Let me note that it takes a year or so for price increases to catch fire since consumer demand stays mostly the same while investment, and massive increases in public spending in general, are diverted into useless unproductive channels. Eventually, however, the flow of money expenditure begins to grow more rapidly than the flow of actual goods and services to buy.
BOMBSHELL! Dr Fauci in 2012 wrote that “gain of function” research to juice up bat viruses was worth risking a pandemic: “the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks. It is more likely that a pandemic would occur in nature” @SharriMarkson scoop https://t.co/S7ILuzgnNwpic.twitter.com/iwyPCPctId
America’s top medical adviser for the coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, argued that the benefits of experimenting on contagious viruses – manipulating and heightening their infectious potency – was worth the risk of a laboratory accident sparking a pandemic.
In previously unreported remarks, Dr Fauci supported the contentious gain-of-function experiments that some now fear might have led to an escape from a Wuhan laboratory causing the Covid-19 pandemic, calling them “important work”.
An investigation by The Weekend Australian has also confirmed Dr Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, did not alert senior White House officials before lifting the ban on gain-of-function research in 2017.
Writing in the American Society for Microbiology in October 2012, Dr Fauci acknowledged the controversial scientific research could spark a pandemic.
“In an unlikely but conceivable turn of events, what if that scientist becomes infected with the virus, which leads to an outbreak and ultimately triggers a pandemic?” he wrote. “Many ask reasonable questions: given the possibility of such a scenario – however remote – should the initial experiments have been performed and/or published in the first place, and what were the processes involved in this decision?
“Scientists working in this field might say – as indeed I have said – that the benefits of such experiments and the resulting knowledge outweigh the risks.”
C.S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters quoted by Steve Hayward as amongst his Relevant Classics. This is Lewis on how to ruin education. For 1962, this is incredibly prescient.
The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.
So far as cats sitting on mats is concerned, even Dr Seuss has been banned so what is really left? He even included the fear of “trauma” he was so ahead of his time!
“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with the environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole,” said Edenhofer, who co-chaired the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working group on Mitigation of Climate Change from 2008 to 2015….
“We redistribute de facto the world’s wealth by climate policy,” said Edenhofer.
So what. It’s been an obvious scam from the start so why should anyone change their minds just because they are provided with some obvious facts about the cynicism and lies of the left?
You would think we were in the most upbeat of times from the look of this front page. But more to the point, there is the letter sent out by John Roskam at the IPA. He begins:
This morning there was a headline to a story in The Australian that I don’t think qualifies as fake news – but at least half of it was wrong. It was by the journalist Cameron Stewart and it was ‘My Melbourne now resembles a poorly run police state’. It’s true Melbourne does resemble a police state (although it not so much resembles one as is one) and ‘police state’ is a term I and a number of other people used about Melbourne and Victoria back in May last year. I think the part that’s completely wrong, though, is the bit about ‘poorly run’. On the contrary – if your ambition was to run a police state then Victoria is a pretty good example of how you’d efficiently operate such a regime. You’d convert the police force from disinterested guardian of the peace to political operatives of the government, you’d co-opt the media to parrot your message, you’d intimidate civil society into silence, you’d ban public protests, you’d force your political opponents into acquiescence (that is if you’re not actually attempting to entirely subvert democracy itself, as the Andrews government did when it suspended the sitting of Parliament), and you’d give yourself the legal authority to govern by decree. That to me sums up the state of Victoria in May 2021 and that looks to me for all intents and purposes like a pretty well-run police state. If I’m wrong I’d like to know how. I know that I’ll probably get a few emails from IPA Members saying ‘John – I know it’s bad but aren’t you exaggerating just a little? – in Victoria the expression of political dissent is not actually against the law yet is it?’ And I’ll reply sadly it is – Zoe Buhler was arrested for a Facebook post that advertised a protest march. It’s true that in Victoria opposition political parties aren’t banned – but the Andrews government’s laws have crippled their capacity to raise funds. The title ‘the opposition’ implies they’ll oppose something – but the Coalition opposition in Victoria has meekly surrendered to the government and refuses to take a position on the lockdown.
The great discovery among the left is how easy it is to subdue a population. You don’t need actual gulags or torture or mass arrests. You need a bit of cancel culture and the fear of some disease from which no one is protected by anything done by governments, and weirdly, in Victoria, as in New York State which seems to have been Daniel Andrews’ template, it can even be the government that inflames the disaster but the population still falls into line. I also find the last bit of the quote particularly apt:
The title ‘the opposition’ implies they’ll oppose something – but the Coalition opposition in Victoria has meekly surrendered to the government and refuses to take a position on the lockdown.
