By Paul Thacker at Brownstone dot org.

Several incidents in the Covid pandemic's first two years forced me to confront the uncomfortable reality that American society had cracked apart, fleeing the comfort and safety of accepted knowns to float untethered from logic in a foreign ether far from planet Earth. Welcome to Mars.

But prior incidents had already trained and prepared my mind to expect a coming derangement. During the Persian Gulf War and the Northridge Earthquake, I had near-death experiences that lingered for years in memory, forever shaping my future actions. Just as scary as thinking I was about to die were the frightening behaviors I witnessed in those around me. During the Gulf War, a soldier in my division came across an Iraqi mine. Instead of calling for engineers to destroy the device, he decided to flip it away from himself, blowing off his own head. After the 1994 earthquake stopped shaking my condo so hard the refrigerator fell over and the walls seemed close to caving in, I stepped outside to smell gas leaking from the major pipeline that ran beneath our complex and a nervous neighbor lighting a cigarette to calm his nerves.

Terrified someone we couldn't see might be lighting up a smoke elsewhere in the condo complex, my roommates and I fled for safety, driving through a surreal cityscape of gas line fires, while I rode in the backseat with a loaded pistol.

Both wars and natural disasters upend the laws and rules that govern our normal existence. Experience has taught me that such tectonic shifts in society's rules leave many unprepared to adapt and navigate a new ecosystem. My safety and survival, I've learned, sometimes depend on putting my back against a wall to watch those around me whose thinking refuses to acclimate.

The rules are changing dramatically, I posted on Facebook, back in the summer of 2020. And some people won't be able to adapt. You're gonna see people you have long trusted and respected lose their absolute minds, drop trou and show the whole world their entire ass. Be careful.

I knew crazy was coming. I did not expect that craziness to destroy so much trust in our government, media, and social institutions.

How "Follow the Science" Destroyed Trust in Science

Journalist David Zweig documents much of the Covid pandemic craziness in his book An Abundance of Caution. In diligent detail, he marches the horrified reader through a series of mistakes, most still unacknowledged, including the lack of scientific evidence for lengthy school closures and nonsensical "follow the science" requirements for masks and social distancing. The details he describes remain frightening because too many still deny what happened and refuse to admit they did anything wrong.

The month after the pandemic took off in the West, the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a February 2020, summary of Chinese data and found just 2 percent of Covid patients were less than 19 years old and no children younger than 10 had died. "Disease in children appears to be relatively rare and mild," Zweig discovers, digging up a World Health Organization (WHO) report published that same month.

Just like the study in JAMA, WHO researchers stated that children accounted for around 2 percent of reported cases, with only 0.2 percent of children categorized as "critical disease." This calculates to 0.0048 percent of the total population who became seriously ill.

People interviewed by the WHO investigative team "could not recall episodes in which transmission occurred from a child to an adult."

Despite research showing that kids were at minimal risk from the virus, Zweig records what we all now know: we ignored objective science in favor of subjective values, locked down our cities, shut down our schools, and threw the kids on laptops pretending they would learn. Baseless fears that children were dying in large numbers lingered even six months into the pandemic, long after anyone with eyes could see the virus wasn'...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

On the Promethean Action website Susan Kokinda has addressed the difference between the globalists driving the attempt to demolish the extant world, on the one hand, and those who are defending a value system which enshrines reason in the best sense of the word, on the other. This specific video discussion is tellingly entitled 'Why they hated Kirk and Socrates,' and represents a scorching critique of those who valorise the 'open society' á la George Soros, and those who subscribe to the conception of reason underpinning the work of the ancient Greek philosopher, Plato. To understand what is at stake, and its relevance for the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a bit of a detour is necessary.

Anyone familiar with the notion of 'the open society,' which is primarily associated with George Soros's supposed - but arguably spurious - 'philanthropic' endeavours worldwide, may know that the phrase was not Soros's invention, but derives from the work of Austrian-British emigré philosopher, Karl Popper, whose book, The Open Society and its Enemies, launched a vicious attack on Plato's philosophy as (mainly) articulated in his famous Republic. In passing I should note that another British philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead, famously remarked that the whole of Western philosophy is a 'series of footnotes to Plato' - an observation which suggests the opposite evaluation of the Greek philosopher's philosophical significance than that of Popper.

