By Charles Krblich at Brownstone dot org.

Growing up, I never cared for Mathematics. It was too logical, bland, boring, difficult, and when contrasted against the stories, battles, wars, glory, destruction, growth, and exploration that was History, I never gave it a fair chance. So it was one of the little ironies of life, that I came to do Mathematics for a living.

Focused study softened the difficulty, and armed with growing knowledge, bland and boring transformed to mildly charming. With new perspective, I discovered what has since become my favorite toy, a Galton Board.

The toy is a small window into our experience over the last several years in which our free and independent lives have clashed broadly against arcane, top-down rules conceived by bureaucrats.

The phrase Standard of Care had already filtered into everyday health decisions made by healthcare providers. As with any bureaucratic phrase it is itself an equivocation — the deliberate use of ambiguous language in order to mislead, deceive, or conceal the truth. The Pandemic was a view into how Standards of Care are often decided simply by the opinion of unelected, unaccountable, and lifelong federal bureaucrats.

My favorite toy, on the other hand, takes an opposite approach, and yet it reveals a hidden fact about life. In plain view, but unseen by all those around us: chaos produces spontaneous order.

The creator of my toy, Sir Francis Galton, has a mixed and fascinating history. He was the originator of eugenics, popularized the phrase "nature versus nurture," developed the first weather map, introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, and he also developed the statistical concept of correlation. Most importantly, he developed my favorite toy.

Galton's Board is just a simple vertical board with interleaved rows of pegs. At the top is a small container storing a mass of small, spherical beads, and at the bottom are bins to collect the beads after they fall through the pegs. That doesn't sound too fancy, and it is not.

The magic happens when the beads are released from their container at the top of the board. Gravity is applied to the Potential Energy of the beads in the container. The energy becomes Kinetic. In fact, for a few moments, there is mass pandemonium. The beads are falling everywhere. The pegs they hit violently redirect their motion into other beads, other pegs, and finally into the bin where the bead finds its final resting place.

The result of the violent and random clashing of the beads is always — always — the same thing: A Normal Distribution.

I know of scarcely anything so apt to impress the imagination as the wonderful form of cosmic order expressed by the Law of Frequency of Error. The law would have been personified by the Greeks and deified, if they had known of it. It reigns with serenity and in complete self-effacement amidst the wildest confusion. The huger the mob, and the greater the apparent anarchy, the more perfect is its sway. It is the supreme law of Unreason. Whenever a large sample of chaotic elements are taken in hand and marshalled in the order of their magnitude, an unsuspected and most beautiful form of regularity proves to have been latent all along.

—Francis Galton, Natural Inheritance, 1889

The naive among us may attribute it to being simply a nifty, mathematical trick, but the evidence is all around us in our everyday lives.

I remember one time I was on vacation with my wife in Key West, FL. They have a fairly ugly landmark that is colorful and marks the Southernmost Point in the United States. We were walking down the road and were surprised to find a line. Neatly queued up along a sidewalk, no business or event to indicate anything unusual to line up for, no authorities managing the line, nor enforcing it, yet there was the neatly ordered line: everyone, without any discussion, naturally queued up waiting their turn to take a picture at the landmark.

Maybe you'll say that ...

By James Lyons-Weiler at Brownstone dot org.

In a recent opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal, CDC Principal Deputy Director Ralph Abraham argued that "framing measles as an American policy failure is inaccurate and misleading," asserting that resources including vaccines and therapeutics have been surging nationwide and that the current measles situation reflects broader global trends rather than a uniquely domestic policy breakdown.

Citing a recent Measles, Mortality Weekly Report article, Abraham hinted that something else was failing. He fell short of mentioning waning immunity or vaccine failure.

The fact that 44.4 percent of secondary measles cases in the Colorado outbreak occurred in individuals who had received two documented doses of MMR vaccine stands in stark contrast to the expected vaccine failure rate. The MMR vaccine is widely cited as having ~94 percent effectiveness after two doses, meaning that only 6 percent of fully vaccinated individuals are expected to remain susceptible under typical exposure conditions.

