By Sofia Karstens at Brownstone dot org.

By now, everyone knows the basics of the California fires that burned down the Palisades and Altadena. And most people are aware of the shady "Make it make sense" particulars around our elected officials and the quasi- and government agencies like the LA DWP.

Some people understand the corruption, fraud, and coordination of criminal activity that has led us here. Far fewer understand how deeply that dysfunction persists, and the degree to which it has been amplified.

The Santa Ynez Reservoir, which held 117,000,000 gallons of water, was emptied in February of 2024. It could have been repaired by employees, but it sat empty for 11 months.

Everyone knows California has a desert climate. Everyone knows about the Santa Ana winds. Everyone has an understanding of the intersection between electricity, fire and fire prevention, trees, and wind in California. The reservoir holding over 100 million gallons was emptied because there was a tear in the cover, the repair was not expedited, and the decision was made to drain it for maintenance before the Santa Anas in the middle of a drought.

At that time, the LADWP was focused entirely on 3 things:

1. Obtaining approval for a recycling sewer water plant, at a cost of over $750 million.

2. Research (using ratepayer funds) converting an existing gas-fired power plant in Utah to hydrogen.

3. Reorganizing the DWP around, and prioritizing, DEI. (To quote the head of the DWP: "Equity is my number 1 priority.").

First, why is the DWP spending ratepayer money to develop technologies and research, to the detriment of public safety measures? Spending ratepayer dollars to figure out how to use a new technology, while our own utility infrastructure lies decaying, untended, and unsupported, is at best outside the scope of the contract.

Next, why are we prioritizing DEI at the expense of the readiness of resources that a 9-year-old could predict we will need in California? Five percent of the LA city fire personnel are women. The 3 most senior people holding leadership positions all came out of that 5%. Not impossible…but neither is rolling a 12 six times in a row.

Researchers said urban water systems like DWP's were not designed to fight wildfires that overtake whole neighborhoods…Is there a reason we are not making that a priority over, say, hydrogen research in Utah? There was zero attempt at mitigation, alternative, or course correction for a known liability in a known risk corridor during a known risk to prevent the state's most predictable disaster.

I submit that ANY conversation but the 117,000,000-gallon reservoir being empty is a shiny object…to avoid talking about that subject. But they've had over a year to course correct so surely they've assigned the minimal resources required to rectify this massive liability…

But it gets worse.

Sexy priorities like DEI and new technologies superseded public safety priorities, and now we see what those priorities got us. Keeping our infrastructure in repair and ready was and is not the executive decision, and our elected officials own those executive decisions because they appoint these positions and have oversight. They failed to adequately prepare a known fire corridor for the world's most predictable emergency. But they've had over a year to course correct so surely they've assigned the resources required to rectify these liabilities also…

But it gets worse.

We have a budget problem. Over $1 billion was spent last year on homeless nonsense that didn't help the homeless. Meanwhile, there was a $17 million cut to the fire department – about which Chief Crowley sent a letter in December saying, essentially, we aren't going to be prepared for a major disaster. She explicitly said that there is equipment we can't repair because we don't have the money for maintenance. Now, $17 million is not insignificant. If you are already cut to the bone with the budget, any more cuts will invariably affect levels of service. A ...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

The case of a young child at Texas Children's Hospital following a near-drowning incident has reignited a debate that medicine has struggled with for more than half a century. According to multiple media reports, the family sought judicial intervention to obtain additional time, explore transfer options, and investigate alternative therapeutic approaches before any final determination regarding brain death would foreclose those possibilities.[1,2] As so often happens in the modern United States of America, the story quickly moved beyond the walls of the hospital. Lawyers became involved. Politicians entered the discussion. Journalists amplified the controversy. Social media transformed a family's private tragedy into a national debate. Yet, beneath the headlines lies a much deeper question.

As a matter of transparency, this is not an argument against brain death. Nor is it an attempt to overturn decades of neurological science. The neurological criteria for death emerged from legitimate clinical challenges and remain accepted by most physicians, hospitals, and courts. Rather, this is a reflection on what happens when medicine becomes so confident in its conclusions that it stops listening to those most affected by them.

After more than four decades practicing medicine in emergency departments, intensive care units, and hospital wards, I have become increasingly convinced that many of the most difficult conflicts in healthcare are not caused by a lack of knowledge. More often, they arise when certainty begins to replace humility and when technical expertise is mistaken for complete understanding.

