According to the Federal Reserve’s quarterly report for Q2, the central bank reported a loss of $57.3 billion through the first half of the year. The Fed is on pace to lose over $100 billion in 2023.
Rising interest rates are a big problem for the Fed, as they are for other banks. The central bank earns interest income on the bonds it holds on its balance sheet. But the Fed also pays out interest to other financial institutions that park money there. The bonds it bought during multiple rounds of quantitative easing (QE) and still holds on its balance sheet were relatively low-yielding. But with rates much higher today, it is paying out interest at a much higher rate.
According to the Fed report, as of June 30, the central bank held roughly $5.5 trillion in US Treasuries with an average yield of 1.96%. It also held $2.6 trillion of mortgage-backed securities with an average yield of 2.20%. Meanwhile, the average interest rate the Fed paid on money it held, along with repo agreements and other operations averaged around 5%.
…
Under the Fed’s charter, the Fed remits its profits to the US Treasury. This helps pay down the massive federal budget deficits. When the Fed loses money, the Treasury loses its payday. That means even bigger budget deficits.
Exit quote: “The last time the Fed reported net operating losses was in 1915.”
The Biden White House sent a letter to its media allies Wednesday, directing them to intensify their “scrutiny” of House Republicans after Speaker Kevin McCarthy announced an impeachment inquiry into the Biden family’s influence-peddling operation.
“It’s time for the media to ramp up its scrutiny of House Republicans for opening an impeachment inquiry based on lies. Impeachment is grave, rare, and historic. The Constitution requires ‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors,” Ian Sams, a spokesperson for the White House Counsel’s Office, wrote in the letter to top U.S. news executives, according to CNN. “After nearly 9 months of investigating, House Republicans haven’t been able to turn up any evidence of the President doing anything wrong,” Sams added inaccurately.
In reality, Republican investigators have produced a mountain of evidence in the form of bank records, suspicious activity reports, wire transfers, text messages, whatsApp messages, emails, voicemails, photos, along with the testimonies of whistleblowers, and Hunter Biden’s former business partners, not to mention Joe Biden’s admission on tape that he got the Ukrainian prosecutor general fired by withholding $1 billion in US loan guarantees in exchange for his ouster.
Democrats, on the other hand, launched an impeachment inquiry of President Donald Trump in 2019 based on the complaint of one then-anonymous Democrat operative (who was aware of Biden’s corruption) who blew the whistle after Trump asked Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to look into the Biden family’s shady business dealings in a phone call.
The White House memo reportedly includes a 14-page appendix that “comprehensively addresses the 7 key lies House Republicans are suggesting they are basing an impeachment on.”
Sams alleged that an impeachment inquiry with no supporting evidence should “set off alarm bells for news organizations.”
Regulatory capture works both ways. The government has captured the entity most responsible for keeping it in check. Probably captured it long ago.
"After nearly 9 months of investigating, House Republicans haven’t been able to turn up any evidence of the President doing anything wrong," the memo states.
The CDC claims its universal recommendation will “ease … rollout,” apparently referencing the fact that the pharmaceuticals continue to package their vaccines in six-dose vials, which makes limited vaccination initiatives a logistical nightmare. Doctors in countries with more targeted recommendations must either schedule vaccinations for a few of their patients in groups of six or discard many unused doses. It’s more convenient to urge the jabs on everybody even in the absence of any justification.
While Europe has now largely confined Covid vaccination to older and vulnerable groups, the American Centers for Disease Control have chosen a different path. Yesterday, they accepted the advice of an advisory panel and recommended the XBB.1.5 jabs to everyone six months and older. They insist that “the benefits of vaccination exceed the risks for everyone,” and hope vaguely that their “universal recommendation” will “ease the rollout of the vaccine and improve access and equity.”
“Let’s keep America strong, healthy,” said Dr. Camille Kotton, a panel member who voted in favor of the recommendation and who is an infectious disease specialist at Harvard Medical School. “Let’s do away with COVID-19 as best we can by prevention of disease through vaccines. Let’s make things clear.”
The argument is not easy to parse. First, the vaccines are alleged to be universally beneficial, although no studies beyond a “CDC analysis” exist to support this broad claim. Second, the universal recommendation is necessary to ensure “equity” and “make things clear.” In other words, more targeted recommendations would sow confusion and limit their uptake among those groups who would benefit from them. Finally, our Dr. Kotton still hopes that the vaccines can “do away with COVID-19.” Either she knows better or she is stupid, but once again, in the striving after an upside beyond benefits to the individual, we see an implicit acknowledgment that the vaccines aren’t universally beneficial after all.
An important consequence of the pandemic in the United States has been the alienation of a great part of the population from the project of public health in general on the one hand, and the overt politicisation of the CDC on the other. Before 2020, American medical mandarins at least claimed to work on behalf of society as a whole; now and again, they even found occasion to worry about how their recommendations would effect their credibility among the entire population. They have since abandoned this mission, adopting a narrow, much more politicised hygiene extremism. Now they have dropped all pretence, appealing only to the highly radicalised Covidians and the pharmaceuticals. Thus their rhetoric and their advice grows steadily more divorced from reality and reason, even as the actual threat of Covid recedes.
Ironically, the radicalism of the CDC arises from the success of the pandemicist opposition in the United States. America was one of the few Western countries that saw genuine resistance to the lockdowners and the vaccinators, extending even to elements of the political establishment. This opposition did serious damage to the entire enterprise of public health, and now millions of Americans will never care what the CDC says about anything ever again. In Europe, the mainstream parties formed a united front in support of the hygiene dictatorship, permitting our public health institutions to retain some claim to social consensus, however tenuous. On this side of the Atlantic, they still have something to lose, which is an incentive towards moderation.
eugyppius: a plague chronicle is a reader-supported publication. maybe you subscribe?
Ceramic Nano Memory is designed to address the “density, performance and access paradigms” as well as cost and sustainability demands of datacenters, Pflaum said. The new technology will bring storage in the “Yottabyte Era,” where a yottabyte is equal to 1,000 billion terabytes, by using ceramic nano layers that are 50-100 atoms thick. Ceramics are inorganic materials that can resist heat and corrosion, and they have been used by humans for at least 26,000 years.