A breakthrough rate approaching 45 percent suggests either disproportionate exposure intensity, selection bias in testing or detection, or non-representative denominator dynamics, not a random sampling of the vaccinated population. Without exposure denominators, the proportion of vaccinated cases cannot be directly interpreted as a failure rate—but its magnitude exceeds baseline expectations and underscores the need for more rigorous denominator tracking, as well as attention to waning immunity, viral load dynamics in vaccinated individuals, and enhanced surveillance sensitivity (e.g., the use of urine RT-PCR).

Publicly available Colorado Department of Public Health data for all 36 measles cases in Colorado during 2025 (which includes but is not restricted to the outbreak described in the MMWR) shows the age distribution for those 36 cases as:

0–4 years: 6 cases

5–17 years: 9 cases

18+ years: 21 cases

Total: 36 cases, of which 15 (42 percent) were children under 18.

Since the MMWR outbreak accounted for 10 of those cases, this broader Colorado surveillance suggests that children made up a substantial fraction of measles cases in the state in 2025 overall, though the exact number of children within the specific outbreak cluster described in the MMWR isn't published directly in that report.

For more than two decades, measles surveillance in the United States and other high-income countries has operated in what might be called the vaccination era. Endemic transmission was declared eliminated in the United States in 2000, and routine immunization with two doses of measles-containing vaccine became the cornerstone of prevention. In this context, a persistent source of public confusion has re-emerged with each new outbreak report: vaccinated people are sometimes diagnosed with measles and are formally counted as confirmed clinical cases. This article explains why that observation is real, why it is epidemiologically unsurprising, and why misunderstanding it distorts both scientific interpretation and public discourse.

The core fact is simple and verifiable. Under current public-health surveillance rules, measles case definitions are agnostic to vaccination status. If an individual meets the clinical criteria for measles and laboratory evidence confirms infection, that individual is counted as a measles case regardless of whether they received zero, one, or two doses of measles-containing vaccine. This is not an anomaly or a loophole in the system; it is a deliberate design choice rooted in how infectious-disease surveillance functions.

To understand why vaccinated cases appear in official counts, it is necessary to begin with how measles cases are defined and confirmed.

Measles surveillance relies on a standardized clinical and laboratory framework. Clinically, a suspected measles case is defined by a febrile illness accompanied by a generalized maculopapular rash and at least one of the classic prodro...

By Colleen Aldous at Brownstone dot org.

On July 29, 2026, we watched Dr. Anthony Fauci's appearance before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which was coerced via Congressional subpoena after he declined to appear voluntarily. The hearing reopened a deep wound. Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, we were part of a minority group that fought for the science of early outpatient multidrug treatments for Covid-19 based on repurposed medications with an excellent safety record, including but not limited to hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

Other minority groups advocated for the truthful investigation of other equally important matters such as the cost/benefit calculation of the lockdown policies, vaccine safety, the ethics of vaccine mandates, and the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. We were all marginalized by several government public health agencies and by the downstream institutions that deferred to government public health policies and recommendations.

At the tail end of the Covid-19 pandemic, the persecution by medical and/or certification boards of medical doctors who pioneered early outpatient treatments for Covid-19 intensified and in many parts of the world it continues unabated. Most of the major news media, participating in The Trusted News Initiative, continue to disparage the scientists who spearheaded alternative ideas and continue to refuse to engage honestly with inconvenient truths and the accumulating research evidence.

At the same time, we have also seen an increasing public awareness about alternative treatments and Covid-19 vaccine injuries. The failures of Covid-19 pandemic-era policies are now more widely recognized by an increasingly skeptical segment of the public. The hypothesis of a possible laboratory-associated origin of the SARS-CoV-2, which was once disparaged as a fringe conspiracy theory, has now been acknowledged as credible by several US intelligence agencies. Minority viewpoints about Covid-19 treatments and Covid-19 vaccine safety concerns are increasingly supported by scientific evidence published in the peer-reviewed literature.

