By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

My Uncle Don had a different name for everyone.

I had no idea where he came up with all these labels. They were often colourful, and clearly he thought they were funny. Except nobody was really laughing.

To him, someone from South Asia was a Paki, an aboriginal person was, obviously, an Indian; a guy from Ukraine was a Bohunk; a Frenchman, a Frog. Germans were Krauts, and a Gook was someone from Southeast Asia, a name, no doubt, planted in his head from a racist epithet thrown at the Vietnamese. You get the picture.

But looking back—this was the 1970's we're talking here—I don't think there was hate behind the labels he gave those from other countries, or those of other religions or other customs. It was mostly his way of making distinctions, as if a person's race, country of origin, or belief was everything you needed to know about that person. Slurs like these took the whole person and reduced him or her to a simple, memorable epithet. Easy. And. Efficient.

The 1970's were a time when people also used words, even in polite company, like "homos," or "kikes" referring to gay men and Jewish people. Slurs casually hurled at entire groups of people allowed you to put them in a box, to classify them, set them apart with a label that curtailed further thought. Many times these labels would be flung without understanding that the person who was the subject of the label might feel lesser, or unworthy of respect. I don't think my Uncle Don was a racist, but looking back now, he sure sounded like one. If he was told his slurs were in poor taste, he'd probably throw up his hands and say, "Look, I'm no racist, but a dark guy is probably from Pakistan so he's a Paki," or something equally clueless.

Uncle Don, like many working-class men of his generation, made caricatures of people based on their race or nationality or religion. He was an industrial plumber and lived in Winnipeg, a melting pot of a city where ribbons of steel converged in vast railroad yards and the trains dumped immigrants from all corners of the earth into the centre of Canada's heartland. There were Scots and Irishmen, Slavs, Asians, Blacks, and numerous pockets of Canada's indigenous people.

Hearing the use of the term "anti-vaxxer" today gives me the same gut reaction I had when listening to Don wax on about people who were visibly different from him. "Anti-vaxx", while in vogue today and uttered without any form of introspection or understanding, is clearly a term of laziness, a mostly defensive maneuver to shield a person from having to engage with another's ideas. In short, the term is a quick way to mark that person as morally deficient, selfish, and contemptible.

Scorning "anti-vaxxers" has become a way to signal one's inherent righteousness and correctness, telling the world in a single word that there are those of us who care about others and untrustworthy people who don't. In a nutshell, the word says: "Imagine how dumb you have to be to seriously question the safety or usefulness of injectable pharmaceutical products that are the most innovative health technology in the history of humankind?" How dumb indeed.

As a straight, white guy, I don't think anyone has ever hurled a slur at me. Until Covid.

The first time someone called me an "anti-vaxxer" was in 2021, after the Pfizer mRNA Covid vaccine was approved. This was before the Pfizer trial was published and everyone in my office at the University rushed to get their shots. I waited.

I knew the likelihood of me, a healthy 58-year-old guy, developing complications and dying from Covid were miniscule. I was on record for seriously questioning previous government policies around the influenza vaccine which—because I read the company's own studies—I determined were next to useless, and coercive to healthcare workers. I believed in the precautionary principle, and Covid didn't scare me one bit. When asked by a colleague about why I was not yet vaccinated, I told him, "I'm...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.

Since Covid, the "mental health crisis" has gone from background music to a deafening noise. It is said to touch every part of society, but none more than Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2013. The French figures give the scale: compared with the previous decade, psychiatric hospitalizations in 2021–2022 rose 106 percent among 20-to-24-year-olds, 163 percent among 15-to-19-year-olds, and a staggering 246 percent among children aged 10 to 14. Researchers spent a decade arguing over datasets.

Parents look for a single culprit they can blame or a device they can confiscate. Having exhausted the managerial and therapeutic answers of more awareness, more services, more medication, and more self-expression they offer for every modern sorrow, institutions are now itching for the stick of social networks age verification, or for AI fear porn. Two excellent books written by two Generation Z authors and published this year refuse the usual explanations and their lazy remedies. They do not deny the disastrous effects of smartphones, lockdowns, or ubiquitous pornography. They insist that these were oil poured on a well-established fire.