Cerabyte now wants to exploit ceramics’ outstanding qualities to store information that can be protected against “most data storage media threats.” Data is written and read with laser or “particle beams,” the company states, with bits structured in QR code-like matrices. Cerabyte already has its own roadmap for the technology, which is projected to scale from 100 nm to 3 nm bit sizes or to an areal density of GB/cm2 to TB/cm2 class.
Ceramic Nano Memory promises a 75% reduction of total cost of ownership (TCO) in data centers, as the technology needs no media replacement, “no energy” and no data migration.
No energy? Surely reads and writes require some juice, even if it’s a lot less than a spinning hard drive requires.
Okay, this is good stuff. I don't know what kind of fashion they be promotin' over there at Fashion Week, but it's pretty telling from the crowd's reaction here that "shower cap and a trash bag" is right up there with the best fashion of the day.
The Biden administration threatened social media platforms with regulation unless they censored health information that conflicted with government messaging. (Photo by Tom Brenner via Getty Images)
When I was four, my mother took her first flight and first trip out of her native India to the U.S. with me and my younger brother in tow. We were going to meet my father, an electrical engineer and rocket scientist by training, who had won the U.S. visa lottery in 1970. He had moved to New York a year earlier. By the time we arrived he was working at McDonald’s because engineering jobs had dried up during a recession.
Both of my parents—children of the violent partition of India and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)—had grown up in poverty, my mother in a Calcutta slum. They immigrated to this country because they believed in the American dream. That belief led to the success my father ultimately found as an engineer and my mother found running a family daycare business.
Our family had indeed won the lottery. But coming to America meant something more profound than financial opportunity.
I remember in 1975 when a high court found that then-prime minister of India Indira Gandhi had interfered unlawfully in an election. The ruling disqualified her from holding office. In response, she declared a state of emergency, suspended democracy, censored the opposition press and government critics, and threw her political opponents in jail. I remember the shock of these events and our family’s collective relief that we were in the U.S., where it was unimaginable that such things could happen.
When I was 19, I became an American citizen. It was one of the happiest days of my young life. The immigration officer gave me a civics test, including a question about the First Amendment. It was an easy test because I knew it in my heart. The American civic religion has the right to free speech as the core of its liturgy. I never imagined that there would come a time when an American government would think of violating this right, or that I would be its target.
Unfortunately, during the pandemic, the American government violated my free speech rights and those of my scientist colleagues for questioning the federal government’s pandemic policies.
My parents had taught me that people here could criticize the government, even over matters of life and death, without worry that the government would censor or suppress us. But over the past three years, I have been robbed of that conviction. American government officials, working in concert with big tech companies, have attacked and suppressed my speech and that of my colleagues for criticizing official pandemic policies—criticism that has been proven prescient.
On Friday, at long last, the Fifth Circuit Court ruled that we were not imagining it—that the Biden administration did indeed strong-arm social media companies into doing its bidding. The court found that the Biden White House, the CDC, the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, and the FBI “engaged in a years-long pressure campaign [on social media outlets] designed to ensure that the censorship aligned with the government’s preferred viewpoints.”
The judges described a pattern of government officials making “threats of ‘fundamental reforms’ like regulatory changes and increased enforcement actions” if we did not comply. The implication was clear. To paraphrase Al Capone: Nice company you have there. It’d be a shame if something were to happen to it.
It worked. According to the judges, “the officials’ campaign succeeded. The platforms, in capitulation to state-sponsored pressure, changed their moderation policies.”
In exposing this behavior—and in declaring it a likely violation of the First Amendment—the ruling is not just a victory for my fellow scientists and me, but for every single American.
The trouble began on October 4, 2020, when my colleagues and I—Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a professor of medicine at Harvard University, and Dr. Sunetra Gupta, an epidemiologist at the University of Oxford—published the Great Barrington Declaration. The Declaration called for an end to economic lockdowns, school shutdowns, and similar restrictive policies on the grounds that they disproportionately harm the young and economically disadvantaged while conferring limited benefits to society as a whole.
The Declaration endorsed a “focused protection” approach that called for strong measures to protect high-risk populations while allowing lower-risk individuals to return to normal life with reasonable precautions. Tens of thousands of doctors and public health scientists signed our statement.
With hindsight, it is clear that this strategy was the right one. Sweden, which in large part eschewed lockdown and, after early problems, embraced focused protection of older populations, had among the lowest age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than nearly every other country in Europe and suffered none of the learning loss for its elementary school children. Similarly, Florida has seen lower cumulative age-adjusted all-cause excess deaths than lockdown-obsessed California since the start of the pandemic.
But at the time, our proposal was viewed by high government officials like Anthony Fauci and some in the Trump White House, including Deborah Birx, then-White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator, as a kind of heresy.
Federal officials immediately targeted the Great Barrington Declaration for suppression because it contradicted the government’s preferred response to Covid. Four days after the Declaration’s publication, then-director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins, emailed Fauci to organize a “devastating takedown” of it.
Almost immediately, social media companies such as Google/YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook censored mentions of the Declaration.
As The Free Press revealed in its Twitter Files reporting, in 2021 Twitterblacklisted me for posting a link to the Great Barrington Declaration. YouTube censored a video of a public policy roundtable of me with Florida governor Ron DeSantis for the crime of telling him that the scientific evidence for masking children is weak.
I have been a professor researching health policy and infectious disease epidemiology at a world-class university for decades. I am not a political person; I am not registered with either party. In part that is because I want to preserve my total independence as a scientist. I have always viewed my job as telling people honestly about the data issues, regardless of whether Democrats or Republicans liked the message.
Yet at the height of the pandemic, I found myself smeared for my supposed political views, and my views about Covid policy and epidemiology were removed from the public square on all manner of social networks. I could not believe this was happening in the country I so love.
In August 2022, my colleagues and I finally had a chance to fight back. The Missouri and Louisiana attorneys general asked me to join as a plaintiff in their case, represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, against the Biden administration. The aim of the suit was to end the government's role in this censorship—and restore the free speech rights of all Americans in the digital town square.