Nevertheless, rather than moving towards a resolution, current views about the Covid-19 pandemic are increasingly bifurcating. While the minority view gains increasing credibility, many of the institutions that represented the prevailing institutional orthodoxy have been intensifying their attacks against heterodox viewpoints and have continued to consolidate their stranglehold for institutional and political power. In the United States, for several years, Dr. Fauci was the public-facing representative of these powerful institutions.

This was the underlying setting when Dr. Fauci appeared, unwillingly, on July 29, 2026 before the United States Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs to answer questions about the policies that he advocated for throughout the Covid-19 pandemic.

After an opening statement, he invoked the 5th Amendment 111 times on the advice of counsel and refused to engage with any of the questions that were posed to him. It was a stark contrast, seeing the public face of our public health agencies, suddenly humbled by refusing to speak his "truth" under oath. This was, after all, the same man who lectured us that he represented science; the man who proclaimed the boundaries of scientific truth and acceptable discourse about government policies; the man who advocated for severe lockdown policies until the deployment of a vaccine, shifting mask wearing guidance, and the arbitrary 6-foot distancing rule; the man who assured us that Covid-19 vaccines were safe and effective; the man who proclaimed that there was insufficient evidence in favor of early outpatient Covid-19 treatments based on hydroxychloroquine and/or ivermectin multidrug protocols.

This same man chose, for the first time, to be silent after reading his opening statement from a piece of paper that he was holding with trembling hands.

...

By Ramesh Thakur at Brownstone dot org.

Canary in a Climate World: Climate Realism vs. the Net Zero Myth (2026) is the third book in the Canary in a Covid World/Climate World series. The first was Canary in a Covid World: How Propaganda and Censorship Changed Our (My) World (2023) and the second was Canary in a (Post) Covid World: Money, Fear and Power (2025). As the titles suggest, the three books trace the changed contours of the world under the impact of the twin crises alleged to have confronted humanity with existential threats. Intriguingly, both narratives seem also to be unravelling in tandem.

My own chapter in the final book describes the many parallels in the two official narratives, including the willing co-option of the media to parrot and amplify the narrative. The institutional failure of the media as a safety guardrail against the abuse of entrusted power by political and health authorities is not news to the Brownstone community. After all, many members were themselves targeted by the censorship industrial complex.

Three American and Argentinian researchers looked at the reporting of climate change stories by ten leading US and British media outlets, five left-leaning (BBC, Guardian, Independent, New York Times, Washington Post) and five right-leaning (Daily Mail, Fox News, New York Post, Telegraph, Wall Street Journal). Their study was published by the National Bureau of Economics Research as Working Paper No. 35216 in May 2026. A total of 116,045 full-text articles from the ten media outlets covering all five IPCC Assessment Reports were scrutinised to observe patterns of how reporters, editors, and columnists selected, framed, and presented stories to governments and the public. The study found a consistent bias towards emphasising higher-impact magnitudes within the ranges reported by the IPCC, a validation of the journalistic adage that if it bleeds, it leads.

Geological records show that warming and cooling periods go through extended cycles with no clear pattern to the intensity, severity, and timing of the cycles. Natural disasters have always been with us and climate change is another constant. The relationship between climate and natural disasters is anything but clear. An IPCC assessment found only weak links between human-induced climate change and droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes.

Notwithstanding this, legacy media just cannot seem to help themselves when it comes to shoehorning climate alarmism into disaster stories. On 23 July, writing about the worst dengue fever outbreak in a decade in Sri Lanka, a BBC report by Kelly Ng and Sampath Dissanayake commented that 'as temperatures rise worldwide, these disease-carrying mosquitos are now moving into new areas, including Europe and the Mediterranean.' They cited a WHO report that the number of cases had surged globally from around 500,000 in 2000 to 14.4 million in 2024.

