TagCOVID-19
Doom and the Politics of Catastrophe
Setting the catastrophe of the 2020 pandemic in perspectiveWhat happened in 2020? Why was there such confusion, contradicting information about Covid-19, and poor bureaucratic oversight of the pandemic? Setting the catastrophe of 2020 in historical perspective, renowned British historian Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. The lessons of history that this country — indeed the West as a whole — should be closely heeded if we want to handle the next crisis better and avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from Read More ›
New Review of “Life After Capitalism” Amplifies Book’s Core Themes
Returning to the "mind-centered economy" where knowledge is wealthA new review of George Gilder’s latest book Life After Capitalism from Samuel Gregg highlights the need for the return of the “mind-centered economy,” in which governmental bureaucracies no longer hamper human creativity and imagination. When capitalistic, democratic societies fall for materialistic presuppositions of the world, they end up resembling socialist contexts in which the state is everything and individual men and women are squelched. Gregg writes at the Acton power blog, [Gilder]takes this notion of the free human mind as the decisive factor in driving economic growth and applies it across the board to economic theory, technology, and our understanding of money. Looking at the question of incentives, for example, Gilder points out that they would yield nothing in Read More ›
The End of Silicon Valley?
What will remote work do to Silicon Valley in the longterm?The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new era of hybrid work, and allowed many workers to operate remotely. What does this mean for major tech centers like Silicon Valley and Seattle? And what are the advantages for competitors like Austin and Miami? In this lecture, hear a panel discuss these issues and related concerns at the 2021 COSM conference. We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Carver Mead, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and George Gilder, co-founder of Discovery Read More ›
Digital and Physical Spaces for Work and Play
What is the future of work?A panel featuring top execs at Microsoft, Plus, OTOY, and Rec Room discusses the future of work and play in both physical and digital spaces. Where will they occur and what will they look like? And what are the implications for productivity, privacy, security, and human fulfillment? We’ve been sharing a number of lectures from past COSM conferences. This video is just one of many you can find at the Bradley Center’s YouTube page. There you’ll find several lectures, interviews, and panels dealing with issues that range from economics, Big Tech, and artificial intelligence. Notable speakers include 2022 Kyoto Prize winner Carver Mead, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and George Gilder, co-founder of Discovery Institute and author of Life After Capitalism: Read More ›
Is the Public Health Technocracy Faltering?
Technocrats don’t rely on mandates but eagerly impose policies that render society less freeIn February, I warned about a treaty being negotiated to empower the World Health Organization to declare a pandemic, which would trigger governments assuming mandatory emergency powers. From, “Transforming WHO into a Public-Health Technocracy“: The WHO director-general would be granted the power to “declare pandemics,” at which point emergency provisions of the treaty to impose public-health policies would go into effect. . . . The WHO would be able to dictate policies if international consensus were not obtained by a vote of the two presidents and four vice presidents of the WHO CA+. . . The International Court of Justice would also be granted decisive power. . . . It would centralize pandemic planning and response into itself. . . Read More ›
Talk More, Tech Less
Dawn Wible, founder of the digital wellness organization “Talk More Tech Less,” talks with Robert J. Marks about her advocacy for healthy screen time among children and young adults. Phone usage has dramatically increased in the last decade, especially during COVID-19. How can we be healthy and whole in a society so saturated with digital media? Additional Resources
An Entertaining Day at the Blue Bird
NPR bids "adieu" to Twitter and BBC bungles interview with MuskA few days ago, the tag “Government-funded Media” appeared underneath NPR’s masthead on Twitter. Today, the company announced its departure from the social media platform and laid out its intentions to proliferate content through email, an app, and “other social media platforms.” The official post reads, “NPR produces consequential, independent journalism every day in service to the public.” NPR claims editorial independence despite the tag denoting them as federally funded, and their decision to part ways with Twitter reflects their ire against Musk’s trepidatious move. A small percentage, according to NPR, is federally funded, but it is no secret that they lean heavy to the left in their commentary, especially in recent years. Musk resurrected a line from NPR (now Read More ›
Goodhart’s Law and Scientific Innovation in Academia