Sir William Osler frequently reminded physicians that medicine operates within a realm of uncertainty and probability.[3] Scientific knowledge continues to advance at a breathtaking pace. We can image the human brain in amazing detail, manipulate physiology in ways previous that generations could scarcely imagine, and sustain life through technologies that would have seemed miraculous only decades ago. Yet despite these advances, medicine remains an imperfect science. Every diagnosis carries assumptions. Every prognosis carries probabilities. Every prediction carries limitations.

More than 2,000 years before the advent of modern intensive care, Socrates recognized a truth that remains relevant today: wisdom begins with an awareness of the limits of one's own knowledge. Scientific progress should increase our humility, not diminish it. Yet modern medicine occasionally behaves as though every important question has already been answered. Nowhere is this tendency more apparent than in discussions surrounding life, death, and the limits of medical intervention.

For most of human history, death was relatively straightforward. A person stopped breathing. The heart stopped beating. The body became cold. Families gathered, prayers were offered, and communities mourned. Death was painful, but it was rarely ambiguous. The development of modern intensive care medicine changed that reality forever. Mechanical ventilation made it possible to sustain respiration despite catastrophic neurological injury. Physicians suddenly encountered situations that previous generations could never have imagined. Hearts continued beating, blood continued circulating, and organs continued functioning despite devastating and apparently irreversible brain injury. Technology had created circumstances that nature had never previously allowed.

In 1968, the Ad Hoc Committee of the Harvard Medical School to Examine the Definition of Brain Death published its landmark report introducing neurological criteria for determining death.[4] The committee was not attempting to create controversy. It was attempting to solve a genuine medical dilemma created by advances in resuscitation, mechanical ventilation, and organ transplantation. Hospitals needed standards and physicians needed guidance. Courts needed definitions. The committee's reco...

By Mollie Engelhart at Brownstone dot org.

Last week, we hosted our monthly Brownstone Institute Supper Club at Sovereignty Ranch. Our guest speaker was Mikki Willis, producer of Plandemic, The Great Awakening (Plandemic 3), and several other films that became touchstones for millions of people trying to make sense of the Covid-19 era.

I expected the conversation to focus on public health, censorship, and the lingering questions many people still have about those years. It did. But what stayed with me most had very little to do with science, politics, or policy. It was a conversation about forgiveness.

Mikki spoke candidly about friendships lost during Covid-19, the pain of being misunderstood, and the reality that many of the apologies people hoped for never came. There were moments when emotion caught in his throat as he reflected on people he once loved and trusted. The hurt was still visible, but so was the peace that had come from refusing to carry that hurt forever.

One of the most powerful ideas he shared was that what gives a two-dimensional image depth is shadow. Without shadow there is no contrast, and without contrast there is no depth. The same is true of life. The difficult moments, the betrayals, the losses, and the disappointments create the depth that allows us to appreciate the full picture. But we cannot allow the shadows to become the whole picture. If we focus only on darkness, we lose sight of the beauty, growth, wisdom, and purpose that exist alongside it.

That idea hit me harder than I expected.

Partly because I have watched my own brother and Mikki experience a fracture in their friendship during Covid-19 that was eventually healed. Seeing two people find their way back to one another after time and distance had come between them is powerful. It is a reminder that relationships can survive even serious disagreements if both people remain willing to do the work.

But the conversation touched something even deeper in me.

During Covid-19, I watched businesses I had spent years building disappear. I watched equity vanish. I watched plans I had worked toward for decades collapse in a matter of months. Like many entrepreneurs, I wasn't just losing income. I was watching pieces of my life's work slip away.

I can forgive that. In fact, I believe I have to. Carrying anger forever is a prison. At some point, it weighs more on the person carrying it than on the person who caused it.

At the same time, forgiveness and accountability are not the same thing, and I think we do ourselves a disservice when we pretend they are.

I do not want to move on as if nothing happened. I do not want to pretend businesses were not destroyed, children were not harmed, families were not divided, and fundamental rights were not restricted. I do not want us to collectively decide that because enough time has passed, the questions no longer matter.

That is what forgiveness is not.

It is not forgetting. It is not pretending the wound never existed. It is not agreeing that what happened was acceptable. Forgiveness is the decision not to allow the wound to define the rest of your life. Accountability, on the other hand, is the willingness to honestly examine what happened so that we do not repeat the same mistakes.