I decided to check this out. I am confident you will gasp in shock to learn that the BBC was cherry-picking data to fit the narrative. As Figure 1 shows, the global trajectory is a jagged line with peaks and troughs. The global number of dengue fever infections (not cases) fell from 10 million in 1998 to 3.7 million in 2000, upturned, and stood at 37.5 million in 2023. But the slope of the global rise almost precisely parallels the rise in Latin America and the Caribbean, from 2 million in 2000 to 27.5 million in 2023. Unless the BBC is prepared to inform us ignorant deplorables just why the temperature rise is global but the dengue infections is restricted mainly to this one region, BBC Verify should call them out on this. But don't hold your breath. Climate change is the narrative that must not be challenged.

Furthermore, on dengue fever deaths, the global slope broadly follows the Asian curve (Figure 2), suggesting that dengue mortality might correlate more to Asiatic poverty, that energy intensity is the key to alleviating and then eradicating poverty, and that foss...

By Bert Olivier at Brownstone dot org.

When Martin Heidegger gave an interview to the German news magazine, Der Spiegel (The Mirror) in 1966, on condition that it would only be published after his death, no one could anticipate the sentence he uttered in the course of this event, which would become the title by which the interview has been known, namely, 'Only a god can save us.'

Save us from what? And why 'a god' instead of 'God?' The answers to these questions would shock some readers and puzzle others. In the case of the first question, it would be a shock of confirmation for some, because they never fully trusted this 'thing,' and their suspicions seemed to be confirmed by Heidegger's remark in the context of the interview. On the part of others it elicited puzzlement, because they had already virtually deified this 'thing.' What was it, then? In a word, technology.

The second question is more complex, given the emergence of technology as a world-shaping power in the early 20th century – recall the colossal world Exhibition Universelle (of technology and engineering) in Paris in 1889, to commemorate the centenary of the French Revolution, which adumbrated the veritable apotheosis of technology to come, and where all the wondrous new inventions of the time were celebrated.

By the time Heidegger wrote his famous essay, 'The question concerning technology' around 1949 (published in 1954; English translation in Heidegger, M. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Harper Torchbooks, 1977, pp. 3-35), it was more than three decades after the end of World War I, and four years after the more advanced military technology that was used in World War II.

Apart from that, technologies such as trains, motor cars, aeroplanes, telephones, and hydroelectric power were already familiar to people, and it did not take a genius to grasp that the post-industrial world, with its roots in the 18 century, had developed into one where new inventions were transforming society apace. In other words, technology was, visibly and audially, a force that was bringing about a metamorphosis on a grand scale. Needless to say, today we are witnessing another technological metamorphosis, arguably even more far-reaching than the one that Heidegger perceived with concern.

At the same time, religious faith had taken a knock in the previous two centuries; in the course of the 18 century, historically known as the Enlightenment or 'Age of Reason,' the latter faculty had started overshadowing faith, and the 19 century, which witnessed the further growth of reason, also saw the emergence of Darwin and Wallace's theory of evolution, which dealt faith a more severe blow than Newtonian mechanics. Hence, with mechanical technology raising its head, it could no longer be taken for granted that the belief in the God of Christendom would remain steadfast.

Back to the question, then. Heidegger was well aware of this historical backdrop to his own work, and that of his contemporaries, and knew that there could be other world-transforming powers comparable to technology in the future. Therefore, 'a god' who could potentially 'save us' from technology is probably a reference to such an as-yet unknown phenomenon. One should note, in this regard, that the German for 'Only a god can save us' is 'Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,' and if he had omitted the indefinite article, 'ein,' it would have made all the difference, because then 'Gott' (which, as noun, is capitalised in German) would have meant 'God, instead of 'a god.'