Many university researchers are leaving academia so they can actually get things doneBritish economist Charles Goodhart was a financial advisor to the Bank of England from 1968 to 1985, a period during which many economists (“monetarists”) believed that central banks should ignore unemployment and interest rates. Instead, they believed that central banks should focus on maintaining a steady rate of growth of the money supply. The core idea was that central banks could ignore economic booms and busts because they are short-lived and self-correcting (Ha! Ha!) and should, instead, keep some measure of the money supply growing at a constant rate in order to keep the rate of inflation low and constant. The choice of which money supply to target was based on how closely it was statistically correlated with GDP. The Read More ›
Science, Safety, & Slavery to the State
Revisiting a 2022 conversation between Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan PageauPaul Kingsnorth is a writer and novelist living in Ireland who operates a Substack account called the Abbey of Misrule. For years his work has focused on the many forms of civilizational control that human beings seek to exert over their fellow man and how such power, whether it be technological, governmental, or corporate, diminishes our humanity and freedom. He is also a newly converted Christian, and he wrote his conversion story for First Things last summer, which you can find here. In April, Kingsnorth joined Jonathan Pageau on his YouTube channel. Pageau is an Eastern Orthodox iconographer from Canada. In their discussion, Kingsnorth uses the word “Machine” to describe the massive technological control that’s now not so subtly creeping up on many western countries. From Read More ›
The Government Can Bug Your Phone
Discovery Institute Fellow Debra Saunders raises the alarm of present-day technocratic measuresDebra J. Saunders, a fellow at Discovery Institute’s Chapman Center for Citizen Leadership, wrote an article for The Daily Caller this week on the mounting problem of privacy regarding cell phone usage. Saunders expresses concern about the ease in which government and Big Tech companies can mine data and track people through their cell phones. Saunders thinks the COVID pandemic sped up the process of privacy violations. She recalls a 2021 incident in which the state of Massachusetts purportedly worked with Google to download a COVID tracker app without users’ notice or consent. Now, the state is facing a lawsuit. Saunders reports, The New Civil Liberties Alliance filed a class-action lawsuit this month against the Massachusetts Department of Public Health to end Read More ›
China’s Foxconn Walkout: How Fear Messaging Can Backfire
Workers were caught in a conflict between unrealistic COVID Zero messaging from the government and seasonal performance demands from the employerAround this time of year, the factories that produce Apple’s iPhones hire thousands of additional workers to meet the demand for the holiday season. While Apple is an American company and the electronics are designed in-house, the manufacturing is done overseas where labor costs are cheaper. One of the largest manufacturers for Apple’s iPhone products is Hon Hai Technology Group, better known as Foxconn, a Taiwan-based company with factories in several countries, including mainland China. One of its largest facilities is in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province — dubbed “iPhone City” by the locals. Thus the Zhengzhou Foxconn factory was slated to make 80% of the iPhone 14 models and 85% of the iPhone Pro models before the end Read More ›
Is Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Doomed to Fail?
Meta is losing loads of money, putting the whole metaverse project into questionOver the last two years, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poured millions of dollars into his immersive metaverse project, which he believes represents the future of digital technology. We’ve seen ad campaigns for the Meta virtual reality headsets, a total rebranding of Zuckerberg’s company, and an unquestioned optimism about the efficacy and popularity of online life. But the company Meta is losing money. Lots of it. Zuckerberg pledged to spend $10 billion a year towards the metaverse over the next decade, showing how committed he is to achieving his vision. The company, however, plummeted this past year, losing approximately $600 billion of its market value. People simply aren’t investing in it as Zuckerberg anticipated, and even certain Meta executives doubt Read More ›
2022 Winter Olympics: Security Vulnerabilities in the MY2022 App
All Olympics attendees are required to download the MY2022 app to track their health and other personal data, despite security concernsThis February should be a time of celebration in China. The opening ceremonies of the Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games is the day after the beginning of Lunar New Year. The Olympic Games commence two days later on February 4th. However, the Chinese government has put a damper on celebrations by continuing to pursue its “zero-Covid” strategy even though every other country has eased restrictions and begun transitioning from a “pandemic” to “endemic” mentality. People in Beijing along with surrounding regions have become exasperated over the daily testing protocols and harsh measures that are in place to ensure the Chinese Communist Party can save face over its prior claims of having defeated the virus. Among many of the issues plaguing the Read More ›