In the last segment of her video address, Kokinda contrasts Popper with Plato and his teacher, Socrates. She elaborates on Popper's hatred of Plato and the influence that this loathing had on the British, particularly those who have shaped what one might call British 'foreign policy' - that is, the British agencies which Promethean Action believes have been driving the onslaught against the Western world and particularly against President Donald Trump. Why? Because, as Kokinda and her colleague, Barbara Boyd remind one, Trump is systematically restoring American sovereignty and liberating it from the stranglehold that Britain - what they call the 'British Empire' - has had on the United States for at least eight decades.

Where does Popper feature in this? He conveniently gave his British hosts the excuse to target every embodiment of 'reason' in the Platonic sense, namely the belief that there are unassailable universal or universalisable principles, which human beings have access to, and moreover, according to which they can live if they so choose. It is ironic, to say the least, that Popper detested Plato - probably because of the latter's contention that a certain class of citizens, the philosophers, should rule a republic, and that the other two classes (the soldiers and the merchants) should be subservient to their rule. In other words, it was a 'republican' vision that cast citizens in three classes according to their talents or excellence (arête), which Popper evidently found intolerable.

Nevertheless, Plato's Republic, like his other dialogues, gives testimony to Plato's willingness to debate the merits of his idea of the 'ideal society.' The other irony is that Popper's philosophy of science, known as 'falsificationism' - the view that a statement is only scientific if it can, in principle, be 'falsified;' that is, 'tested' - actually makes a lot of 'rational' sense (in relation to experience). And yet, he trashed Plato's trust in reason.

Kokinda also reminds one - and this is highly pertinent to what happened to Charlie Kirk - that Plato's teacher was Socrates. Why is this the case? Consider the following: To be a true philosopher puts one in a difficult, sometimes dangerous position, as when you speak truth to power. This is because it is usually not something that one chooses to be. It does not even matter whether you have studied philosophy at college or not. Either one is a person who pursues knowledge and truth regardless of the familial or inst...

By Lori Weintz at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Lori Weintz's book, Mechanisms of Harm: Medicine in the Time of Covid-19.]

They had a pandemic. They had a technology they couldn't bring safely to market, and the emergency allowed them to do it…allowed them to go through emergency use authorization, to get people on board with taking it because people were so scared of Covid. It allowed them to basically push aside all of the safeguards that should have prevented a prototype technology like this from reaching the market without demonstrating safety.

Bret Weinstein, Evolutionary biologist, August 5, 2023

Dr. David Gortler points out that, "New vaccine development has historically involved a meticulous, slow, decade-long discovery, testing, review, and approval process. In contrast to that, those established epidemiological and time-honored standards seemingly evaporated under the justification of a Public Health Emergency (PHE). That scuttling was not for a "classic" type vaccine - but instead for brand-new, mRNA "vaccines" and their LNP components. Next, the entire expedited approval/review process was condensed to less than one year." But we had been taught to trust vaccines.

We have been told from the time we were children and receiving our first shots, that vaccines are a miracle of modern medicine. A little bit of discomfort leads to lifelong protection against serious diseases such as polio and measles. Sometimes a booster shot is required, as in the case of tetanus, to maintain protection.

Most of us also knew that once you received the vaccine, or had the disease, you didn't get that illness again. For example, those who had chickenpox as children did not receive the chickenpox vaccine when it became available years later, because they already had immunity against the disease.

This is what we understood. This is what doctors are taught in medical school where they spend roughly one week on vaccines - basically learning about the childhood immunization schedule, and proper handling and administering of the vaccines. Dr. Joseph Ladapo, the Florida Surgeon General, says that other medications are looked at objectively in medical school, but "with vaccines, they are treated instead as something that is inherently good or inherently benevolent…And when individuals…choose not to participate in vaccine programs [they are considered] essentially bad people. There's a value judgment that is absent from every other medication in medicine."

With Covid-19 we were told, in no uncertain terms, that vaccination was our only way out of the pandemic, that natural immunity from prior infection was insufficient protection, and that the Covid vaccines were 95% effective. "Safe and effective" was the mantra. Great news! Except it wasn't, because "95% effective" was based on obfuscation. The fact that Pfizer and the FDA wanted 75 years to release the data on the vaccine development and clinical trials is evidence of wrongdoing. It took multiple Freedom of Information Act requests, and a court order to make the data available. What it revealed is shocking.

By Martin Kulldorff at Brownstone dot org.