To the vast majority of Heidegger's contemporaries, including his interviewers (as will become apparent below), with the exception of a mere handful, the notion that we need to be rescued from technology must have seemed insane. Today this attitude is probably exacerbated to the nth degree. What, do without our beloved cellphones? (Appropriately named as such, I would think: these cellular devices, the 'smart' ones more than their quaint prede...

By Alan Cassels at Brownstone dot org.

At first, I thought this July 15, 2026 New York Times article was a parody. Then when I found out it clearly wasn't a spoof, I asked myself, what kind of moronic gesture is this, recommending screening of military people for low testosterone?

In a move that sounds more like a plot point from a dystopian satire than a Pentagon briefing, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently announced a mandatory annual testosterone screening program for all US service members aged 30 and older. Hegseth's vision for a "High-T Department of War" treats the complex biological reality of human aging as a "decisive tactical" variable that can be managed through a blood test.

If only life were that simple. If we could only create the perfect screening test, life would be so much easier. But alas….

When I was writing my book on screening (Seeking Sickness, Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease) I interviewed Professor Sir Muir Gray from Oxford. He's an internationally renowned public health expert who transformed the UK's screening programs in the 1980s and 1990s into highly managed, evidence-based systems. He also published the book Evidence: Screening and Practice, which is probably the most authoritative book on the topic. Muir Gray had a mischievous and entertaining lilt to his voice and I clearly remembered when he told me what must be his signature screening aphorism: "All screening programmes do harm; some do good as well."

After researching screening programs for many years, I'd say that he's mostly right, and most medical screening programs, even the ones highly studied such as screening for breast or prostate cancer overpromise and underdeliver. But where does testosterone screening of middle-aged soldiers fit within that paradigm? Spoiler Alert: On almost all levels, and from whatever angle you examine this idea, it plumbs new levels of dumbness.

For starters, if the end game is testosterone replacement therapy, ie: augmenting a person's testosterone level in order to improve sexual function, fatigue, muscle loss, and mood, then we'd hope that the treatment prescribed (typically testosterone gel) would be perfectly safe, right?

I can tell you that after spending over 30 years examining the gaps between medical marketing and hard clinical science, and reading thousands of clinical trials, I have never come across a drug's safety profile as weird as that for testosterone gel.

Most trials measure what happens to the patient taking the drug, compared to those taking a placebo. And the effects of the drug are measured in the person who swallows it. Testosterone can be different. It can affect other people like your spouse or your children through what is known as "secondary exposure." This risk, known as virilization, is the development of male physical characteristics in females or children, driven by excess male hormones (androgens) like testosterone. Basically when you spread testosterone gel on your skin you can virilize your children—or even your spouse—just by holding them.

Common signs include facial hair growth (hirsutism), a deepening voice, clitoral enlargement, acne, and male-pattern baldness. The FDA included a warning about secondary exposure to testosterone in children and women, expressly indicating that "signs and symptoms have included enlargement of the penis or clitoris, development of pubic hair, increased erections and libido, aggressive behavior, and advanced bone age."

Whoa. And that only happens because dad's taking testosterone gel.

But how useful is it to screen military personnel for low testosterone?

Well, it might be useful to identify men who have had damaged testicles or who have hypogonadism (when the body produces little or no testosterone) but those cases are rare.

But what will happen when you do test America's servicepeople for "Low -T?" Well, you will find that some of them "have it" as identified. But if it's not causing symptoms does this arbitrary ...

By Sofia Karstens at Brownstone dot org.

SHARE | PRINT | EMAIL

Woodrow Wilson holds a distinction no other American president has: he earned a Ph.D., completing his doctorate in political science and history at Johns Hopkins University in 1886. That same year, he wrote an essay called "The Study of Administration," later published in the inaugural volume of Political Science Quarterly. Historians widely credit this essay as the founding document of public administration as a formal academic field, and Wilson himself as the father of that discipline.