Lawyers in the Missouri v. Biden case deposed representatives, under oath, from many federal agencies involved in the censorship efforts, including Anthony Fauci.
Broad discovery of email exchanges between the government and social media companies showed an administration willing to use its regulatory powers against social media companies that did not comply with censorship demands.
The case revealed that a dozen federal agencies—including the CDC, the Office of the Surgeon General, and the Biden White House—pressured social media companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter to censor and suppress even true speech contradicting federal pandemic priorities. For instance, in 2021, the White House threatened social media companies with damaging regulatory action unless it censored scientists who shared the demonstrable fact that the Covid vaccines do not prevent people from getting Covid.
True or false, if speech interfered with the government’s priorities, it had to go.
On Independence Day this year, federal Judge Terry Doughty issued a preliminary injunction in the case, ordering the federal government to immediately stop coercing social media companies to censor protected free speech. In his decision, Justice Doughty compared the administration’s censorship infrastructure to an Orwellian Ministry of Truth. His ruling decried the vast federal censorship enterprise that dictated who and what social media companies could publish.
The government appealed, convinced it should have the power to censor scientific speech. An administrative stay followed and lasted much of the summer. But on Friday, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit unanimously restored a modified version of the preliminary injunction, telling the government to stop using social media companies to do its censorship dirty work:
Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social media companies’ decision-making processes.
As I read the decision, I was overcome with emotion. I think my father, who died when I was 20, would be proud that I played a role in this. I know my mother is.
That is because the victory is not just for me but for every American who felt the oppressive force of this censorship industrial complex during the pandemic. It is a vindication for parents who advocated for some semblance of normal life for their children but found their Facebook groups suppressed. It is a vindication for vaccine-injured patients who sought the company and counsel of fellow patients online but found themselves gaslit by social media companies and the government into thinking their personal experience of harm was all in their heads.
The decision provides some solace for scientists who had deep reservations about lockdowns but censored themselves for fear of the reputational damage that came with being falsely labeled misinformers. They were not wrong in thinking science wasn’t working right; science simply cannot function without free speech.
The decision isn’t perfect. Some entities at the heart of the government’s censorship enterprise can still organize to suppress speech. For instance, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) within the Department of Homeland Security can still work with academics to develop a hit list for government censorship. And the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Fauci’s old organization, can still coordinate devastating takedowns of outside scientists critical of government policy.
But the headline is a good one: the federal government can no longer threaten social media companies with destruction if they don’t censor on behalf of the government.
The Biden administration, which has proven itself to be an enemy of free speech, will surely appeal the decision to the Supreme Court. But I am hopeful that we will win there, just as we have at every venue in this litigation. I am grateful for the resilience of the U.S. Constitution, which has withstood this challenge.
But I can never go back to the uncomplicated faith and naive confidence I had in America when I was young. Our government is not immune to the authoritarian impulse. I have learned the hard way that it is only we, the people, who must hold an overreaching government accountable for violating our most sacred rights. Without our vigilance, we will lose them.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD, is a professor of health policy at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he researches epidemiology and health economics. He is a founding fellow of the Academy for Science and Freedom, a Hillsdale College initiative. He also podcasts at the Illusion of Consensus site. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @DrJBhattacharya.
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Matt Ridley, Ph.D. biologist, well-known popular science writer, and ) a retired member of the British House of Lords (being the 5th Viscount Ridley) responds in the Telegraph (paywalled, cached copy) to Patrick Brown’s whistle-blowing article on how he self-censored to get published in what I call an “apex predator journal”:
We have known for years that distinguished scientists who think that global warming is a problem but not a “crisis” get ostracised, cancelled or rejected by peer reviewers. Meanwhile, even the most trivial study that comes to an alarmist conclusion – such as a notorious one that found fish behaviour to be affected by carbon dioxide – gets rushed into print and celebrated in the media. Junior scientists notice and tailor their texts accordingly.
One of the biggest measurable impacts of increased carbon dioxide is global greening – the recent increase in green vegetation on the planet, equivalent to twice the area of the United States and counting. But as I discovered when I broke a story on this in 2015, pointing this out brings a hail of professorial hate down on your head. I was even singled out in a Boston University press release for daring to suggest that more green vegetation might not be bad news.
[Patrick] Brown says that “there is a taboo against studying or even mentioning successes since they are thought to undermine the motivation for greenhouse gas emissions reductions”. The problem is all solutions are taboo. If I waved a magic wand and gave the world unlimited clean and cheap energy tomorrow, I expect many climate scientists would be horrified: they would be out of a job.
Those who argue that climate change is real and a problem, but that other environmental issues are more urgent – overfishing of the oceans, invasive alien species, reliance of poor Africans on bushmeat and charcoal, to name three – are treated as heretics to be persecuted.
It’s not just climate change. The main science journals have been quick to accept the Chinese regime’s insistence that a lab leak could not have caused the pandemic, refusing to publish several papers that argued otherwise and to investigate the issue, while rushing into print half-baked studies that seemed to implicate the seafood market in Wuhan. One such study purported to have found possible evidence that raccoon dogs were infected and was hyped. The total debunking of that study last month by Professor Jesse Bloom was ignored.
Taxpayer, you are not hearing the whole truth from the academics you fund.
For a lie that is half a truth is ever the blackest of lies — Alfred Tennyson, “The Grandmother”
In yesterday’s decision in Missouri v. Biden, the Fifth Circuit (Judges Edith Clement, Jennifer Elrod, and Don Willett) held that the federal government violated the First Amendment by causing social media platforms to block posts on various topics (including “the COVID-19 lab-leak theory, pandemic lockdowns, vaccine side-effects, election fraud, and the Hunter Biden laptop story”).
The court acknowledged that the First Amendment doesn’t bar social media platforms from acting on their own to restrict user speech, since the First Amendment applies only to the government and not to private parties (including large corporations). But the court concluded that the First Amendment may be violated “when a private party is coerced or significantly encouraged by the government to such a degree that its ‘choice’—which if made by the government would be unconstitutional—’must in law be deemed to be that of the State.’ This is known as the close nexus test.”