Scientific journals have had enormous positive impact on the development of science, but in some ways, they are now hampering rather than enhancing open scientific discourse. After reviewing the history and current problems with journals, a new academic publishing model is proposed. It embraces open access and open rigorous peer review, it rewards reviewers for their important work with honoraria and public acknowledgement, and it allows scientists to publish their research in a timely and efficient manner without wasting valuable scientists' time and resources.

The Birth of Scientific Journals

The printing press revolutionized scientific communication in the 16th century. After a few years of thinking and pondering, or maybe a decade or two, scientists published a book with their new thoughts, ideas, and discoveries. This gave us classics that laid the foundation for modern science, such as De Nova Stella by Tycho Brahe (1573), Astronomia Nova by Johannes Kepler (1609), Discours de la Methode by René Descartes (1637), Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica by Isaac Newton (1686), and Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus (1735). For more rapid communication, scientists relied on handwritten letters to each other.

Until they published a book, which took considerable effort and resources, scientists could only communicate with a few close friends and colleagues. That was not efficient. This gave rise to the scientific journal, an invention with profound impact on the development of science. The first one, Journal des Sçavans (Journal of the Learned), appeared in France in 1665. A decade later, this journal published the calculation of the speed of light by Ole Romer. The fastest thing in nature was communicated at a speed previously unavailable to scientists.

Over the next few hundred years, scientific journals became increasingly important, overtaking books as the primary means of scientific communication. As scientists became more specialized, so did the journals, with subject matter periodicals such as Medical Essays and Observations (1733), Chemisches Journal (1778), Annalen der Physik (1799), and Public Health Reports (1878). Printed journals were sent to scientists and university libraries around the world, and a truly international scientific community was created.

Without journals, science would not have developed as it did, and those early journal editors and printers are unsung heroes of scientific progress.

Commercial Publishers

In the mid-20th century, academic publishing took a turn for the worse. Starting with Robert Maxwell and his Pergamon Press, commercial publishers understood that the monopoly situation in scientific publishing could be very profitable. When a paper is only published in one journal, major university libraries must subscribe to that journal no matter how expensive it is, to ensure that their scientists can access the whole scientific literature.

As eloquently stated by Stephen Buranyi, 'librarians were locked into a series of thousands of tiny monopolies…and they had to buy all of them at whatever price the publishers wanted.' While most society journals were reasonably priced, commercial publishers had a bonanza. A 1992 survey of journals in the field of statistics showed that most society journals charged libraries less than $2 per scientific research article, while the most expensive commercial journal charged $44 per article. At the time, that was more for a single journal article than the average price for an academic book.

It has since gotten increasingly worse. Being both the producers and consumers of scientific articles, universities pay an enormous amount of money for journals that contain articles that are both written and peer-reviewed by their own scientists, which they provide to journals for free. As a result, scientific journal publishers have huge profit margins reaching almost 40%. It is not for nothing that George Monbiot called...

By Robert Billard at Brownstone dot org.

In Spring 2020, supposedly "civilized" nations of the world tackled the prospects of how best to subjugate their domestic populations. At this time I was struck by seemingly obvious parallels to another sad chapter in the history of human misery: the Irish Potato Famine. There are many core similarities marking the two calamities.

Both evolved from real biological threats that did actually exist (a potato blight in Ireland and a novel coronavirus globally); yet government choices (rooted more in ideology and control) amplified the suffering far beyond anything naturally inflicted. British policies during the famine prioritized exports and landlord profit over human lives (Irish landlords at this time were a gentry class called the "Protestant Ascendancy" that exercised social, political, and economic domination over the subject population). Likewise, lockdown mandates favored top-down edicts over personal choice and community resilience, which only favored the social elite who could afford to sequester. Both eras saw freedoms trampled: the Irish lost access to their own food and land, while Covid restrictions silenced dissent, shuttered churches, and confined people to their homes, all under the guise of public safety.

The Irish Potato Famine's Man-Made Roots

The Irish catastrophe of 1845-1852 killed over a million and forced another million to emigrate, but it stemmed from more than crop failure. British governance enforced a system where Irish tenant farmers grew cash crops for export, leaving potatoes as their sole staple. When the blight hit, food ships sailed out of Irish ports laden with grain and livestock, bound for England, while locals starved. Relief came too late and too stingy, burdened on absentee landlords who evicted families to cut costs. This was no act of God, but rather policy as punishment and tied to centuries of colonial disdain.