Wilson's central argument was that government should be split into two separate domains: politics, where elected officials set broad goals and policy direction, and administration, a technical, expert-driven sphere that should be run with "large powers and unhampered discretion" and insulated from day-to-day political interference.

Wilson suggested that government ought to be removed from the political process…in other words: "Democracy is too important to be left to voters." He explicitly encouraged American reformers to study European administrative models – including Prussia's – for lessons in efficiency, arguing that the US had fallen behind other nations in developing a science of government administration.

Later scholars have debated how far Wilson actually intended this separation to go, and some interpret his argument as calling for administrators to be almost entirely removed from political accountability. His essay laid the intellectual groundwork for what would become the modern professional civil service – insulated from patronage and run by career administrators rather than political appointees or elected officials.

Nearly 50 years later, a very different intellectual tradition found refuge in the same city that Wilson's ideas would eventually help administer. Max Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt, Germany in 1930, leading a group of thinkers who developed what became known as Critical Theory. Its core members included Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Leo Löwenthal. Critical Theory is a philosophical framework that analyzes power structures and social inequalities.

Developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s, it shifted Marxism from a strict economic focus to a critique of culture, media, and modern society. Critical Theory was a different way of looking at philosophy; where philosophy was a search for truth – trying to explain phenomena and things that were not easily proven by science (ethics for example) – Critical Theory shifted to look at philosophy specifically through the lens of Marxism. It became no longer a search for truth but a means of propagandizing, which some would argue was a betrayal of philosophy.

When the Nazis seized power in 1933, Horkheimer was forced to relocate the group first to Geneva and then to New York, where it formed a loose affiliation with Columbia University in 1934–35. Horkheimer's actual scholarly project – laid out in works like Dialectic of Enlightenment and Eclipse of Reason – described how instrumental reason, mass culture, and authoritarianism are able to take hold in modern societies.

It was also between 1933 and 1937 that several regulatory agencies were established that would come to form the backbone of the modern Administrative State.

By the early 1960s, the American left was largely defined by an older tradition: labor unions, industrial organizing, and class-based politics rooted in the fights of the 1930s and '40s. In June 1962, a group of Socialist Organization representatives, student activists, organized labor unions, civil rights leaders, and foreign observers gathered in Port Huron, Michigan, and produced a document that would come to mark a generational break from that tradition.

Students for a Democratic Society had grown out of the Student League for Industrial Democracy, the youth wing of an older Socialist educational group called the ...

By Ian Miller at Brownstone dot org.

When a massive treasure trove of Anthony Fauci's diary entries and emails were released recently, thanks to Sen. Rand Paul, it caused a tremendous amount of embarrassment for the 85-year-old former public health official.

Fauci came across as a remarkable narcissist, someone obsessed with his own instant and surprising fame. He chronicled each and every media appearance, celebrating each instance a legacy outlet published yet another glowing, reverential profile. He spoke excitedly about his friendships with celebrities like Joan Baez and Barbra Streisand, even stating that he and Baez were made for each other.

More importantly he also said completely different things privately than he was stating publicly:

He acknowledged in his diary that the lab leak was not only possible, but likely.

He admitted that he wanted masks mandated because people were wearing them anyway and the CDC had pushed it.

He knew closures weren't working, saying that cases were rising and falling irrespective of policy.

He even fretted about potentially contracting Covid-19 at an event that required proof of vaccination.

He then went on to demand more vaccine mandates and passports afterward anyway.

Fauci ultimately appeared to be pretty appalling, to put it mildly.

The only entity that came out looking worse? That same legacy media.

CNN's Jake Tapper is mentioned several times, including having shared multiple dinners with the doctor.

One was in October 2020, just before Fauci demanded that Americans shut down Thanksgiving.

I reached out to Tapper's PR rep to see if that "friendship" impacted his coverage, and despite his public demonstrations of concern over "transparency," they declined to comment.

Another person mentioned? CNN's Dana Bash.