We don’t even have to lock the opposition up. They do it by themselves without anybody having to lift a finger.
Malcom X once called the media “the most powerful entity on the earth.” They have, he said, “the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of masses”. Today, that power is now infused with the power of the world’s biggest tech and social media companies. Together social and traditional media have the power to make a medicine that has saved possibly millions of lives during the current pandemic disappear from the conversation. When it is covered, it’s almost always in a negative light. Some media organizations, including the NY Times, have even prefaced mention of the word “ivermectin” — a medicine that has done so much good over its 40-year lifespan that its creators were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015 — with the word “controversial.”
Read it all. Since the international efforts to obliterate HCQ as a means to deal with the Chinese Flu, even when there was no other available means to treat anyone who caught the virus, there have been many questions about what is really going on. This only adds more questions to all of the others.
The NIH gave $3.7 million in funding to a New York-based nonprofit, EcoHealth Alliance, run by British-born Dr. Peter Daszak, who then, with the approval of the NIH, gave nearly $600,000 of that money to help fund the gain-of-function research on bat coronaviruses at the Wuhan Institute, and co-authored scientific papers with the scientist who conducted the lab’s research, China’s so-called batwoman, Shi Zhengli.
The NIH is The National Institutes of Health which is the primary agency of the American Government responsible for biomedical and public health research.
Sister Brigid Arthur, 86, and Anj Sharma, 16, are among a group who secured a judgment from the Australian federal court that found the government has a duty to protect young people from climate change.
The federal court of Australia has found the environment minister, Sussan Ley, has a duty of care to protect young people from the climate crisis in a judgment hailed by lawyers and teenagers who brought the case as a world first.
Eight teenagers and an octogenarian nun had sought an injunction to prevent Ley approving a proposal by Whitehaven Coal to expand the Vickery coalmine in northern New South Wales, arguing the minister had a common law duty of care to protect younger people against future harm from climate change.
Justice Mordecai Bromberg found the minister had a duty of care to not act in a way that would cause future harm to younger people. But he did not grant the injunction as he was not satisfied the minister would breach her duty of care.
Fear is in the air. A dozen new cases and no deaths.
Acting Premier James Merlino has announced Victoria will be sent into a seven-day lockdown from midnight after the state recorded 12 new COVID cases in the past 24 hours.
The Acting Premier is even the Leader of the Opposition:
Snap lockdown will be ‘difficult’ for businesses: Merlino
Chinese city skylines in the economic development zones consist of business district skyscrapers mixed high-rise apartment complexes at least 30 stories high. The latter exist in groups of a dozen or so buildings of identical designs shooting far up into the sky, sometimes placed in the outskirts to facilitate the city’s expansion or change travel patterns according to some (central) master plan for the city.
The boxy skylines are interrupted by vast numbers of tower cranes in the many construction projects that produce more high-rises and skyscrapers at impressive speeds. The city is conquering the countryside and devouring the surroundings much like a swarm of locusts.
This image is one of production, a society experiencing enormous economic growth and wealth creation.
But traveling as the day gives in to night shows a very different picture of these sprawling Chinese cities. While the setting sun makes the tower cranes stand out even more, what is obviously missing is the sign of civilization: artificial lighting. Many of these newly constructed buildings become silhouettes against the sunset that are as dark as a dead tree trunk.
One can stand in the middle of the city watching the glass-and-metal skyscrapers wrapped in neon lighting, as one would expect. Yet among them see many dark shapes of buildings that are empty – if not dead. These buildings are not necessarily new and move-in ready, they are simply uninhabited and unused.
This is the lesson Bylund is trying to get across.
What China teaches us about economics and economic policy is the lesson that is generally not provided in college classrooms: the important distinction within production between value creation and capital consumption.
The story of China’s economic development is to a great extent one of unsustainable, centrally planned growth specifically in terms of GDP — but a lack of sustainable value creation, capital accumulation, and entrepreneurship.
Production creates jobs even if what is produced is wasteful infrastructure projects, ghost cities, or only ghost buildings in otherwise inhabited cities. But those jobs only exist for as long as the projects are underway – that is, for as long as there is already created capital available to consume, domestically or attracted from abroad.
Production without value added, as discussed here. This same issue is discussed in the video below, but this time in relation to Nazi Germany. Centrally planned economies look superficially great, but are actually a mess.
Law of Markets 