Covid's Echo: Control Over Cure

Fast-forward to 2020, and a similar script unfolded. The virus was indeed deadly for the vulnerable, but the response (in the form of indefinite shutdowns, mask mandates, and travel bans) created a cascade of harms far worse than the thing it was trying to mitigate. Economies ground to a halt, mental health crises surged, and children lost years of schooling, all while leaders preached "Follow the science" from their insulated bubbles. Freedom of speech crumbled under censorship of dissenting doctors, religious gatherings faced police raids, and personal autonomy yielded to tracking apps and vaccine passports. These toxic measures (sold as temporary) corrosively lingered, forever eroding trust in institutions.

Lessons in Liberty

In both tragedies, the state positioned itself as savior, only to wield power that prolonged the pain. Ireland's famine could have eased with halted exports and more directed aid; Covid's toll would have been lessened through targeted protection as opposed to blanket coercion. The common thread? Governments that view people as subjects, not sovereigns.

In the raw opening of her 1995 single "Famine," Sinéad O'Connor cuts straight to the bone: "Okay, I want to talk about Ireland. Specifically, I want to talk about the 'famine.' About the fact that there never really was one. There was no 'famine.'" She wasn't denying the horror of the emaciated bodies, the coffin ships, and ghost towns left behind. O'Connor was calling out the lie at its heart: what history labels a natural disaster was, in truth, a deliberate starvation engineered by a distant elite ruling class. Her words hang over us today, a stark reminder as we sift through the wreckage of the Covid years. Another real affliction, another cascade of misery, another round of officials who turned crisis into catastrophe through sheer force of misguided (at best), nefarious, and illegal edicts.

Fall, 1845, Ireland. The potato fields, lifeline for nearly half the population, withered under a fungal blight imported from the Ameri...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

Many news outlets reported the announcement of the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday by saying President Donald Trump had missed out (Washington Post, Yahoo, Hindustan Times, Huffington Post), not won (USA Today), fallen short (AP News), lost (Time), etc. There is even a meme doing the rounds about 'Trump Wine.' 'Made from sour grapes,' the label explains, 'This is a full bodied and bitter vintage guaranteed to leave a nasty taste in your mouth for years.'

For the record, the prize was awarded to María Corina Machado for her courageous and sustained opposition to Venezuela's ruling regime. Trump called to congratulate her. Given his own attacks on the Venezuelan president, his anger will be partly mollified, and he could even back her with practical support. He nonetheless attacked the prize committee, and the White House assailed it for putting politics before peace.

He could be in serious contention next year. If his Gaza peace plan is implemented and holds until next October, he should get it. That he is unlikely to do so is more a reflection on the award and less on Trump.

So He Won the Nobel Peace Prize. Meh!

Alfred Nobel's will stipulates the prize should be awarded to the person who has contributed the most to promote 'fraternity between nations…abolition or reduction of standing armies and…holding and promotion of peace congresses.' Over the decades, this has expanded progressively to embrace human rights, political dissent, environmentalism, race, gender, and other social justice causes.

On these grounds, I would have thought the Covid resistance should have been a winner. The emphasis has shifted from outcomes and actual work to advocacy. In honouring President Barack Obama in 2009, the Nobel committee embarrassed itself, patronised him, and demeaned the prize. His biggest accomplishment was the choice of his predecessor as president: the prize was a one-finger send-off to President George W. Bush.

There have been other strange laureates, including those prone to wage war (Henry Kissinger, 1973), tainted through association with terrorism (Yasser Arafat, 1994), and contributions to fields beyond peace, such as planting millions of trees. Some laureates were subsequently discovered to have embellished their record, and others proved to be flawed champions of human rights who had won them the treasured accolade.

Conversely, Mahatma Gandhi did not get the prize, not for his contributions to the theory and practice of non-violence, nor for his role in toppling the British Raj as the curtain raiser to worldwide decolonisation. The sad reality is how little practical difference the prize has made to the causes it espoused. They bring baubles and honour to the laureates, but the prize has lost much of its lustre as far as results go.

Trump Was Not a Serious Contender

The nomination processes start in September and nominations close on 31 January. The five-member Norwegian Nobel committee scrutinises the list of candidates and whittles it down between February and October. The prize is announced on or close to 10 October, the date Alfred Nobel died, and the award ceremony is held in Oslo in early December.

The calendar rules out a newly elected president in his first year, with the risible exception of Obama. The period under review was 2024. Trump's claims to have ended seven wars and boasts of 'nobody's ever done that' are not taken seriously beyond the narrow circle of fervent devotees, sycophantic courtiers, and supplicant foreign leaders eager to ingratiate themselves with over-the-top flattery.