We need both. Without forgiveness, we remain trapped in bitterness. Without accountability, we guarantee that history repeats itself.

I am deeply grateful for what Mikki Willis brought to the world during Covid-19. His films gave many people the courage to ask questions when asking questions carried real social and professional consequences. Whether someone agreed with every conclusion he reached or not, he helped create space for conversations that powerful institutions often seemed unwilling to have.

What inspired me most last week, however, was not what he did during Covid-19. It was who he has become since. His willingness to forgive, his willingness to continue searching for truth without becoming consumed by anger, and hi...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

The cacophony for and against vaccines – even what is a vaccine is in broad dispute – has reached new level of deafening absurdity. There isn't just one rabbit hole but hundreds.

Compliance is tanking, which is what one would expect after brutal mandates and ubiquitous injury and death. Meanwhile, pharma bots are dominating social media to shame dissidents, while legacy media turns news pages into nonstop shot-and-pill advertising.

Everyone is left with questions about whom to trust and what is true. Several states have already seceded from the CDC's own attempt to change the childhood schedule even slightly. That's how contentious this issue has become.

My thesis: this epistemic nihilism is born of the deliberate subversion of economic signaling systems that would otherwise reveal inconvenient truths.

Let's begin with theory.

In 1920, Ludwig von Mises set aside all moral, aesthetic, and philosophical issues concerning socialism and examined how it would work as a purely economic experiment. This was a point rarely considered at all in the centuries before, even by the new leaders of the Soviet Union who had no idea what they were doing beyond nationalizing industry, blathering on about the dictatorship of the proletariat, and demonizing land owners.

Mises calmly explained that double-entry bookkeeping is the mathematical means by which society has come to evaluate the benefits and costs of resource use. This requires prices, which are indicators of relative scarcities and consumer demand. These prices form the essential building blocks of economic knowledge. They provide pointers regarding the essential questions of what to produce and in what quantity.

In order for these prices to be accurate, they must be formed in the context of real-world market trading up and down the full structure of production, from raw materials through capital goods to consumer goods. Only that process generates reliable signals from which accounting is built.

Socialism purports to replace the price system with central commands. In that case, not even the planners will have access to information about the real world around them. They will be flying blind and inevitably screw it up. They did indeed.

The implications of the argument go far beyond the debate over socialism. They reach into every sector mired in government intervention that distorts pricing signals. With every price distortion, we get further away from having accurate information about economic value and market viability in real-world settings.

It was Toby Rogers who first pointed out that this accounts for much if not all of the confusion surrounding the vaccine industry and practice. For two and a quarter centuries, this product, practice, and industry has relied fundamentally on statist means of boosting its viability at every stage: investment, production, distribution, consumption, and even liability. There is no stage of this sector that is untouched by government meddling on behalf of the industry in question.

Rogers writes:

The vaccine era — the years since the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act — exposes a failure neither [Mises or F.A. Hayek] foresaw. Let's call it the calculation problem under regulatory and epistemic capture. Socialism abolished the price outright. Capture in a mixed market economy is subtler: it leaves a price standing and corrupts it from within until it is worse than meaningless.

Mandates, government purchasing, and insurance rules guarantee sales no matter what the product actually does. School-entry laws force sales upon captive customers (e.g. children who want to go to school). Liability protection removes the price that disciplines a defective product — the damages a court would otherwise make the manufacturer pay. The buyer is compelled and the producer is protected so no meaningful price can form.

Making matters worse, price aggregates what buyers believe about the thing they buy, however regul...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

Tomorrow will make four long years since that bitterly cold day in Washington, D.C., when the medical freedom movement shocked the officious and unctuous Biden administration with the first major DC political rally since the infamous post-election events of January 06, 2021. And yet, what I find most stunning was not that we pulled it off with essentially no lawlessness — despite rumors of attendance by a variety of disruptive forces and the concerted efforts of various chaos agents — but that the core issues remain unresolved four years later.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the West Coast Health Alliance continue to advocate for mandated Covid mRNA vaccines for children as young as 6 months old. In Hawaii, Governor Dr. Josh Green and his cronies have just introduced a bill in the legislature to repeal the current Hawaiian Childhood Vaccinations Exemption process, making compliance with state-imposed vaccine mandates for children a statewide policy without any opt-out clause.