New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday suspended laws that allow open and concealed carry of firearms in Albuquerque for 30 days after declaring a public health emergency. The order, in my view, is flagrantly unconstitutional under existing Second Amendment precedent. It could also be a calculated effort to evade a ruling by making the period of suspension so short that it becomes moot before any final decision is reached by a court.
The order cites recent cases of gun-related violence in and around the city, including the killing of an 11-year-old boy dead and the wounding of a woman in their vehicle in an apparent road rage incident after a baseball game.
Grisham declared that “as I said yesterday, the time for standard measures has passed. And when New Mexicans are afraid to be in crowds, to take their kids to school, to leave a baseball game—when their very right to exist is threatened by the prospect of violence at every turn—something is very wrong.”
Democratic leaders have increasingly turned to a claim used successfully during the pandemic in declaring a health emergency to maximize unilateral authority of governors. There have also been calls to declare racism a public health emergency, supported by groups like the American Public Health Association. Transgender programs have also been declared a public health emergency by some groups. The motivation behind many of these calls is not to negate constitutional rights, but the question is whether such declarations allow governors discretion to suspend or curtail individual rights.
As the list of claimed health emergencies grow, even state Democratic judges may begin to balk at the obvious end run around constitutional rights.
The order allows for an expansion to other cities that meet the threshold for violent crime if 1,000 or more violent crimes per 100,000 residents have occurred per year since 2021. It also sets a threshold of 90 firearms-related emergency room visits per 100,000 residents have occurred between July 2022 and June of this year.
The taking away of individual rights as an emergency measure is hardly new. For centuries, governments have claimed that the suspension of individual rights is necessary for the good of citizens.
What is striking about this effort is the short specified period. By setting a 30-day period, the Governor makes it difficult to secure a final decision. She could face a preliminary injunction in that time. However, if she gets a sympathetic trial judge, the time could run out before a final ruling can be secured on appeal. In any case, it makes it less likely that the case can be taken to the Supreme Court or even through the federal court system.
Yet, challengers could argue that the matter is not moot when the order can be and is likely to be repeated in the future. That is always a challenging claim to make, but it is clearly true in this case. What is clear is that this is unambiguously and undeniably unconstitutional under existing precedent.
Even if an injunction is secured on the basis of a presumptively unconstitutional act, many will of course celebrate the boldness of Grisham in taking away an individual right under a clever measure. It is, however, too clever by half. If a court decides that this is not moot at the end of the period, New Mexico could supply a vehicle to curtail future such claims.
We have seen how Democratic strongholds have proven the greatest assets for gun-rights advocates.
Major Democratic cities are delivering lasting self-inflicted wounds to gun control efforts with poorly conceived and poorly drafted measures.
In 2008, the District of Columbia brought us District of Columbia v. Heller, the watershed decision declaring that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of gun possession.
In 2010, Chicago brought us McDonald v. City of Chicago, in which the Court declared that that right is incorporated against state and local government.
However, no state has done more for the Second Amendment than New York. The state has been a fountain of unconstitutional laws — and the basis for a series of wins for Second Amendment advocates.
New Mexico could now prove the next big opportunity for gun rights advocates in tackling the public health rationale for gun control.
The DA was busy dismissing cases right and left and the clueless governor doesn’t understand why crime is on the rise? The new DA isn’t any better: a Grisham hand-picked establishment Democrat who was accused of directing staffers to publish stolen emails that included receipts about underwear purchases from former Susana Martinez.
Blue cities like Albuquerque have a murder problem — and a judicial rot problem. Grisham citing a “public health emergency” is exactly why Second Amendment supporters reject this specious claim by anti-Second Amendment advocates to classify felonious actions and prohibited carry as a “health issue.”
No way this edict survives the guaranteed court battle, especially post Bruen.
The only issue here are Democrats who enable repeat offenders to further brutalize innocent citizens.
Exit quote:
Governor Lujan Grisham says her duty to uphold her oath to the constitution is "not absolute" pic.twitter.com/Mla4rcNXMX
The rationale here seems to be counter to those protesting that the higher all cause mortality in vaccinated is because the vaccinated tend to be sicker. Here the opposite is argued. I wonder which is true.
The true effectiveness of the first Covid booster was short-lived, if meaningful at all, once inherent biases are corrected for, says Prof Eyal Shahar. Peak protection was somewhere between mediocre and zero.
Former chief medical advisor to the US President Anthony Fauci was questioned over the weekend by CNN reporter Michael Smerconish, about face masks being able to curb the spread of covid-19.
“There’s no doubt that masks work,” said Fauci.
“Different studies give different percentages of advantage of wearing it, but there's no doubt that the weight of the studies … indicate the benefit of wearing masks,” he added.
Smerconish brought up the 2023 Cochrane review which found no evidence that physical interventions like face masks could stop viral transmission in the community and cited my interview with lead author of the study Tom Jefferson who confirmed, “There is just no evidence that they [masks] make any difference. Full stop.”
Fauci replied, “Yeah but there are other studies,” stressing that masks work on an individual basis.
“When you’re talking about the effect on the epidemic or the pandemic as a whole, the data are less strong…but when you talk about an individual basis of someone protecting themselves or protecting themselves from spreading it to others, there's no doubt that there are many studies that show there is an advantage,” said Fauci.
Professor Tom Jefferson, who says he is committed to updating the Cochrane review as new evidence emerges, has responded to Fauci’s comments.
“So, Fauci is saying that masks work for individuals but not at a population level? That simply doesn’t make sense,” said Jefferson.
“And he says there are ‘other studies’…but what studies? He doesn’t name them so I cannot interpret his remarks without knowing what he is referring to,” he added.
Jefferson explains that the entire point of the Cochrane review was to systematically sift through all the available randomised data on physical interventions such as masks and determine what was useful and what was not.
Since 2011, the Cochrane review only included randomised trials to minimise bias from confounders.
“It might be that Fauci is relying on trash studies,” said Jefferson. “Many of them are observational, some are cross-sectional, and some actually use modelling. That is not strong evidence.”