Trump Could Be in Serious Contention Next Year

Trump's 20-point Gaza peace plan falls into three conceptual-cum-chronological parts: today, tomorrow, and the day after. At the time of writing, in a hinge moment in the two-year war, Israel has implemented a ceasefire in Gaza, Hamas has agreed to release Israeli hostages on 13-14 October, and Israel will release around 2,000 Palestinian prison...

By el gato malo at Brownstone dot org.

This article was originally published in January 2024.

Let's start with two simple axioms:

Certain sorts of the mentally ill seek power over others as they cannot control themselves. It's a way to try to substitute regulating the world around them for self-stability by making their own internal dysregulation seem fitting or laudable; it's environment as surrogate for self.

The anxious and insecure seek out powerful patrons/ideologies to which to conform in order to feel "safe." When you have little faith in your own identity or drives, the desire to be subsumed and validated by the will of others is a powerful opiate; again environment as surrogate for self.

The confluence of these two trends creates the alliance that is the DEI calamity: it's an externalization of internal instability.

It also ensures its endless escalation until it eats itself in a fiery singularity of absurdity because staying atop the hierarchy requires ever more intense and baroque protestations of marginalization and fealty.

Let's look:

United Nations offshoot and self-described champion of "safe spaces," UN women provides a particularly piquant example.

This is Munroe Bergdorf, the spokesperson (born a man, now doing business as a woman) they have chosen to pursue this goal.

Take a quick look at this picture.

What's the first phrase that pops into your head?

Whatever it was, I'll wager it was not "safe space."

But what if maybe it is?

What if maybe it's just a "safe space" for someone other than you?

Consider:

Per axiom 1 above, this is a very safe space for Munroe who clearly relishes the role of telling others what to think and what to do.

But what's in it for the UN women?

Well, per axiom 2 above, its devotees are looking for someone to tell them what to do and what to think so that they can be sure they are "good people" and then wield that assumed mantle of virtue like a mace to keep their fears of lacking identity at bay. The added benefit of being able to shrill outrage at any who disagree and the frisson of being beastly to others comprise a little taste of power that makes the whole idea irresistible.

It's a surreal codependent synergy made in precincts so mad that even the haters have fled in fear.

And the evidence is sort of everywhere. It's not like this has been subtle, there has just been an omerta around noticing the nudity of the emperor.

But when whatever pathology pervades such a "movement" keeps throwing up the same weird cross-gender dominatrix pastiches of women as "brave avatars to follow," at a certain point, wall of silence or no, some questions need to get asked.

The LA Times predictably gushed over it and deplored and denigrated any who would find fault.

See how it comes together?

People who are literally crazy get to play at "being in control," something they desperately relish and the hopelessly insecure get to pose with them and coo "How brave!" while getting their picture taken with people in hyper-sexualized domina apparel that would not look out of place in some of the more selective Berlin brothels.

Everyone gets to engage their fetish and proclaim it virtue.

It's their safe space.

It's also a performance space (which is why Hollywood loves it).

And making you unsafe and ever more insecure is a big part of it.

The whole system is a rigged game.

"You cannot judge a person by what they look like or wear!"

"Misgendering me is a hate crime!"

It boils down to:

"Guess what to call me!"

"WRONG!"

"I win!"

See the impossibility of the predicament?

This is because it's not rooted in logic or reasonableness or even sanity: it's a desire to be outraged so one may once more demand to correct and dominate others.

But this sure does go wild when it comes apart, doesn't it?

Suddenly your fearless "superhero" gets outed as fraud and their "origin story" about "forced conversion therapy" gets called into question as a Smollet-level fabrication.

Hardly a surprise when you selected for the cr...

By Jeffrey A. Tucker at Brownstone dot org.

[The following is an excerpt from Jeffrey Tucker's book, Spirits of America: On the Semiquincentennial.]

Sloane's eighth chapter begins with an interesting observation. He was an expert on old-style covered wooden bridges. Strange passion but stick with me here.

He observed that there were always signs on these bridges: "Walk your horse." Apparently galloping across a bridge creates a rhythmic pattern that weakens the structural foundations. To make the bridge secure for longer, people on horses dismounted and walked slowly and deliberately.