Freya India's GIRLS®: Gen Z and the Commodification of Everything is the report from inside girlhood. Pierre Valentin's The Malaise of Generation Z, alas not yet available in English, broadens the perspective to the entire Zoomer generation, taking Christopher Lasch as a guide. Read together, they describe one event: the transfer of the inner life from families, churches, trades, and ordinary adult authority to a tutelary, market-therapeutic complex specialized in the production of a fundamentally dependent and weak self. In other words, the "mental health crisis" is not happening by default, but by design.

India and Valentin's books are not interchangeable. Born in 1999, India is a British woman who was given a smartphone at eleven and later logged off to think…and to live. Her popular Substack is essential reading on what it feels like for girls to grow up as content.

GIRLS® is personal without being a memoir and researched without being bland journalism. Born in 1998, Valentin is a French political essayist. His subject goes well beyond what screens do to boys or girls. It is a whole age group, from early adolescence to the edge of thirty, whose shared experience is no longer a war, an economic crisis, musical tastes, or a common work, but a psychiatric curve. Specialists agree that this generation is more depressed, more anxious, more fragile, and more unhappy than those that preceded it. But they completely miss the mark on what that fact means.

India's title is the argument. Girls have been remade into GIRLS®. They are ornaments under filters, objects on dating apps, brands under management, lives packaged for an audience and priced by public rating. Her book is not another self-righteous and exasperating sermon taken from the register of luxury stoicism about "too much Instagram," like Jonathan Haidt's lazy conclusion in The Anxious Generation.

In that book, Haidt, who is atheist, pleads for mass transnational prohibitions, particularly age verification, and, as Pierre Valentin ironically points out, ends with a utilitarian eulogy of religion! It is a minutely detailed account of how a web of industries exploited the oldest vulnerabilities of girlhood by turning them into a commodity and marketing them as empowerment. Beauty, psychiatry, pornography, dating, and tech all pull attention inward, toward appearance, feeling, and appetite. In an almost burlesque version of Mandeville's bee fable, it is vanity turned into liberation.

GIRLS® moves through six stations. Filtered focuses on girls' anxieties over their faces and bodies, revised by apps that began with very few filters and became a permanent and unforgiving tribunal. Diagnosed is the conversion of ordinary unhappiness into a portable identity, complete with language, community, and a produ...

By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

Bill Gates has long been one of the most admired people in the world, especially since he stepped down from his role running Microsoft to devote himself and much of his fortune to philanthropy. That reputation has been tarnished recently, however, by revelations of the billionaire's close relation with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, and exposés on his own fraught relationships with women.

On the eve of Gates' private testimony with Congress scheduled for tomorrow, a trove of federal whistleblower documents provided to RealClearInvestigations is renewing questions about how Gates money has bought what critics complain is an untoward influence on government health policy. For almost a quarter of a century, his main vehicle of power, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing Gates to shape the direction of the country's health strategy in ways that have benefitted his own priorities and pet causes while polishing his image as a benevolent global do-gooder.

At a time of growing concern about the power of billionaires such as Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Sam Altman, Gates' efforts stand out. Instead of lobbying federal agencies for specific policies, Gates leveraged his wealth to work inside the government, partnering with high-ranking NIH officials to steer taxpayer research funding and design scientific policies for several federal programs.

The cache of several dozen emails and documents, made public for the first time by an NIH whistleblower, reinforces previous reports detailing Gates's extensive influence over U.S. biomedical research. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Kate Elder, a senior vaccines policy adviser for Doctors Without Borders, complained to Politico, "What makes Bill Gates qualified to be giving advice and advising the U.S. government on where they should be putting the tremendous resources?"

Emails and internal plans, for example, show that the NIH – the world's largest funder of biomedical research – gave the Gates Foundation first billing for the joint workshops and meetings held on federal property.