“Once we excluded such low-quality studies from the review, we concluded there was no evidence that masks reduced transmission,” he added.
The problem with Fauci is that his story has changed.
Initially, Fauci said that masks were ineffective and unnecessary. In March 2020, Fauci told60 Minutes, “Right now in the United States, people should not be walking around with masks.”
But only a few weeks later, he did a U-turn and began recommending widespread use of face masks.
Fauci defended his U-turn saying, “When the facts change, I change my mind.”
Jefferson retorted, “What facts changed? There were no randomised studies, no new evidence to justify his flip-flop. That’s simply not true.”
Since then, Fauci has remained adamant that face masks not only stop people from infecting others, but they also protect the wearer.
Fauci advocated for the use of cloth masks, and even encouraged double-masking in the absence of evidence.
"You put another layer on, it just makes common sense that it would be more effective," Fauci told NBC News.
“What Fauci doesn't understand is that cloth and surgical masks cannot stop viruses because viruses are too small and they still get through,” said Jefferson.
He laments that public figures have tried to undermine the Cochrane review, despite it representing the gold standard of evidence.
Cochrane’s editor-in-chief, Karla Soares-Weiser capitulated to pressure and “apologised” for the wording in the plain language summary of the review because it “was open to misinterpretation” and may have led to “inaccurate and misleading” claims.
And former CDC director Rochelle Walensky misled Congress after claiming the Cochrane review had been “retracted” which was patently false.
As it stands, the Cochrane review will continue to be the subject of attacks because it presents a major roadblock for implementing masking policies. Jefferson says he doesn’t know what motivates people to ignore the facts.
“Could it be part of this whole agenda to control people’s behaviour? Perhaps,” he speculated.
“What I do know,” said Jefferson, “is that Fauci was in a position to run a trial, he could have randomised two regions to wear masks or not. But he didn’t and that’s unforgivable.”
Fauci, who served as the federal government's top infectious disease specialist for nearly 40 years, stepped down in Dec 2022 and is now a professor at Georgetown University’s Department of Medicine, in the Division of Infectious Diseases.
The process of achieving tenure tends to weed out the dissidents beforehand.
DOES TENURE MATTER FOR ACADEMIC FREEDOM? Mark McNeilly’s analysis of FIRE’s numbers shows that it does. But it should matter a lot more if it is to be worth the downsides.
Fauci's and Lysenko's names should be forever linked for their anti science positions and for their actions against scientific discussion. Fauci should be eternally mocked for claiming to be the anthropic incarnation of science walking among us.
J. Edgar Hoover was the consummate bureaucratic power builder. He controlled presidents through an an unchallengeable combination of secrets, money, threats, and lies. He was a media hero leading a pristine expert agency whose sole mission was to protect the public and uphold the rule of law.
Trofim Lysenko was a Russian scientist who rose to control Soviet agriculture not because his theories improved farm outputs – quite the opposite, in fact – but because they best reflected communist ideology, impressing Stalin to the point he was awarded the Order of Lenin eight times and was the Director of the USSR’s Institute for Genetics for more than 20 years.
Hoover refused to acknowledge the existence of the mafia because it was fixing horse races for him. He persecuted anyone he believed thought differently from him. The moment he got his degree he went to work for the federal government.
Lysenko refused to acknowledge Mendelian genetics despite overwhelming evidence that it exists, ruthlessly unpersoned political and scientific opponents, ensured personal loyalty through a combination of fear and money, and was directly and/or indirectly responsible for multiple preventable famines worldwide that killed tens of millions of people.
Hoover was an unassailable DC institution, having spent decades honing his image, making sure he knew where the bodies were buried, and even burying a few himself. He was feared and loathed but ultimately irreplaceable because of his ability to mold the system to his own benefit.
Lysenko actively ignored the scientific method while proclaiming himself the leading scientist in the nation. He started with politically acceptable theories and worked backwards – when he even bothered – to make sure the facts fit, even if he had to make the facts up out of whole cloth. His symbiotic relationship with the Soviet power structure – Stalin – worked to benefit both parties while ignoring basic facts and principles.
Hoover knowingly and repeatedly lied to the public and presidents and Congress throughout his career.
Lysenko muzzled – to the point of murder - any potential rival concepts throughout his career.
Both Hoover and Lysenko protected and rewarded loyal acolytes no matter what they did as long as they remained loyal and both worked closely with their respective military-industrial complexes.
When you meld the salient points of these two people, what happens?
Dr. Anthony Fauci happens.
During his reign as the government’s health tsar (NIH, CDC, FDA, HHS be damned,) Fauci combined the power corridor mastery of Hoover with Lysenko’s contempt for the scientific method, leading directly to the man-made pandemic disaster that befell the nation and the world in 2020.
For background, Hoover was born into the civil service – both his parents were part of it – and into what was then a relatively small permanent DC government culture. His job during World War I was hunting down radicals; he played an integral part of the infamous Palmer Raids and he was put in charge of the Bureau of Investigation even before its name was changed to the FBI.
He was capricious, fastidious, hyper-organized, personally nasty, paranoid, methodical, racist, technologically savvy, image-obsessed (people with secrets usually are) and, as the FBI in the public’s mind was out there catching bad guys. he remained far more personally focused on what started his career and his meteoric rise through the Department of Justice bureaucracy: hunting people who thought differently.
Hoover was also personally financially corrupt – he tended not to have to pay for dinners out and vacations and the Mafia – this is why he claimed it didn’t exist – would tell him which horse races were fixed.
But – or because of all that – Hoover was untouchable and remained in charge of the FBI long after federal retirement age. President Johnson waived it for him.
During World War II, Hoover worked hand-in-glove with the military, in fact creating an FBI subdivision that was effectively one of the United States’ first dedicated foreign intelligence services. He tried to expand that role after the war, but was – for one of the few times in his career – denied.