He uses this to illustrate a fascinating point about the American perceptions of time in the past. It was really never about haste. The idea of a "New York minute" is new. The old way is patience, discipline, slow achievement, and unrelenting and constant work in all hours.

Sloane points out that if you ever visited an older farmer and see how he works, he is rather slow about it all but never stops going. He does this and does that but never seems to be in a rush. He seeks to do a thorough job, not a quick one. He doesn't get frustrated with the wood that doesn't fit, the nail that is rusted, or the door jam that is off; instead, he just calmly takes it on as another thing to do.

I vaguely recall this as a young man when I worked with my uncle on a roofing job. We climbed up carefully and slowly and started pulling shingles one by one, fixing or replacing them, and moving on to the next one. I quickly grew impatient as I saw the huge length we had to cover. I started to rush my portion and brag about it. He looked at me knowingly.

We worked for hours in the hot sun. Finally, at nearly the noon hour, he said we should take a break. I was deeply grateful, climbed down the ladder, and headed for the water hose. I drank as much and as fast as I could. He muttered a warning about that. Sure enough, I threw up. Blech. He laughed and we went inside.

He sat down and his wife bought him not a gigantic glass of water but a cup of coffee. I sat there gobsmacked. How in the world could he have coffee after 4 hours in the hot sun with nonstop work? Years later, I was still thinking about this.

Sloane has the answer. He didn't work fast or furiously to exhaustion. He worked slowly and deliberately, consistent with his job and his health. He knew what he was doing. I did not.

After the break and a sandwich, we climbed back up. I was intimidated by how much more there was to do. We got back at it. Another three hours went by, and we took another break. We got back up and worked more.

Sure enough, by 5 o'clock on the hour, we finished. I was thrilled and I simply could not believe how two people working steadily and deliberately could have done all that in one day. I felt great pride and still celebrate to this day.

For my uncle it was just another day, which he repeated every day on everything on which he worked.

Sloane says that this is the true American spirit. Not speed. Not haste. Not a quick win. Instead, the sense of time in our history is relentlessness, patience, deliberate, determined, steady, disciplined. Routine not dopamine. This is the foundation of the American sense of time that we have clearly lost.

Speed these days comes at the highest premium. We expect everything to happen fast. We don't read; we watch the movie. We listen to video interviews at twice the pace of the real thing. We generate the AI summary rather than spend an hour reading. We glom onto any technology that turns days into hours and hours into minutes and minutes into seconds.

This distorted sense of time plays into things like business planning. We are supposed to have 5-year plans and 1-year plans for everything. This is supposed to inspire us to build quickly, act fast, stay driven to achieve, and keep us undiverted. I've always been suspicious of this way of thinking.

As I turn this over in my mind, I've always believed that the only real path to long-term success is si...

By Joel Salatin at Brownstone dot org.

By far the most common question people ask me is, "Can the Polyface approach feed the world?"

Yet another big op-ed piece in the New York Times on Sept 28 took this position to marginalize non-chemical agriculture, using the oft-quoted idea that we would need three times as much farmland to produce the food the world needs if we quit using glyphosate and chemical fertilizer.

Let's take a walk into history and see where this kind of "scientific studies show" originated.

When Mason Carbaugh was Virginia Agriculture Commissioner more than 30 years ago, he issued a "state of the Commonwealth's Agriculture" each year. I'll never forget opening it and reading his dire predictions about what would happen if we went to organic farming. Half the world would starve; organic farmers needed to pick which half they wanted to starve.

This was long before the government organic certification program, but the rumblings toward non-chemical approaches were already rattling the establishment narrative. They had to nip this rebellious notion in the bud.

I didn't cotton to being called a starvation advocate.

Do you know how it makes you feel to be told your methodology would kill half the planet? Think on that for a bit. I began sleuthing the studies the commissioner cited to come to his conclusions. Here is the pinnacle of scientific modeling at Virginia Tech, Virginia's esteemed land grant university.

They decided to do a comparison of chemical versus organic production. The college had many test plots for studying things. These were all fairly small 10 ft. X 12 ft. type plots. Imagine a couple of football fields partitioned off into little plots to study pesticides, herbicides, various chemical concoctions, seed germination, and plant varieties.

In other words, these plots, for years, received all sorts of chemical cocktails along with tillage, herbicides-you get the picture. The soil was dead. The plots were certainly not part of a larger ecologically functional system. These plots epitomized a linear reductionist, segregated, and mechanistic paradigm toward biology.