The Gates Foundation did not respond to repeated requests for comment. The NIH also declined to comment.

Like most philanthropies, the Gates Foundation tries to grow its endowment through investments. Some of these efforts, especially its stake in vaccine companies, blur the lines between profit-seeking and the foundation's mission to develop and deliver vaccines around the world. This symbiotic relationship between capitalism and charity also benefits Gates, whose power and position hinge in large part on the size of his foundation's assets. Before the pandemic, The Nation magazine reported that the Gates Foundation had a $40 million stake in CureVac – this was not a grant but an investment. CureVac was one of many companies the nonprofit bought stock in that were working on COVID vaccines and therapeutics.

Around that same period, the Gates Foundation announced that it had begun to "leverage a portion of its $2.5 billion Strategic Investment Fund" to advance the nonprofit's COVID work. The Gates Foundation also turned a $55 million investmentin Pfizer's COVID vaccine partner, BioNTech, into over $550 million when it sold stock a couple of years later after the vaccine hit the market.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation was established in 2000 with an initial endowment of $20 billion and a primary focus on reducing global health disparities. Rather than working exclusively through non-governmental agencies, the Gates Foundation began contributing to the NIH through the agency's own nonprofit, the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH). Congress created the FNIH in 1990 as a firewall between NIH officials and outside donors seeking to influence federal research.

That firewall is not ironclad. In 2018, for example, NIH officials, funded by beer and liquor ...

By Josh Stylman at Brownstone dot org.

A few summers ago I gave consideration to moving to Florida or Texas. This was 2021 when it felt like there was a collective madness in my hometown of New York City. If you remember that moment, you remember the destinations where people like me were fleeing. I was looking into places like Florida and Texas. The so-called free states, the escape hatches (not my framing but more of a public consciousness in a particular demographic that I had seemed to become a part of). I compiled spreadsheets about neighborhoods, school lists, and initiated other projects you do when you're about to uproot your family.

And somewhere in that diligence I came across a company called Oxitec. They breed genetically modified mosquitoes. In May 2020, the EPA approved an experimental release permit. The two states cleared for field testing were Florida and Texas.

I'll share what happened next in the spirit of transparency, even if it makes me look a little ridiculous in retrospect. I sat there and thought: the two states I'm considering as my escape are the two states approved for experimental GMO insect release. And then I wondered: are the escape hatches just honeypots to round up the dissidents?

And then I thought: who and what have I become? I mean that's insane, right? Does a reasonable person wonder if Bill Gates personally zoned his retirement? I remember actually feeling embarrassed, alone in my own head. I'd spent two decades in tech. I didn't know it at the time but I played my own tiny role in helping build some of the surveillance plumbing I now write about. I am not a man who is easily spooked by an internet meme. And here I was, pattern-matching my way out of a real estate decision as if the ticks had lobbyists.

For a variety of reasons we left NYC but stayed in the state. Partly logistics, but also because by 2021 I'd talked myself into the conclusion that whatever was happening was global, and if that was true, fleeing somewhere wasn't really an escape. Some places might have had longer runways than others, but I wasn't going to live as a man on the run. My wife and I decided it was better for us to optimize for quality of life, and we ultimately decided to stay in New York in a more rural setting. I'm not going to suggest that decision was vindicated, because it wasn't, not cleanly anyway (though we're mostly a happy family).

In the years since, however, I kept running into pieces of that mosquito story that I couldn't quite make myself stop assembling.

This past week Marty Bent posted something that made me revisit a lot of my research from that era.

Two professors at a medical school in Michigan published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Bioethics. Their argument is that it is "morally obligatory" to genetically engineer ticks to spread a disease that makes humans violently allergic to red meat.

My first reaction was the natural one, in my opinion. It had to be an Onion or Babylon Bee headline someone laundered through a fake citation. People don't really write ideas like this down, do they? They certainly don't get them reviewed by their peers.

