The point is that none of the Democrats’ objections are principled. They oppose Mr. Musk’s takeover for the simple reason that they want to silence conservative voices and contrarian views on subjects such as climate and Covid. Twitter’s deposed executives succeeded at this even as they failed to make money for investors.
Hillsdale College president Larry Arnn explains one reason for that college’s greatness. A slice:
A century after the college’s founding, the 1955 Hillsdale football team was invited to play at the Tangerine Bowl in Florida but instructed to leave all its black members at home. In keeping with its principles, the team declined to play.
In the 1970s, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare demanded Hillsdale College begin to count its students by race. It claimed the power to make this demand because some of the college’s students were using taxpayer-funded aid to pay for their education. After losing litigation that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, Hillsdale announced it would no longer accept government money.
Most Americans still agree with us on these points. When asked explicitly about taking race and ethnicity into account in hiring and promotion decisions, 74% of respondents are opposed. What Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” still live.
Our policy of nondiscrimination has led to a student population comprising an array of socio-economic groups and cultural, racial and religious traditions. Currently, Hillsdale College has students enrolled from 49 states. In the past five years, the college has accepted students from 26 foreign countries, including Barbados, Brazil, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Mongolia, Nepal, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Thailand and Vietnam. Not one of these young men and women was accepted on the grounds of race, heritage or background. They were invited to attend Hillsdale on the strength of their character, their intellect and, crucially, their intentions. Learning is hard work. It is done only by those who are determined to do it. Neither we nor anyone else is able to provide an education alone.
Nurse practitioners provide excellent primary-care services.
George Leef reviews Matthew Hennessey’s Visible Hand. A slice:
Hennessey knows that market opponents usually concentrate their fire on the price system, arguing that it is unfair to the poor, who struggle to pay for essentials. (See “Prices Are Hell,” p. 42.) It’s a fine sentiment to want to help the poor, he argues, but tampering with the price system is a bad way to do that. The result will be a misallocation of resources that won’t help the poor and will harm everyone else. Price controls (including so‐called anti‐gouging laws), rent controls, minimum wage laws, and other interference with the price system are detrimental, he shows. If the government, for example, tries to make medical care free, the result will be long waiting times and a decline in the quality of care—and even after that, people will still end up paying the monetary costs in higher taxes or some other way.
Gary Galles argues that Democrats fail the marshmallow test.
Here’s Aaron Kheriaty covid tyranny. A slice:
COVID-19 represents the first time in the history of pandemics that we confined healthy populations. While the ancients did not understand the mechanisms of infectious disease—they knew nothing of viruses and bacteria—they nevertheless figured out many ways to mitigate the spread of contagion during epidemics. These time-tested measures ranged from quarantining symptomatic patients to enlisting those with natural immunity, who had recovered from the illness, to care for the sick.
From the lepers in the Old Testament to the plague of Justinian in Ancient Rome to the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, lockdowns were never part of conventional public health measures. The concept of lockdowns arose in part from a public health apparatus that had become militarized over the previous two decades. We now routinely hear of “countermeasures,” but doctors and nurses never use that word, which is a term of spycraft and soldiering.
In 1968, while an estimated one to four million people died in the H3N2 influenza pandemic, businesses and schools stayed open and large events were never cancelled. Until 2020 we had not previously locked down entire populations, because that strategy does not work. In 2020 we had zero empirical evidence that lockdowns would save lives, only flawed mathematical models whose predications were not just slightly off, but wildly exaggerated by orders of magnitude.
When Drs. Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, leading the president’s coronavirus task force, decided in February 2020 that lockdowns were the way to go, the New York Times was tasked with explaining this approach to Americans. On February 27, the Times published a podcast in which science reporter Donald McNeil explained that civil rights had to be suspended if we were going to stop the spread of COVID. The following day, the Times published McNeil’s article, “To Take On the Coronavirus, Go Medieval on It.”
The piece did not give enough credit to Medieval society, which sometimes locked the gates of walled cities or closed borders during epidemics, but never ordered people to stay in their homes, never stopped people from plying their trade, and never isolated asymptomatic individuals from others in the community.
Reminder: the Cochrane review of the mask literature provides no support of masking to prevent influenza infection. Ask “experts” pushing community masking for the flu to show their work. Spit shined swiss cheese is not worth your time.