Bash, according to Fauci, had texted him to say that he was "a better man" than Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) after their heated exchange, adding that CNN compatriot Wolf Blitzer believed nobody would have blamed Fauci if he'd said "go f— yourself" in response to Jordan's questions.

Bash has essentially ignored this, because as a highly concerned source of journalistic integrity or something, it's important that she maintains never actually taking accountability for anything.

She also had current Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on her show Sunday. She then took that opportunity to misrepresent how poorly she, CNN, and legacy media performed their jobs during the pandemic.

When asking Kennedy if President Trump deserves the blame for the policies that Fauci recommended, Kennedy brought up that Trump almost immediately wanted lockdowns to end.

"President Trump, as you recall, wanted to end lockdowns," Kennedy said. "I think the thing that did the most damage to our country was the lockdowns, the lockdown that shut down 3.5 million businesses in our country with no due process, no just compensation. All of our churches closed, our schools, and our children are still paying the price for that. And yet we had the worst outcome of any country in the world. We have the highest death rate from Covid of any nation on earth."

That's not entirely accurate; there are other countries with a higher Covid mortality rate. And it's unclear how many of those "Covid deaths" were attributable to the virus itself versus incidental positive tests. But his point is directionally correct; that had Trump ignored Fauci and Deborah Birx, along with the rest of the public health community, and either avoided lockdowns entirely or ended them immediately, he'd have been crucified by the media, particularly CNN and people like Tapper and Bash.

Just imagine Fauci on television every single night telling a morally outraged Dana Bash that Trump was ignoring the science and not "following the experts." We'd see every single outcome being blamed on Trump's inexcusable ignorance of The Science.

Heck, he followed Fauci's advice and they chose to continually condemn Trump at every turn anywa...

By Jason Locasale at Brownstone dot org.

Anthony Fauci is now facing intense scrutiny. His diaries, emails, and testimony have raised fundamental questions about what he knew, what he told the public, and how he exercised authority during the pandemic. Many outside academia describe this as his fall from grace, while universities and medical institutions continue to celebrate him as a heroic public servant and scientific authority.

That contradiction is the starting point for this essay. Fauci matters not only because of his individual conduct, but because he exposes the institutions that produced, empowered, and continue to protect him.

The pandemic did not create the dysfunction inside biomedical science. It placed a magnifying glass over institutions that had been decaying for decades. Grant politics, unfounded hype, administrative expansion, scientific gerontocracy, institutional self-protection, and the punishment of dissent were already pervasive. Fauci enabled the public to watch those forces operate through one person on television every day.

Biomedical institutions did not create one Fauci. They created thousands. The pandemic spotlight simply made one of them famous.

Fauci's diaries offer an unusually revealing account of how he understood his role during the pandemic. Written as notes toward a future autobiography, they show what he considered important enough to preserve about those years.

The diaries undermine the mythology of a reluctant scientist who was unexpectedly thrust into politics and celebrity. They reveal a bureaucratic celebrity preoccupied with attention, status, prominent relationships, media appearances, reputation, and his place in history.

His interest in how he was portrayed, whom he met, who praised him, and how his public image was developing consumes far more attention than any serious engagement with the emerging science of Covid-19 and the pandemic. The office shrine, the concern with his portrait, the meticulous record of his fame, and the diary itself as material for an autobiography all expose the same fixation.

Those self-curated notes reveal his priorities. Science is less as an intellectual pursuit than as the credential supporting the public performance.

The related emails and documents complete the picture. Fauci sought award nominations from influential friends, while funding, prestige, appointments, and recognition circulated through the same professional networks. These relationships were then presented publicly as independent acknowledgments of merit.

One of the most important revelations was the distance between private uncertainty and public certainty. Fauci and those around him privately considered possibilities that they publicly dismissed. The authors of the Proximal Origin paper privately assigned a laboratory origin a substantial probability, then helped present that possibility to the public as impossible.