So I checked and it turned out to be real. Bioethics, volume 39, issue 8, pages 772 through 781. Published online July 2025. It's indexed in PubMed. You can pull it up on Wiley right now. The authors are Parker Crutchfield and Blake Hereth, both at Western Michigan University's Homer Stryker MD School of Medicine. The paper is called "Beneficial Bloodsucking."

The author's actual argument – and remember this is not satire – is that alpha-gal syndrome (AGS), the tick-borne red meat allergy, is a "moral bioenhancer." Their logic: if eating meat is morally wrong, and the allergy makes you stop eating meat (because it will now kill you), then the allergy makes you a better person. From there they build what they call the Convergence Argument, which in plain English means "multiple different ethical frameworks all happen to point at the same conclus...

By Jessica Rose at Brownstone dot org.

Ralph Baric's 2007 paper stands as a foundational reference in synthetic viral genomics, demonstrating how a SARS-like coronavirus could be de novo assembled from published sequence data alone. Framed as a risk assessment for synthetic biology in the context of biodefense, the paper provides a detailed technical roadmap for constructing infectious chimeric coronaviruses using seamless reverse-genetics techniques. This work exemplifies dual-use (civilian and military) research of concern: the very same tools developed for pandemic preparedness and biodefense can be readily applied to engineer viruses with enhanced pathogenicity, transmissibility, or immune evasion.

With the unexpected discovery of SV40 promoter-enhancer-origin sequences in the Pfizer Covid-19 mRNA injectable products, it becomes apparent how biodefense can become bioterrorism very quickly. These powerful mammalian regulatory elements, retained from a standard pcDNA3.1-type production plasmid, were never intended for human administration. Their detection in commercial vials links a synthetic biology framework directly to the manufacturing process of the "countermeasures" themselves – turning a theoretical dual-use discussion into a concrete, real-world example of how synthetic tools and legacy genetic elements entered hundreds of millions of people under the banner of biodefense.

Ralph S. Baric's 2006 paper entitled: "Synthetic Viral Genomics: Risks and Benefits for Science and Society" reviews how synthetic genomics and reverse genetics has transformed virology, both for good and ill. It details the Baltimore classification of viruses and explains established reverse-genetics techniques from infectious cDNA clones and bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) vectors for large DNA viruses, to seamless assembly methods (ie: "No See'm" sites using type IIS restriction enzymes) for RNA viruses like coronaviruses.

These tools have already enabled resurrection of extinct pathogens (ie: 1918 influenza) and construction of chimeric viruses, allowing precise manipulation of virulence, transmissibility, host range, and immune evasion genes. Baric catalogs select agents across virus families, noting which are synthesizable from published sequences, and highlights barriers like sequence accuracy, genome stability in bacteria, and technical expertise – barriers he predicted would erode rapidly as DNA synthesis became cheaper and more accessible.

If you read the paper, you will have seen that it provides a detailed, practical framework for de novo synthesis and reverse genetics of SARS-CoV specifically, including seamless full-genome assembly, in vitro transcription to RNA, and recovery of infectious virus. The paper repeatedly notes that synthetic genomics allows reconstruction of viruses like SARS-CoV from sequence data alone, without needing the natural virus, and discusses how this could be used for both 'legitimate' research (vaccines, pathogenesis studies) and misuse.

In addition, the methods Baric outlines in the paper are directly applicable to SARS-CoV-2 (also ~30 kb), which is even more clearly laid out in Peter Daszak's DEFUSE proposal: a collaborative how-to guide for "defusing bat-borne coronaviruses" (Figure 1). Post 2019 implementations have used yeast recombination, Gibson assembly, or similar seamless techniques, but the core principles (synthetic DNA fragments full-length cDNA RNA transcripts infectious virus) are the same. As mentioned, Baric's lab and collaborators had already demonstrated this for the original SARS-CoV in 2003.