Lysenko started his life quite differently. Son of a Ukrainian peasant, he reportedly could not read until the age of 13 but eventually made his way through agricultural college as the Russian Revolution swirled around him. His work focused in large part on “vernalization” – which involves shocking seeds with cold to make them more productive. While this can work with certain plants in certain fashions, Lysenko pushed the concept to absurd ends, saying that not only did genetics not matter but that it didn’t exist.
This is exactly what Stalin and the state wanted to hear – environment triumphs over anything else, the perfect metaphor for the creation of the new Soviet Man. The “Western” shackles of Enlightenment thinking – science, evidence, debate, rational thought – was no longer necessary if anything could be molded to the will of the state to produce what the state wanted.
Lysenko was put in charge of Soviet agriculture and millions of people starved to death because of it (not just in Russia, not just Ukraine’s Holodomor, but decades later in China Mao put Lysenkoism into practice and 30 to 50 million people died.)
Like Hoover, Lysenko had extraordinary staying power; his career, with all that entailed – disappearances, the destruction of biology as a science in Russia, the murders of opponents, the grip on power – lasted 40 years.
And both had the power of imposition – these were men who had the means to make their will manifest.
Like Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The direct parallels between the three are startling.
Each went straight from school into government service.
Hoover and his version of the FBI were darlings of the media to such an extent that, until recently, the agency was one of the most trusted in the country. Lysenko, for his part, came to the attention of Stalin through a laudatory article in Pravda. Fauci’s “America’s doctor” press was consistently positive and, during the pandemic, became exclusively hagiographic.
President Johnson waived the retirement age for Hoover, Lysenko held power until well after Stalin died, and Fauci benefited from the elimination of the federal retirement age and exactly zero political will to force him out.
Hoover controlled presidents through secrets and intimidation. Fauci used the convenience of the complicated nature of what he did to exert the same pressure, a tactic that was at the center of his running roughshod over President Trump, the CDC, FDA, and the HHS leadership. Combine that with his intimately close relationship to the military and Fauci did not need “dirt” on the powers that be to get his way – he was the power that be.
Hoover arrested his opponents, Lysenko had them sent to the gulag or just plain shot. Fauci worked to destroy his critics’ reputation – see the Great Barrington Declaration signatories – and their ability to put food on the table by smearing their qualifications or by directly cutting them out of the billions of dollars in funding he controlled. His was a strategy of vilification that knew no bounds, including his targeted takedowns of his fellow bureaucrats and putative political masters.
One of the keys to Lysenkoism was that everything is equally moldable, which, as noted, made it very popular with the Soviet nomenklatura. Fauci – to the nation’s unending detriment – took the attitude ‘everyone is at equal risk’ at the beginning of the AIDS crisis and did the same thing during the entirety of the pandemic despite knowing it was patently false.
Whether or not these attitudes can be put down to gross incompetence or the standard bureaucrat-think that all problems have the same solutions for everyone is not known. Most likely, he purposefully declared that everyone was at equal risk from covid in order to expand his already massive power and funding base. As with Lysenko’s famines, it was this position that condemned so many millions to the soul-crushing pandemic response:
Massive educational degradation. Economic devastation, by both the lockdowns and now the continuing fiscal nightmare plaguing the nation caused by continuing federal overreaction. The critical damage to the development of children’s social skills through hyper-masking and fear-mongering. The obliteration of the public’s trust in institutions due to their incompetence and deceitfulness during the pandemic. The massive erosion of civil liberties. The direct hardships caused by vaccination mandates, etc. under the false claim of helping one’s neighbor. The explosion of the growth of Wall Street built on the destruction of Main Street. The clear separation of society into two camps – those who could easily prosper during the pandemic and those whose lives were completely upended. The demonization of anyone daring to ask even basic questions about the efficacy of the response, be it the vaccines themselves, the closure of public schools, the origin of the virus, or the absurdity of the useless public theater that made up much of the program. The fissures created throughout society and the harm caused by guillotined relationships amongst family and friends. The slanders and career chaos endured by prominent actual experts (see the Great Barrington Declaration) and just plain reasonable people like Jennifer Sey for daring to offer different approaches, approaches – such as focusing on the most vulnerable - that had been tested and succeeded before.
Fauci and Lysenko are also on the same wavelength in regard to the scientific method. Lysenko denied it existed – Fauci claimed to be the embodiment of it when he is in fact its antithesis. I am the science, follow the science, do not criticize the science, worship the science – these were Fauci’s pandemic mantras.
In truth, he willfully ignored and/or modified evidence, he worked backwards from a desired outcome – his pandemic plan – to find anything that could justify it, from absurd studies to historical precedents that simply did not exist. He threatened anyone who dared dissent, made a mockery of the concept of transparent debate, and rewarded those who toed his line no matter their personal misgivings – the Twitter files and the Missouri v Biden depositions make all of that abundantly clear.
No actual scientist – Fauci’s training was as a regular doctor, not as an epidemiologist or researcher – would ever even consider uttering the phrase “follow the science” because it is impossible. Science is a process that follows a method; while it may technically be a noun it is in fact a verb and following the science is as impossible as following a car you are driving…unless you have already determined where you will end up.
Lysenko and Fauci both supported absurdly dangerous concepts – Lysenko’s insistence at the point of a gun on the non-existence of genetics and Fauci with his point of a needle support of deadly gain-of-function research that has never worked, unless you are using it to create bioweapons:
“The risk/reward calculation under those circumstances is very clear – zero chance of reward for performing an infinitely risky act. Performing any activity – from crossing the street to breeding superbugs in a lab – with those odds is unconscionable….Admittedly, it may have “worked” if a different goal was in mind. First, if a more plausible reason for engaging in the practice – the creation of bioweapons – has resulted in a “success” it will obviously never be made known to the public.”
Hoover and Fauci repeatedly, brazenly, and with no consequence lied to the American people and Congress. Both knew they would not be seriously challenged and that if they were challenged, their defenders in the press would hound and denigrate that person. They were immune and they knew it and they took advantage of the fact.
It could be said Fauci went even further, twisting the facts and twisting the arms of other scientists and officials to make them, too, lie to the public or face the kind of consequences he could dole out.