Shortly after the DC "Defeat the Mandates" rally, the Washington Post labeled me a liar (in print, repeatedly) for claiming that the mRNA products were not working as intended, in that they did not prevent infection or disease caused by SARS-CoV-2. And yet that has now become a universally acknowledged truth. I guess that intentional, repeated defamation did not withstand the test of time.

Suffice to say, I am not holding my breath for an apology. So much for the reliability of the "experts'" wisdom and insight. One might imagine a bit of introspection would be in order, perhaps a modicum of shame, and a pinch of humility. But that does not deter the same highly credentialed medical "experts" from insisting on mandating the most aggressive vaccine schedule in the entire world for our children. In jab they trust, and so we must.

But what do the medical Guilds have to say about mandates and informed consent?

In its Code of Medical Ethics, the American Medical Association states:

"Informed consent in medical treatment is fundamental in both ethics and law. Patients have the right to receive information and ask questions about recommended treatments so that they can make well-considered decisions about care. Successful communication in the patient-physician relationship fosters trust and supports shared decision making."

American Medical Association. Code of Medical Ethics: Informed Consent. 2025.

Fundamental in both ethics and law. But apparently there is an unwritten and unspoken vaccines mandate exemption.

In its Public Health Code of Ethics, the American Public Health Association asserts:

"the effective and ethical practice of public health depends upon social and cultural conditions of respect for personal autonomy, self-determination, privacy, and the absence of domination in its many interpersonal and institutional forms."

American Public Health Association. Public Health Code of Ethics. 2019.

"Absence of domination in its many interpersonal and institutional forms" is an interesting and relevant turn of phrase. If state-imposed vaccine mandates are not a form of institutional domination, I do not know what is.

Bioethics is the study and application of moral principles in medicine and the life sciences, built around four central pillars: autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice. Among these, informed consent stands as the cornerstone of ethical practice because it operationalizes respect for autonomy — the individual's right to self-determination. Informed consent requires that patients receive complete and transparent information about the purpose, benefits, risks, and alternatives of any proposed intervention, including the option to refuse treatment.

True consent must be voluntary and free from coercion, deception, or informational manipulation. Without full disclosure and comprehension, consent becomes mere compliance, negating the principle of autonomy and transforming medicine into a f...

By Ian Miller at Brownstone dot org.

The Covid lockdowns may not have been remotely effective, but at least they harmed millions of people and created long-lasting negative impacts that we're still dealing with today.

That's the conclusion of a massive new body of research into the nonsensical policies promoted by the public health "expert" class, promoted by their media partners, and enacted by incompetent, cowardly politicians.

Mask mandates had been thoroughly discouraged by decades of pre-Covid pandemic planning. There was no body of research supporting the closing of certain businesses at different hours of the day, as many jurisdictions demanded.

No studies were conducted on the reduction of infection rates resulting from placing directional arrows on the floors of grocery stores to direct people through aisles in predetermined patterns.

There were no randomized controlled trials on closing skate parks and beaches, arresting people surfing alone in the ocean, restricting capacity to random percentages based on inaccurate assumptions of community spread.

We had no idea whether closing schools would be effective or "save lives," but we did it anyway. We didn't know if vaccine passports would actually have a meaningful impact on community spread, yet we were encouraged to push that too.

All these "interventions" started with little-to-no evidence. That's bad enough. What makes it much worse? That we implemented them all with zero consideration of possible side effects resulting from those policies.

Lockdowns were an unprecedented incursion on freedom and liberty. What would that do to society, the economy, mental health, and so on? It appeared that no one involved gave those considerations a second thought, and now we're paying the price.

A massive new systematic review of over 130 studies of Covid policies was published recently in Health Affairs Scholar by writers from the Department of Health Policy, Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health in Indianapolis, synthesizing the research into ancillary outcomes from lockdowns, school closures, and other mandates. The goal of this systematic review was to find the "unintended health effects" resulting from those policies. Essentially, putting Covid aside, what were the results when it came to various important measures of health?

They write that while policymakers and public health authorities have produced years of reports and lectures on the importance of mandates and lockdowns in reducing viral transmission, there's a large "gap in the literature" regarding what other impacts may have resulted from "shelter-in-place/stay-at-home orders, workplace closures, and school closures."

While peer-review isn't a guarantee of accuracy, all 132 studies included in the analysis were peer-reviewed. Those 132 studies resulted in finding over 450 unique outcomes. And spoiler alert, the overwhelming majority of those outcomes were negative.