The paper is eerily prescient in terms of laying out the infrastructure for both "pandemic preparedness" and "dual-use" procedures. Synthetic approaches enabled rapid response: once a new pathogen's sequence is known, genes or full genomes can be synthesized for diagnostics, vaccines, and therapeutics, without waiting for natural isolates. This paradigm was used during SARS-CoV-2. We are all...

By David Bell at Brownstone dot org.

(Original publication date: 5/30/2026.)

We are to believe, according to some public health voices and media, that the Ebola outbreak in Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is a threat to us all. This is a bit of a pattern, and it is a story full of obvious flaws.

Hot on the heels of COVID-19, in which humans may have fiddled with a virus and then used the Nature Medicine journal to pretend otherwise, we have endured one existential threat after another. Mpox, avian flu, Marburg virus and Hantavirus between them have not totalled 1,000 deaths together over the entire period. Mpox is perhaps the worst, with about 500 deaths across two separate "public health emergencies of international concern", mostly due to malnutrition in, once again, DRC. But DRC loses 70,000 children to malaria every year, so Mpox was really our problem rather than theirs.

The narrative of polycrisis foisted on an ever-more sceptical public has wrecked the integrity of international public health. Under its current model, global health priorities are largely determined by a few very wealthy individuals with limited public health understanding, or corporations with direct vested interests in certain outcomes. Public health journals are financially beholden to these, as are mainstream media, and can only reflect the hype.

The story is all about the necessity for more money to enable experts to rescue both ourselves and the people of affected regions. Highly paid consultants and pharmaceuticals from Western corporations become essential to save populations apparently helpless without our urgent largesse. This is historically ridiculous, it is ignorant, it is stupid and the note by Villa and co-authors of the Ituri Collective explains why in very clear and coherent terms.

Ebola virus was first identified 50 years ago in DRC, and since then has caused intermittent outbreaks, mostly small. It has presumably done this throughout human history, which means hundreds of thousands of years in this area. The largest, in 2014, was in West Africa and killed about 11,000 people over a year. Spread by close and direct contact with body fluids from a sick person, it kills about 30% of presenting cases with a severe febrile illness and systemic bleeding ('haemorrhagic fever'). Illness is therefore relatively obvious, as commonly is the path of transmission.

Ebola virus presence has been detected at low frequency in many animal species in Central and West Africa. Its main animal host, if it has one, is not clear, but evidence is found in bats, rodents, non-human primates, pigs and species such as the small duiker antelope. And, of course, occasionally in humans. Transmission from animals to humans is called a 'spillover' of a pathogen or disease, and it happens a lot. Influenza is a common example, as are brucellosis and Hantavirus. What matters is whether it then establishes transmission between humans, and that depends on many factors.

Critically for understanding the current hype: why did transmission become established in Ituri province in DRC to cause the current outbreak?

Viall and colleagues explain the reasons why this outbreak could be sustained, as summarised below. Unfortunately, the media have ignored these factors in most reporting. But they are common to many such occurrences in African populations.

Ituri is a province in North East DRC with a population of about seven million people. It has several ethnic groups, a lot of gold mining and a lot of poverty. There have been major armed insurgencies for several years, including two main factions – one (the Allied Democratic Forces) affiliated with the Islamic State terrorist group. Active military responses come from the DRC armed forces and, in the past, those of neighbouring Uganda. Atrocities against the civilians trying to survive within this context are common, and there are several large camps of people displaced from their homes by the armed groups. Groups...

By Sofia Karstens at Brownstone dot org.

Do you remember the fairy godmother Merryweather in Sleeping Beauty? She's the one who, when the evil queen curses the newborn Aurora to prick her finger on a spindle and die on her sixteenth birthday, can't undo the curse…but she can soften it. So she uses her own gift to change the ending: not death, but a deep, enchanted sleep.

There is a whole lot of seemingly coordinated (dare I call it) panic right now around AI. I've written extensively about the legitimate, existential dangers we do need to address in technology. But my spidey sense tells me this current fever pitch isn't that.