And all three benefited personally and financially from their actions and they made sure their most loyal supporters – supporters and acolytes and partners in power like Peter Daszak of EcoHealth Alliance infamy - did as well.
History is written by the winners and – at this moment in time – Fauci is on the side of the winners and his public image is unblemished, as is his civil and criminal record. His halo of kindly omnipotence remains largely intact.
But as we move forward, the winners may change.
The winners – hopefully - will become those who understand the scientific method and the importance of ethical behavior, have a commitment to transparency and honesty, and believe in holding others and themselves accountable for their actions.
Will that occur? Hoover’s place in history went from G-man number one to cross-dressing corrupt oppressor in about 15 years. Lysenko was unpersoned by the Soviets relatively quickly – it’s how they did things there then – though there are Lysenkoist lurkers at the edges now.
As to Fauci, time will tell. It will be up to society to create the courage to demand the truth, to demand an end to the craven corruption of the culture.
It can only be hoped that this will happen and happen soon – preferably while Fauci is still alive so that he can hear someone call him: J. Edgar Lysenko.
Forever intent on managing his image and public opinion on the pandemic response, he accepted a seemingly safe interview on CNN. The reporter was someone he trusted, Michael Smerconish, who tossed in what he believed to be a softball question.
He asked Fauci about the Cochrane study on masks by Tom Jefferson, and, in particular the author’s comments to Brownstone fellow Maryanne Demasi. Jefferson flat out said that masks don’t work to control viruses. Smerconish simply wanted Fauci’s response.
Fauci, who might have been expected to perform better, stumbled very badly. He said that while on a population level mask evidence is weak, the evidence is stronger on an individual level. That of course is a bit of a head-scratcher, especially since he cited none of the supposed studies.
Actually, it makes no sense at all. The whole point of the Jefferson paper was to examine the best-possible evidence. The results were exactly the “science” that Fauci has touted for years. The big difference is that the results completely contradict Fauci himself. Is this guy a pathological liar?
After the exchange, Smerconish reported that he texted Fauci an apology for the way the interview went, assuring him that it was not intended as a “gotcha” interview. He reported that Fauci texted him back but didn’t want to share the contents because he didn’t have permission. Interesting. I’m pretty sure that a reporter under normal circumstances would certainly share that information. But as we know, Fauci is in a league of his own.
In addition, some very interesting email correspondence came out, thanks to a FOIA request by US Right to Know. The communication to Fauci was courtesy of Fauci’s chief of staff Greg Folkers and on behalf of Fauci’s frequent co-author David Morens. The date was January 27, 2020, about the time that China’s experience with SARS-CoV-2 was making the news all over the US. (I wrote my first article against lockdowns for Covid the next day.)
“EcoHealth group (Peter Daszak et al), has for years been among the biggest players in coronavirus work, also in collaboration with Ralph Baric, Ian Lipkin and others,” wrote Folkers. In the past 5 years, and working with the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they had discovered hundreds of coronaviruses circulating in China. Further, the memo said, “clinical signs of bat SARS-CoVs in mice were not prevented with a vaccine candidate against SARS-CoV, and were not treatable with most monoclonal therapies being developed.”
Here is the full memo:
The timing here checks out against Jeremy Farrar’s own memoir:
“By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening. I was also getting the uncomfortable feeling that some of the information needed by scientists all around the world to detect and fight this new disease was not being disclosed as fast as it could be. I did not know it then, but a fraught few weeks lay ahead. In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone, hold clandestine meetings, keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism. ‘If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,’ I told them nervously, ‘this is what you need to know.’”
Wow, these guys believed they would be off’d! That’s some crazy stuff there.
These weeks were the critical turning point. China had already locked down. Farrar reports that “the world had all the information it needed by 24 January: a potentially fatal novel respiratory disease that could spread between people without symptoms, with no vaccines or treatments, that had already ravaged a huge, highly connected Chinese city.”
Then the possibility of a lab leak became very obvious in these days. “In the last week of January 2020,” he writes, “I saw email chatter from scientists in the US suggesting the virus looked almost engineered to infect human cells. These were credible scientists proposing an incredible, and terrifying, possibility of either an accidental leak from a laboratory or a deliberate release.”
This fits exactly with the above memo to Fauci. It was at this point that the cool-and-collected Fauci organized the authors of what became the “Proximal Origin” paper that denied it was a lab leak, the first draft of which was circulated on February 4. Among the authors was a virologist who had worked with EcoHealth.
You can look through the entire timeline and see that this all checks out. It seems ever clearer what was going on here. Fauci and his cohorts were alerted to NIH funding of the Wuhan lab. They became convinced of the very strong likelihood that this was a lab leak, accidental or deliberate. This began to make some sense of other reports from many months earlier of sick soldiers returning from the Military World Games. They panicked and they worked on a cover-up.
Why did they panic? Was it for fear of the public health consequences of a rapidly spreading virus? More likely, they panicked that they would rightly be blamed for it because the lab was funded through a third party by US taxpayers. They must also have known that they were doing gain-of-function research: the idea that labs create viruses and then also manufacture the antidote in the form of a vaccine. But according to the report on Fauci’s desk, no vaccine works for this one or others in this class of virus.
Fauci defaulted to the only action he could think of at the time: use lockdowns to minimize the spread. His staff had already taken a junket to Wuhan and returned with a report dated February 24, 2020 that said that lockdowns worked to suppress viral spread.
Lacking any better ideas, Fauci decided to push lockdowns as a way of minimizing the damage and keeping his reputation out of harm’s way by 1) denying the lab leak with a seemingly credible paper, and 2) causing a hugely distracting amount of chaos with a lockdown that they convinced Donald Trump himself to back.
This would of course wreck the Trump presidency, which was a bonus from the point of view of the military intelligence that was already working to implement protocols from their recently concluded “germ games.”
Next in line came the necessity to involve the New York Times, which on February 28 ran an article calling for the US to “go medieval” on the virus in addition to an article by Peter Dazsak himself on the op-ed page!
Four days later, Fauci told Michael Gerson of the Washington Post on March 2, 2020, that no vaccine would be needed to get over the pandemic. “Social distancing is not really geared to wait for a vaccine,” wrote Fauci. “The epidemic will gradually decline and stop on its own without a vaccine.”