What makes their results even more infuriating is that there was, as they explain, "very low quality" evidence that lockdowns would be effective, as well as a "lack of information on potential unintended downstream consequences." Yet decision-makers plowed forward anyway, despite the "serious ethical, economic, health equity, and human rights concerns" resulting from such policies.

Not to mention that the researchers found that lockdowns had "little to no effect on COVID-19 mortality," the most important stated goal of lockdowns. Stay home, save lives, the mantra went. Turns out, like so many other government messages, that this was completely and utterly incorrect.

So we've established that there was no reduction in Covid mortality from lockdowns, very low quality evidence supporting lockdowns in the first place, and an overwhelming majority of studies found negative side effects from those policies. All great news so far. But it gets even better when examining what those negative side effects actually were, and how widespread those results were...

By Maryanne Demasi at Brownstone dot org.

This week, I reported that Pfizer's mRNA flu shot offered almost no clinical benefit in adults aged 18–64 — and that the harms were more significant than the headlines suggested.

But that was not the full story.

The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) did not publish any data from the older adults in the same trial — the very population most at risk from influenza and the main reason these vaccines exist.

Instead, the over-65 results were quietly uploaded to ClinicalTrials.gov, where they sat buried on a government website, out of sight and far from the scrutiny that comes with publication in a leading medical journal.

When MIT professor Retsef Levi discovered the missing cohort while reviewing the trial documents, he was stunned — not only by what the data showed, but by what it means when a flagship journal selectively reports findings that may directly shape public health decisions.

What he told me calls into question not just this study, but the integrity of the system that allowed it to happen.

Levi said the missing data in the NEJM article was "puzzling," adding that "it seems like the reason for omitting the older participants was because the results were not favourable for the studied mRNA vaccine."

The trial enrolled about 27,000 participants aged 65 and older. Their data make it clear: Pfizer's mRNA flu shot did not outperform the traditional flu shot in the elderly.

On top of that, Pfizer's shot caused slightly higher rates of mild-to-moderate local and systemic reactions — injection-site pain, fatigue — consistent with the well-known reactogenicity profile of mRNA products.

Levi said omitting data from this group was "unacceptable, especially since the over-65s are among the high-risk populations that influenza vaccines aim to protect."

He did not soften his criticism of NEJM's role.

"It's either gross negligence in the review process, or worse, scientific misconduct," said Levi, questioning how the public can trust a journal "if its review process either misses or hides major results in the trial."

Rather than presenting the full dataset in the journal, Pfizer uploaded the unfavourable results on ClinicalTrials.gov, where they remained effectively invisible to clinicians and the public.

Levi said there was no question this was an egregious oversight.

"I do not see how NEJM can argue that the published article is transparent, when results are selectively reported, and moreover, negative results are not reported."

The failure to publish the older cohort's results has now placed NEJM — and its Editor-in-Chief, Dr Eric Rubin — under intense scrutiny.

Levi said, "I think that what we see here is a clear failure of the NEJM's review process and integrity, and the ultimate responsibility rests with the Editor in Chief…Dr Rubin should be expected to provide a clear explanation as to how this has happened."

Dr Eric Rubin presided over the decision to publish a Pfizer trial stripped of its most important age group, allowing a reputed journal to become complicit in the same selective reporting practices that have long undermined scientific publishing.

Rubin also sits on the FDA's Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC) — the same committee that may one day review Pfizer's biological licence application for this very product.

His track record during the pandemic has been fraught.

In a 2021 VRBPAC meeting on Covid-19 vaccines for children, Rubin dismissed concerns about unknown safety gaps, saying, "We're never going to learn about how safe the vaccine is unless we start giving it. And that's just the way it goes."

NEJM under his leadership also published the pivotal AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine trial — a paper that omitted adverse event data.

One of those missing cases involved participant Brianne Dressen, whose severe neurological complications were removed from the trial records. Dressen personally contacted Rubin asking him to correct the record a...

By Joseph Varon at Brownstone dot org.

When Abraham Lincoln was shot, America saw more than just the loss of a President. Something quieter happened that night, but it was just as important. People saw the kind of doctor that society once truly respected.

Doctor Charles Augustus Leale was just 23 years of age when he walked into Ford's Theatre on April 14, 1865. He had finished medical school only weeks before and was assigned to the theater because the President would be there. By the end of that night, his name was forever linked to one of America's most tragic events.