For one thing: why now? I'm certainly not the only person who's been writing about these issues for years or believes we've already crossed that threshold. So why the sudden, synchronized urgency? Why is someone like Bill Gates – after literally decades as AI's most prominent optimist – suddenly publishing a 6,000-word essay warning that we've "passed AI's danger thresholds," calling for new national and international regulatory bodies? What's in it for him, now, after all this time?

A psyop is never just one thing. It's a wilderness of mirrors. A single mirror shows you one reflection you can identify and correct for. A wilderness of them means every angle you check reflects another angle, with no clean vantage point outside the hall to verify against, which is functionally what a multi-actor convergence produces, even without any one person orchestrating it. You don't need an overlord director standing behind the glass for the hall of mirrors to work. And that's the unsettling part: a single coordinated psyop presumably has an off switch, in principle, if you ever find the operator.

A wilderness of independently-incentivized mirrors doesn't. There's no one thread to pull. You'd have to defund the labs' marketing incentive, restructure the regulatory capture dynamics, fix the media business model, and drain the political utility out of "AI-as-boogeyman" – separately, all at once – for the reflection to actually stop. It isn't one thing. It's five or six things (usually at least), each independently profitable or useful to a different party, all predictably, reliably, producing the same noise.

The convergence looks a little something like:

Genuine researcher concern, unevenly calibrated by a public conversation where the public-facing volume of the concern exceeds its actual epistemic certainty.

Commercial incentive: "This is so capable it could go wrong" is also, uncomfortably, a marketing claim.

Regulatory capture dynamics, probably the spear tip: heavy compliance regimes burden small competitors while incumbents absorb them easily, and some of the loudest voices demanding regulation run the largest labs.

Media incentive: fear and novelty both outperform nuance for engagement, full stop, independent of subject matter. This would be true of AI coverage even if none of the other factors existed.

And political utility: AI fear has become a genuinely useful rhetorical tool across very different political projects…It serves centralized-control arguments, deregulatory "beat China" urgency, and culture-war anxieties about job loss or loss of control all at once, depending on who's using it. Much of this predates AI entirely and would've attached to some other target if AI hadn't come along.

None of these require a coordinating hand talking to the other four. They just currently point the same direction, for reasons specific to each actor's own incentives. It's a hat rack: real, separate, true things, all easy to hang on the same peg, creating the appearance of a unified campaign without requiring one to actually exist.

There's a mainstream body of scholarship describing this mechanism. Gregory Dickinson, in his Harvard Journal on Legislation article "Law Proofing the Future," writes in the section "Big Tech and Regulatory Capture:" "the very platforms and app makers whose companies make prompt calls for reg...

By Renaud Beauchard at Brownstone dot org.

Wendell Berry died on August 31 at his farm in Port Royal, Kentucky. He was 92. For more than half a century he farmed with horses, wrote in pencil, adamantly refused to purchase a computer, and insisted that the health of a person cannot be separated from the health of a place. That faithfulness to a place is the part of his thought that the health freedom movement most needs now.

Health, Berry never tired of saying, comes from the same root as whole, heal, and holy. To be healthy is to be whole. Health as wholeness is not a decree from the medical apparatus. It is membership to a community: belonging to other people and to a particular piece of earth. "I believe that the community—in the fullest sense: a place and all its creatures—is the smallest unit of health," he wrote, "and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms."

That sentence should hang over every discussion of medical liberty. The movement for health freedom has rightly fought for informed consent, against coercive public-health machinery, against the reduction of the body to a set of data to be mined by the Biosecurity State. Those fights are essential, but they are not sufficient.

A person who has successfully kept the State out of his bloodstream can still be unwell if the soil from which comes the food that feeds him is dead, if the water he drinks is polluted, if his neighborhood is atomized, and if the food system that feeds him is a chain of distant, chemicalized abstractions. Autonomy without membership to the kind of community Berry wrote about all his life is not worthy of a fight.