Scientists identified a handful of plots to grow conventional chemical corn and an adjacent handful to grow the same hybrid corn organically. The chemical plots received the full complement of fertilizer, pesticides, and herbicides. The organic plots received nothing. No compost. No foliar fish emulsion. And the corn was the same hybrids bred for chemical uptake, not open-pollinated varieties known for resilience in low-input systems.

You can imagine the outcome.

The chemical plots grew beautifully and yielded bumper crop equivalents.

The organic plots were weedy, poorly formed, and yielded a fraction of the others.

Based on this "sound science" the university and agriculture writers like our current friend at the New York Times have disparaged non-chemical agriculture with credentialed authority.

These types of studies were repeated at other land grant universities throughout the 1980s as the nascent organic food movement gained traction.

Anyone who knows a scintilla about non-chemical agriculture understands that biological soil is part of a larger system. The soil is a living community of some 4.5 billion organisms per handful. Today, only 10 percent of them are named. The rest are unnamed, and we don't even know what they do. We're still that ignorant about soil.

Interestingly, in just the last couple of years, agronomists who appreciate this living community have identified something called a quorum.

Until now, agronomists thought all the microorganisms in the soil competed with each other. After all, a cursory look at nature seems to validate the notion of competition. Pigs compete for the trough. Cows compete for clover. Chickens compete for grasshoppers.

But what we're now learning is that when the soil comes into balance, the various microscopic beings form a synergistic quorum and begin helping each other.

They become complementa...

By Robert Malone at Brownstone dot org.

[This article is a republication of a Substack post that was originally published in January 2024.]

Buckle in, this is a speech for the history books. Summary quotes and the transcript are below the video.

Note that "Libertarianism" as used here by Milei is synonymous with the classical liberalism of the US Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson. Life, liberty, property. The term "classical liberalism," while sometimes used to describe libertarianism, is actually a modern invention. There is a school of political and economic thought which advocates that we should be using the word liberalism (which is very different from what in the US are called "liberals" or left wing) to describe the true philosophy of individualism. Also keep in mind that Javier Milei self identifies as an anarcho-capitalist in the mold of Murray Rothbard, and you can hear echos of Rothbard's arguments in this speech by economist/president Milei.

Summary of Javier Milei's speech in Davos 2024 (in 20 quotes)

1. "Today I am here to tell you that the Western world is in danger, and it's in danger because those who are supposed to defend the values of the West are co-opted by a vision of the world that inexorably leads to socialism, and thereby to poverty."

2. "Unfortunately, in recent decades, motivated by some well-meaning individuals willing to help others, and others motivated by the desire to belong to a privileged class, the main leaders of the Western world have abandoned the model of freedom for different versions of what we call collectivism."

3. "We are here to tell you that collectivist experiments are never the solution to the problems that afflict the citizens of the world, rather they are the root cause."

4. "The problem with neoclassical (economists) is the model they love so much does not match reality, so they attribute their own mistakes to the supposed market failure, rather than reviewing the premises of their model."

5. "On the pretext of the supposed market failures, regulations are introduced, which only create distortions in the price system, preventing economic calculation, and therefore, also prevent savings, investment, and growth.".

6. "Not even supposedly libertarian economists understand what the market is, because if they did understand it, they would quickly see that it's impossible for something along the lines of market failure to exist."

7. "Talking about market failure is an oxymoron, there are no market failures, if transactions are voluntary the only context where it can be a market failure is coercion, and the only one that is able to coerce is the state."

8. "Faced with the theoretical demonstration that state intervention is harmful, and the empirical evidence that it has failed, the solution proposed by the collectivists is not greater freedom but rather greater regulation. Greater regulation which creates a downwards spiral until we are all poor, and the life of all of us depend on a bureaucrat sitting somewhere in a luxury office."

9. "Given the dismal failure of collectivist models, and the undeniable advances in the free world, socialists were led to change their agenda. They left behind the class struggle based on the economic system, and replaced it with other supposed social conflicts, which are just as harmful to life as a community, and to economic growth."

10. "Today's states don't need to directly control the means of production to control every aspect of the life of individuals. With tools like printing money, debt, subsidies, control of the interest rate, price controls, and regulations to correct the so-called market failures, they can control the lives and fates of millions of individuals."

11. "They say that capitalism is evil because it's individualistic and that collectivism is good because it's altruistic, of course with the money of others."

12. "Those who promote social justice, they advocate the idea that the whole economy is a pie that can be shared ...