse hospitality, meaning that he may commit burglary in a house he is invited to, but never against the host. He never commits murder, avoids violence, is "chivalrous though not moral in his relations with women," and is intensely patriotic (dispatching to the Queen, in one telling moment, a gold cup stolen from the British museum on the day of the Diamond Jubilee). His code is one of social form rather than absolute right or wrong. By contrast, James Hadley Chase's No Orchids for Miss Blandish, Orwell has noted, flatters the reader's "power instinct," offering escape not into action but into cruelty and sexual perversion. It is a novel where the thrill lies in domination. Orwell saw the fork in the road right there. One path preserves a world where wonder is possible. The other, obsessed with certainty, leads straight to the managerial class we spend our days despising – not because they are powerful, but because they are indecent. They don't merely want to govern; they want you to thank them while they humiliate you. They demand that you internalize your shame while they play with your body and with your children's minds. They regulate your speech, your sleep, your very immune system, and integrate the results of their experiments on you as data into their dashboards and compliance metrics. That indecency has been the real fuel behind the populist insurgency which crystallized into political dividends around 2015. The anger was legitimate. The sense of betrayal was deep. But most of the m...