As soon as the gunshots rang out, panic took over the theater. People screamed, soldiers rushed in, and confusion filled the room. In the middle of it all, Leale climbed into Lincoln's box and faced a scene that most doctors would remember forever.

Years later, he described the moment with remarkable simplicity: "As I looked at the President, he appeared to be dead." He then added, "As the President did not respond, I thought about the other form of death, apnoea, and I assumed my preferred position to revive by artificial respiration."

Those initial sentences stand out. Simple, honest, and very human. They do not sound planned or practiced. They sound like a young doctor facing a disaster, trying to make sense of what he saw as it happened. Leale did not freeze. He immediately acted. He quickly checked Lincoln's head wound, cleared a blood clot to ease the pressure, opened the airway with his fingers, and tried artificial respiration with the methods he knew. Historians still debate whether he performed an early form of cardiac massage, but that seems less important now. What matters most is that he acted right away to help. He acted as a real doctor.

There was a time when doctors, like Charles Augustus Leale, held a special place in society. People didn't just see them as skilled professionals. They saw them as moral leaders. Communities trusted doctors not because they were always right, but because patients felt doctors truly cared about them, not just the system. Leale had no protocol to follow that evening. No committee advised him. No administrator stood nearby explaining liability concerns. No electronic medical record demanded documentation. There was no legal department, no compliance office, no billing specialist, and no corporate structure surrounding him. There was simply a physician, a dying patient, and a sense of duty. Medicine today feels very different.

Today's healthcare is full of amazing technology. We can use machines to support organs, read genomes, use artificial intelligence for diagnosis, and keep people alive in ways we couldn't imagine years ago. Intensive care units now look like engineering labs. But even with all this progress, many patients say healthcare feels impersonal and cold.

People often leave medical encounters feeling processed rather than cared for. We shouldn't pretend that medicine in the 1800s was perfect. Doctors in Leale's time didn't have antibiotics, ventilators, modern anesthesia, or many of the treatments we take for granted now. Death rates were very high. Still, medicine back then often felt much more personal, and that quality now seems at risk. Yet, the doctor belonged to the patient. Now, many doctors feel like they belong to large systems instead of their own practices.

This change didn't happen all at once. Over many years, medicine slowly turned from a calling into an industry. Hospitals became big businesses. Doctors became employees. Patients became consumers. Even the way we talk about healing started to sound like business talk.

Doctors now hear words like throughput, optimization, efficiency, productivity targets, and market share more often than words like presence, reflection, or bedside intuition. Even the words we use for doctors have changed. More and more, doctors are called "providers," a term so bland that it could just as easily describe a cable or internet company. When that happened,...

By Richard Kelly at Brownstone dot org.

A flurry of excitement has gripped news services in the last week or so as several groups of 'ISIS Brides' arrived back in Australia, from parts of the Middle East. The actions of these women have caused consternation, to say the least, among Australians who consider that giving support and comfort to terrorists is at best an error of judgment. Some were arrested, others were not.

Some had scuffling supporters to welcome them, others arrived more or less unnoticed. Various opinions were voiced, or whispered, about what ought to have happened. Politicians did what politicians do. Talking heads talked.

At least two things became clear – they are real people, with friends and critics, and they are newsworthy. Nothing like a jostling crowd bumping into cameramen and reporters as the main characters barge their way through the arrivals hall blinking into the sunlight of the concourse, trying to spot an Uber to whisk them away, for a TV news item.

Newsworthiness is a difficult thing to define. I suppose newspaper editors and TV producers routinely make what to the naïve public look like heartless calls on what to leave out of the day's edition. (And moronic calls on what to include.)

Indeed, the content of a paper or a nightly news bulletin is as instructive for what is not mentioned as it is for the items that do get a run. One gets a picture of what kind of overall story or stories the editor or proprietor feels most comfortable portraying. It is tempting to draw further conclusions from this kind of analysis about the motives behind the stance – but without further facts any conclusion would be just speculation.

Not that there's anything wrong with speculation – sometimes it's all we have to go on. When the story is NOT run, what are we to make of that?

Imagine a set of circumstances whereby a real family or group of friends was taken from a cruise ship mid-holiday and forcibly dressed in plastic overalls, masked, paraded across tarmacs, flown back to Australia, and detained indefinitely in a purpose-built stalag in Western Australia. It's the Hantavirus, don't you know. Not infection, just contact-traced.