Berry made the connection explicit in an essay entitled "The Body and the Earth," collected in The Unsettling of America and later in The Art of the Commonplace. Our bodies, he wrote, "are moving particles of the earth, joined inextricably both to the soil and to the bodies of other living creatures." It is therefore unsurprising that we treat our bodies as we treat the land.

When we treat land as an extractive resource, as something to be mined, specialized, chemically altered, and abandoned, we treat the body the same way: as a machine whose parts can be isolated, optimized, and replaced by specialists who have no interest in nutrition, agriculture, or the wholesomeness of mind and spirit. "It is therefore absurd," he wrote, "to approach the subject of health piecemeal with a departmentalized band of specialists." A doctor uninterested in the health of soil is as absurd, continued Berry, as a farmer uninterested in the health of people.

In this view, healing is not a procedure performed on an isolated organism. "Healing is impossible in loneliness; it is the opposite of loneliness. Conviviality is healing. To be healed we must come with all the other creatures to the feast of Creation." The feast is local. It requires a place that is intimately known, cared for with affection, and kept whole enough to keep giving. Love of place is not a shmaltzy slogan. It is the condition of knowledge and of care. You cannot properly care for what you do not love, and you cannot love what you refuse to know in its particularity.

This is the lesson the health freedom movement must take from Berry without abandoning its core commitments. Medical freedom is a necessary defense against the Machine, but it is of little use if we don't know where our food comes from, who grows it and how, what a neighborhood looks like when the soil is alive, or what care looks like when it is not outsourced to distant systems that treat both land and body as inputs.

Berry's answer was never a set of slick policies. It was faithfulness to a place and to the kind of labor that the love of a place requires. Berry left his native Kentucky to study at Stanford and teach in New York City, but he returned to Henry County, farmed it, wrote about it, and refused the careerist mobility that treats every locality as interchangeable.

The ...

By Daniel Nuccio at Brownstone dot org.

Knowing what's in your food or whether what you're about to eat comports with a medically prescribed diet can be difficult. There's no reason why the government should make it harder. But that's exactly what the United States Department of Agriculture and Food and Drug Administration are doing when they prohibit companies from conveying information about FODMAP content on food labels.

Although not inherently harmful to most people, FODMAPs are a broad category of short-chain carbohydrates and sugar alcohols believed to trigger gastrointestinal symptoms in individuals living with irritable bowel syndrome and possibly several other functional gastrointestinal disorders.

In technical terms, FODMAPs are fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols. More practically, people with IBS might want to be careful around most standard dairy items, honey, several cereals and artificial sweeteners, and a cornucopia of fruits, vegetables, legumes, and spices.

When consumed, these items can lead to luminal distension by causing increased amounts of water to enter the gastrointestinal tract and increased gas production by bacteria living in the colon. In some individuals with IBS and other functional gut disorders, this may trigger or exacerbate certain symptoms of their condition (e.g., intense pain and changes in intestinal motility), possibly through neurons in the gut responding abnormally to these physiological responses to FODMAP consumption.

Hence, some patients with these conditions choose to limit their FODMAP intake or are encouraged to do so by their health care provider. Some go on strict low-FODMAP diets long term. Others temporarily do so for two to eight weeks then work to reintroduce specific FODMAP-containing foods into their diet to determine what they can tolerate. Broadly speaking, a lot of patients with relevant conditions find that the diet helps alleviate their symptoms.

Low-FODMAP diets though are generally considered sort of bland. They also tend to require a certain amount of time and education to be effective. Looking at a table of high- and low-FODMAP foods to make decisions about what to eat may not require an advanced degree in nutrition, but it is not difficult to imagine how having to break out such a table to evaluate every item you consider purchasing at the grocery store could become rather burdensome, especially if you're new to the diet.

Fortunately, there are organizations and companies out there to help. Monash University, for example, has labs that both study the effectiveness of low-FODMAP diets and test food items for FODMAP content. Monash also offers several resources to help those on low-FODMAP diets make informed meal choices and works with companies that wish to offer low-FODMAP food options. If a company wants to submit a product to Monash for evaluation and Monash determines the item is low in FODMAP content, the company can then use a trademarked label to convey this information to consumers.