The same pattern appeared in pronouncements about masking, vaccine transmission, and other major pandemic questions. The issue is not hindsight. The issue is presenting uncertain claims as settled truth while privately recognizing that the evidence was unresolved.

Fauci projected an image of authority, and that was sufficient. His title, confidence, and media presence substituted for careful engagement with the evidence.

Masking, for example, involved questions of aerosol physics, fluid mechanics, particle size, droplet formation, airflow, filtration, leakage, and fit. These are concrete scientific and engineering questions. Yet Fauci showed no interest in working through them before making definitive public pronouncements.

He approached scientific disagreement more like a party in an adversarial legal proceeding than a scientist. Once an institutional position had been adopted, contrary evidence became an obstacle and dissenting scientists became opponents to defeat. The objective shifted from determining what was true to defending the position and preserving author...

By Lucio Saverio Eastman at Brownstone dot org.

I was raised in two wildly different households. One was leftist, liberal, and progressive. The other was right-wing, conservative, and merit-based. My observations and anecdotes don't come from a think tank or a poll. They come from decades of first-hand experience observing the archetypes, habits, mindsets, and personalities on both sides. I've experienced, up close, how the difference between entitlement and accountability plays out in real people's lives, including my own.

Overall, progressives may seem very "smart" from the perspective of status quo credentialism. But they tend to lack experience where it matters most: history, economics, objectivity, incentives, genetics, unintended consequences, moral hierarchy.

The institutional progressive culture's ideology is not a healthy path to governance. It's the path we've seen so prevalent in today's popular social hierarchy. A path full of loyalty tests, state machinery and ultimately, unbridled tyranny. History supplies the repeating and rhyming examples, but it is easily and sometimes wilfully forgotten.

"Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a PhD and still be an idiot."

~Richard P. Feynman

People who believe we are all One are the problem. People who believe countries don't exist are the problem. People who believe in open borders are the problem. People who believe fantasies, every wind of doctrine, and who cycle through "gurus" almost daily are the problem.

For example, Malthus has been wrong for two hundred years, yet his ideas keep resurging despite the obvious failure of his predictions. Overpopulation is a myth. Net Zero is a futile exercise for fearful toddlers. In reality, humans are extremely resourceful when allowed to freely pursue solutions. We have hardly come close to scratching the surface of what is available and possible. Human ingenuity is the real hero.

High-trust societies say: "Hey, we're experiencing a drought. Try to save water. Thank you. It'll rain soon. Enjoy your weekend and let us know if you need any help putting up that new barn or shed."

Low-trust societies say: "Watering is now banned. Fines will be issued for every overage. Recycling is mandatory. Permits are required for an ever-growing list of things people used to do without asking. Call the snitch line if you suspect a neighbor of anything."

Same drought. The difference isn't technology or wealth. It's the trust that still exists in one place, and has been deliberately drained out of the other.

There's a lot of puffery online about smart people, educated people, and enlightened people. I've met a few in real life. They are the principled ones who see through the bullshit. The rest seem to be riding the coattails of narrative, marketing, and questionable authority.

When many of these characters finally showed who they really were during the lockdowns, I shut my door to them and locked it. It's been liberating in ways that they can't fathom, because they're still slaves to the narrative to this day.

My problem with their collectivism is entirely about how they react. A healthy membership — not really collective, just contractual arrangements with low exit costs and high individual sovereignty — tends to respond to someone exiting the contract with congratulatory well-wishes and zero to little jealousy.

Contrast that with actual "collectives," which project extreme reactions because of their fantastical claims of monopoly on meaning, identity, resources, or because their members have high sunk costs and nowhere else to go. You find this on both sides of the left-right paradigm. The reaction is the tell. This same problem shows up on more than one layer of social life.

"I see the liberty of the individual not only as a great moral good in itself…but also as the necessary condition for the flowering of all the other goods that mankind cherishes."

~Murray Rothbard

Governments do the same thing with entire industries. Once ...