Xi’an Lockdown: Beijing Continues to Pursue “Zero-Covid”
With the Winter Olympics quickly approaching, China faces great internal stress for its strict COVID responseFirst, I hoped to escape lockdownLater, I hoped to get out to buy foodNow, I only hope I’m not hauled off a poem widely shared on Weibo about Xi’an; translated and reported by China Digital Times Rather than shifting gears, as much of the world has, Beijing continues to chase its zero-covid agenda. But the Chinese government’s heavy-handed measures to control the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and its messaging to the public to justify those measures, may have backfired. China is beholden to its “zero-Covid” strategy as the February 2nd opening ceremonies for the Beijing Winter Olympics nears and the Omicron variant spreads across the world. The Chinese Communist Party constructed a narrative early in the pandemic claiming that China Read More ›
COVID-19, Bayes’ Rule, and Simpson’s paradox
Israeli data, when studied carefully, confirm the effectiveness of COVID-19 vaccinesIsrael has a very high COVID-19 vaccination rate and yet, on August 15, 2021, 58% of those Israelis hospitalized for COVID-19 were fully vaccinated — suggesting that vaccinations are ineffective or even harmful. This is a great example of two common statistical traps. The first is confusion about inverse probabilities. One hundred doctors were once asked this hypothetical question: In a routine examination, you find a lump in a female patient’s breast. In your experience, only 1 out of 100 such lumps turn out to be malignant, but, to be safe, you order a mammogram X-ray. If the lump is malignant, there is a 0.80 probability that the mammogram will identify it as malignant; if the lump is benign, there is a 0.90 probability that Read More ›
Eminent Historian Niall Ferguson To Speak at COSM 2021
Ferguson’s new book, “Doom: The politics of catastrophe” is considered timely reading in the COVID-19 eraHistorian Niall Ferguson, will be speaking at COSM 2021 in Seattle on Doom: The politics of catastrophe (November 11, 12:00 pm – 12:45 pm.) His talk will be based on his new book, Doom (Penguin, 2021), which offers a disturbing but timely thesis: “Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all.” (from the Publisher) But we are not better prepared. Any thoughtful person who Read More ›
Media Try But Fail To Learn From Their Romance With Cuomo
Revoking Cuomo’s Emmy, amid facile self-reproach, is hardly a substitute for unpacking the bigger facts of what the recently resigned New York governor did wrongIn a revealing article in Columbia Journalism Review New York City journalist Ross Barkan talks about the many media fails in covering the misdeeds of recently resigned New York State governor Andrew Cuomo. And yet, somehow, Barkan deftly pulls the punches. His omissions tell us a good deal about what is wrong with mainstream media today. Cuomo was brought down by credible sexual assault and intimidation allegations over many years. One reason justice took so long was the media’s infatuation with Cuomo, ignoring on-the-ground realities of all types — some deadly, as we shall see. Barkan gets a lot of stuff right: Cuomo was not nearly as skilled at handling the COVID-19 epidemic as major media painted him: But Cuomo’s Read More ›
China Brief: Update on COVID-19 Origins
More evidence points to China's attempted suppression of human error as the origin of COVID-19In January a team from the World Health Organization traveled to Wuhan, Hubei in China to investigate the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 (coronavirus) outbreak. Team lead Dr. Peter Ben Embarek said in the press conference that a lab accident was “extremely unlikely” as the cause of the Covid-19 outbreak. He stuck to the Party line that the virus likely jumped from animals to humans or that it could have been imported from frozen food deliveries. Embarek has since changed his position. In a documentary aired on Danish television on August 12, Embarek said that the pandemic was likely due to a lab accident and he admitted that the team was pressured by Chinese authorities to not mention the lab leak Read More ›
Is “Misinformation” Another Way to Say “Unwelcome Information”?
Cameron English notes that, on social media, major media outlets can botch the science with impunity but the slightest offenses, real or imagined, get others silencedAt American Council on Science and Health (“promoting science and debunking junk since 1978”), Cameron English reflects on the handwringing among social media companies about how to crack down on “misinformation” on COVID-19. Given the number of authoritative statements made and suddenly reversed, tt seems that any such crackdown would largely be driven by politics. For example: Facebook recently announced that it would “no longer take down posts claiming that Covid-19 was man-made or manufactured,” and the company’s new policy nicely underscores this point about credibility. What was the social media platform’s justification for allowing users to discuss the lab-spillover hypothesis? It didn’t hire a team of virologists and foreign policy experts to assess the viability of competing explanations for Read More ›