Economist Alex Tabarrok takes issue with the administration’s diagnosis of Covid vaccine supply shortages. You gotta love the irony. Stumble Joe thinks we can and should spend billions on wind farms and electric vehicle charging stations, but when it comes to vaccine production he won’t spend a penny.
Author: John Todd Roberts
OSHA Imposes New Rule For Employer-Required COVID-19 Vaccines
Source: ENR (Engineering News-Record).
“OSHA states that if a vaccine is required [as a condition of employment], then any adverse reaction is considered work-related and therefore it must be recorded.”
The rule makes perfect sense as a matter of bureaucratic logic. Still, one can’t suppress a chuckle. It is almost as if vaccine mandates are forcing Cloward-Piven effects on those who impose them.
The Covid vaccines may be good, but mandating or coercing people to get them is morally wrong. Good on OSHA for standing up for liberty in its rule-making decision.
The Novel Coronavirus’ Spike Protein Plays Additional Key Role in Illness
“A lot of people think of [Covid-19] as a respiratory disease, but it’s really a vascular disease,” says Assistant Research Professor Uri Manor, who is co-senior author of the study. “That could explain why some people have strokes, and why some people have issues in other parts of the body. The commonality between them is that they all have vascular underpinnings.”
This story is probably more important than it seems.
Stories by Idries Shah
Social Democracy
I have come across the phrase “social democracy” a number of times lately. I assumed that I understood it, but just to check my own assumptions I looked it up this morning.
From the source:
“Social democracy, [a] political ideology that originally advocated a peaceful evolutionary transition of society from capitalism to socialism using established political processes.”
I stand corrected. I thought “social democracy” was an empty ostentation. After all, democracy itself is a social behavior. Now I know that social democracy is a revolutionary strategy.
This Time Is No Different
Two paragraphs in the source stand out:
Continue reading “This Time Is No Different”Take government spending on infrastructure, which the president touted last night as a source of major future growth and jobs. It is one thing to assume a major return on investment; it is quite another to find such a return when looking at what happens in practice. A recent review of the literature in this NBER paper by economist Gilles Duranton of Wharton University et al. finds “little compelling evidence about transportation infrastructure creating economic growth.”
Looking at spending on highway construction in the Great Recession stimulus bill, economist Valerie A. Ramey, arguably one of the top scholars on this issue, concluded that “there is scant empirical evidence that infrastructure investment, or public investment in general, has a short-run stimulus effect. There are more papers that find negative effects on employment than positive effects on employment.”
Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It
We had a post a while back that challenged Tidewater Forum readers to explain Critical Race Theory. The challenge, I think, was based on the assumption that critics of CRT don’t know what it is, and wouldn’t criticize it if they did. The instant essay is as good a response to the original post as one can imagine, albeit a late one.
Continue reading “Critical Race Theory: What It Is and How to Fight It”Stumble Joe’s First Address to Congress
The optics were bad, the rhetoric was pedestrian, the message disturbing.
Continue reading “Stumble Joe’s First Address to Congress”Race Relations in America Are Better Than Ever
Source: Wall Street Journal (behind paywall).
My personal experience — having lived in Virginia for more than half a century — is that outright racism that once was common now is almost non-existant. A new report by political scientist Eric Kaufmann of the Manhattan Institute appears to support the observation.
Continue reading “Race Relations in America Are Better Than Ever”CDC’s New Outdoor Mask Guidance Is a Joke
When pandemic hysteria first began, I posted a link here in the Forum to the CDC’s dedicated Covid-19 information page. Not long after that, CDC botched the roll-out of its diagnostic assay, disrupting early case incidence reporting. Months later CDC published new guidelines for cause-of-death reporting that made fatality statistics dubious in some ways. Early in the pandemic response, CDC recommended against wearing face masks, now it is recommending that even vaccinated people wear them outdoors.
I regret my early endorsement of the CDC as a source of reliable public health information. I get it that mistakes happen, but the CDC doesn’t seem to make understandable mistakes in a context of scientific norms. Some other factor (politics?) appears to be driving the show.