Surely newsrooms would be frantic with activity, already looking beyond the smug claim from the federal Health Minister Mark Butler that these people would be subject to quarantine measures he boasted to be the toughest in the world. "I do make no apology for the fact this is one of the stronger approaches you'd see around the world," he said, adding some countries are only quarantining passengers for a few days.

That kind of sound bite is good for a 20-second item on the telly. But the whole thing is a goldmine. Stories for months; even a cadet reporter could knock up a list of angles as long as Victoria's lockdowns (262 days, lest we forget):

Who are they? What are their names? Are they related to each other? What was the rest of their holiday going to be? How long had they been planning it? Was it the trip of a lifetime? Are they missing their dog? Did they have other things they needed to be doing? Is their internet access working? How often are they Facetiming the grandkids? Are they getting exercise? Do they like the food they are being served?

Do they have a GoFundMe to pay for the rent they can't afford because they can't work? Has their small business gone bankrupt yet? Will they be able to claim compensation or sue the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Health Department for locking them up? Have their pre-existing medical conditions remained in check, or have they deteriorated? Have they missed an important event like a wedding or the birth of a granddaughter?

Newsrooms ought to be covering their plight. That they are not is proof that they are not regarded as newsworthy. Having reached that conclusion, we are back to wondering why.

According to my calculations, these Australians are about 2 weeks into their 'at least 3 weeks' nightmare. No questions have been put to the P...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

Many of us have had the intuition that the economic damage from 2020 – including industrial stoppages, monetary printing, supply-chain disruptions, extended school closures, and general population demoralization – was in fact far greater than official statistics indicate.

What follows will shore up this intuition, using new techniques and numbers from an innovative project called RealityIndex.co.

It's true that official data is bad enough, showing a 26% loss in purchasing power, slow growth in output, and only marginal improvements in real income. The labor participation rate and worker/population ratio never fully recovered and continue to fall.

Output has been lackluster. It's supposedly running 2.3% which is about half the postwar norm for US economic performance. It feels like a general downshift. Official data shows a brief recession in 2020 followed by gradual economic recovery overall.

But is this even true? In 2024, Brownstone Institute commissioned a study (by E.J. Antoni and Peter St. Onge) that concluded that we have never really entered recovery after 2022. We've been in a technical recession since that time. They got this with some limited adjustments of price data bumped up against output data. That study was met with brutal attacks, with every critic falling back on official data and doubting the supposed extremism of the conclusion.

That's where matters have stood even as reports pour in concerning broken labor markets, no raises for 1 in 4 professional-class workers, and sketchy Gross Domestic Product (GDP) data that seems barely above zero thanks mainly to medical-sector subsidies, government spending, and social services. Then there are the learning losses showing dramatic declines in test scores among affected students.

We are left with real questions. How can consumer sentiment be at historic lows given that the overall data seems to raise no loud alarms?

In the meantime, Artificial Intelligence has come along to make these complicated calculations possible, ones that seek to discern and delineate the huge gaps between official data and reality. The goal is to come up with real data concerning real prices, sans the many different methods that the Department of Labor uses to adjust price changes.

For example, housing prices are not measured directly but rather converted to owners' equivalent rent (OER). Medical service prices are adjusted for consumption, not premiums or final bills. When consumers substitute one good for another, that is also factored in. When the quality of a good or service improves, the statisticians apply what they called hedonic adjustments, which are invariably designed to minimize price increases and never run the other direction.

Where does this leave those of us who are looking for a plain index of prices? A veil has been put over that basic question and answer, such that we don't know for sure. This matters tremendously for issues like raises, examining cost of living increases, taxes, and pension payments. Everything is adjusted for inflation to convert it to real valuations but if we don't have a clear number, what are we to do?

This is why we should be thrilled about a new study/service called the Reality Index. You are free to browse the site yourself and examine every aspect of the method. Essentially, the site owner, an independent intellectual in Madrid, Tom Elliott, has deployed tools of AI to wholly reconstruct price indices in a way that is consistent with actual prices. His results are absolutely eye-popping. I've examined the method here in detail and found no fault.

The Wall Street Journal has also taken notice. This is good news and raises the possibility that we can finally get to the truth.

The core of the problem is a constantly changing methodology in official data. The formula was changed eight times over 35 years. All the changes seem technical and vaguely justifiable, once explained. Adding them all up, you get...