However, as one US company learned, even if one of the world's leading FODMAP research facilities tells you your food is low in FODMAPs, this isn't exactly the kind of thing you can just put on a label in the United States.

In 2018, Ketan Vakil, after dealing with his own digestive issues involving FODMAPs, saw an opening in the market to cater to customers on low-FODMAP diets by offering diet-compatible broths and spice blends that could safely add some flavor to this notoriously bland diet. Hence, he founded Gourmend Foods, and, after getting a chicken broth and some spice blends low-FODMAP certified by Monash, Vakil and Gourmend proceeded to sell those items online and in retail using Monash's trademarked label.

However, in 2022 when Vakil expanded Gourmend's product line with a low-FODMAP beef broth, he learned from the USDA while going through a pre-approval process for the beef broth's label that it would be illegal for him to in...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

An email arrived from a reader that posed a serious problem, a general one of which I was only vaguely aware. It deals with an issue deeply intimate to all family life. It affects the crucial cultural matter of the prolongation of legacy and human life itself.

Her niece is expecting a baby. The child is due in three weeks, which means that it will be around for Thanksgiving holidays. Instead of treating this as a glorious opportunity for the extended family to marvel with delight over new life, hearts lifted all around, the mother is treating family as nothing more than walking and talking disease vectors.

On the advice of her pediatrician, she is banning anyone from getting near the baby unless they have fully four shots: D-Tap, Covid, flu, and RSV. This is because the baby cannot be vaccinated with D-Tap for two months. The entire family is being told this and people are trying to figure out what to do.

Some will refuse and be relegated to Zoom contact. Some will be masked and gloved. Others will go along and risk injury to themselves for absolutely no reason.

The practice is called cocooning. It makes no sense at all. Cocooning is different from nest building, which is a normal sense of wanting time to bond and learn and care. This is different. It is a pharmacological innovation that implies that the basic immune system is deeply flawed without the injection of industrial products and therefore a newborn can only be around other maximally injected people.

The Covid and flu shots are known to register negative efficacy. None of these shots can prevent transmission, an indisputable fact. Moreover, every pharmaceutical carries risks. Four at once carries more risk than one.

In effect, the new mother is exercising soft power, blackmailing her family by denying joy to them unless they give money to the shotmakers. Think of it as an informal vaccine passport imposed by cautious new moms who have no idea they are being manipulated by powerful industrial interests.

I was shocked by this email but apparently this is very common. It's a policy. Incredibly, the CDC itself recommends this: "A baby's family members and caregivers should be up to date on their vaccinations to help form a circle of disease protection around the baby."

If you believe that, I've got a closet full of potions to sell you.

It's a wonder humanity has survived so long without such exhortations! It's "social distancing" applied to pediatrics, without the same evidence in support, which is to say none.

A maker of one D-Tap shot is GlaxoSmithKline. Ten years ago, they put out an advertising campaign for their shot called Boostrix. It featured a wolf holding a baby. The campaign was called Big Bad Cough. The message was that no young mother should let anyone without Boostrix near her newborn child.

A class-action lawsuit was launched on grounds that the potion does not actually protect against spread. The company settled the lawsuit. Disbursements are now going out to people who took the shot under the advertising campaign's influence.

The plaintiffs in the lawsuit had claimed "physical and emotional injury, the injection creating in their bodies a defective immunity to pertussis that will last the remainder of their lives, receiving a painful injection of various substances into their bodies that they would not have received otherwise, expending time and resources to seek out and obtain Boostrix, paying, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, for Boostrix, and after GSK led them to fear that without Boostrix they were in danger of spreading pertussis, receiving the product has actually rendered them more likely to spread pertussis and hence only increased the fear created by GSK."

The courts did not ultimately rule. The company settled to prevent that for good reason. The jabbed accepted the payout rather than take the challenge all the way.

We've only begun to discuss the complete fraudulence of the entire co...