Why would he say this? Again, Fauci had been told that no vaccine in China seemed to work. Plus, he is not a stupid man – coronaviruses mutate too quickly – and had years of attempts to vaccinate against AIDS without success. So his thinking was that using force to stop the spread was the only real option for a man who was seeking to “cover his ass,” as the expression goes.
The big problem with the plan, of course, was that there was no exit strategy. As soon as you open up, the virus is going to spread anyway. This was why Fauci welcomed all attempts at creating a vaccine anyway. At least the vaccine would provide an excuse to end the lockdowns.
But just in case it did not, he worked with his co-author David Morens on a big think piece that came out in Cell in August 2020. This was the paper that said lockdowns should really be permanent.
“Living in greater harmony with nature,” they wrote, “will require changes in human behavior as well as other radical changes that may take decades to achieve: rebuilding the infrastructures of human existence, from cities to homes to workplaces, to water and sewer systems, to recreational and gatherings venues.”
Despite Fauci’s wishes, the most extreme aspects of lockdowns gradually faded away in time, most anointed experts can pretend as if the vaccine ended the worst aspects of the pandemic (that’s why the mandates became necessary, if only to maximize uptake and confound the science), and Fauci keeps going on national television, despite his age and wealth, to dial back his responsibility for any aspect of it, including the lockdowns he is on record backing from February 26, 2020, onward.
In any case, this is a summary of current knowledge. There are of course many other layers to this onion, including the early involvement of the pharmaceutical companies and the extensive intervention by the Department of Defense. Sadly, much of the necessary information to sort through that thicket is wholly classified.
Thus ends Fauci’s not-so-good week. We’ll get to the bottom of this eventually.
Correlation and causation: Social upheaval and COVID lockdowns are most likely why gun sales are steadily rising, and some experts say, with no end in sight.
After the spectacular collapse of his sweetheart deal with the Justice Department in court, Hunter Biden’s lawyer angrily told the prosecutors in open court to “just rip it up.” It appears, however, that the defense team does not want to shred one part of the deal: the diversion agreement to avoid any charge over his false statement to obtain a gun permit. The defense is now arguing that, since the two sides signed the agreement before the implosion in court, it is final and complete.
The Justice Department thinks otherwise. It is arguing that neither the probation officer nor the Court agreed to the plea agreement to finalize it. Indeed, it was the sweeping immunity language buried in the gun charge section that led the Court to throw a flag on the play. Accordingly, the Justice Department is now pledging to indict Hunter by the end of the month.
Hunter, however, is insisting that the Justice Department will have to pry the agreement from his cold, dead fingers. Indeed, the President’s son may be channeling more from the National Rifle Association (NRA) than its catchline. If the court rejects the diversion agreement as executed, Hunter could be making an argument that will leave the Biden White House in something of a pickle.
One obvious attack against a charge is to argue that the underlying law itself is unconstitutional.
Under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(3), anyone who is an “unlawful user of or addicted to any controlled substance,” including marijuana, is barred from possessing a gun and can face up to 10 years in prison.
However, recently the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled the law violated the Second Amendment in United States v. Daniels. The case involved a man who was arrested in possession of marijuana and two loaded firearms. The Fifth Circuit relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen v. New York Rifle & Pistol Association, which established that firearms laws must conform with the nation’s “historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
President Biden denounced Bruen as a virtual abomination and has been a vocal supporter of the underlying law. Hunter, however, may now find himself in strange company in seeking to avoid any federal charge.
In the appellate opinion, Judge Jerry E. Smith wrote that “Our history and tradition may support some limits on an intoxicated person’s right to carry a weapon, but it does not justify disarming a sober citizen based exclusively on his past drug usage.”
That sounds tantalizingly familiar, but is it enough for Hunter to go full Wayne LaPierre?
If so, this would not be the first time that Hunter followed a path that his father has previously condemned in others. For example, for decades, Joe Biden has railed against “deadbeat dads” despite his son’s long effort to avoid paying child support to Lunden Alexis Roberts. Hunter spent years fighting support for his daughter Navy, even after a court confirmed that he was her father. Joe Biden himself only recently acknowledged the existence of Navy after routinely excluding her from the list of his grandchildren.
Yet, the President may not be quite ready for his son to join actual hunters in advocating for sweeping gun rights protections, including for drug users.
In making the argument, Hunter will have to claim that references to gun ownership by “law-abiding citizens” in past cases like District of Columbia v. Heller and Bruen should not be read to exclude everyone who breaks the law. Judge Smith cites a prior ruling in United States v. Rahimi, rejecting the federal ban on gun possession by people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. In that decision, the court held that the phrase should be read as “shorthand” alluding to “people who were historically ‘stripped of their Second Amendment rights.'”
The government has argued (and would likely argue in the Biden case) that there were laws from the 17th and 18th centuries barring people from publicly carrying or firing guns while intoxicated. However, the Fifth Circuit rejected the historical claim and noted that “under the government’s reasoning, Congress could ban gun possession by anyone who has multiple alcoholic drinks a week…based on the postbellum intoxicated carry laws. The analogical reasoning Bruen prescribed cannot stretch that far.”
The government has tried to use other laws barring guns to the mentally ill and dangerous individuals as historical analogs, but the court would have none of it. Indeed, Hunter could find himself arguing that people are too often denied rights by the government under claims that they are “insurrectionists.” Sound familiar?
The government has pointed to how “Founding-era governments took guns away from persons perceived to be dangerous.” However, the Fifth Circuit noted that those laws targeted unpopular people, including Catholics, as akin to traitors to the Revolution. Judge Smith wrote that drug users “are not a class of political traitors, as British Loyalists were perceived to be. Nor are they like Catholics and other religious dissenters who were seen as potential insurrectionists.”
So, a rejection of the gun diversion agreement could prove an even greater diversion for the Biden family as Hunter embraces the very decisions and rights long opposed by his father. In the meantime, the Justice Department would be citing historical precedent used against Catholics (like the Bidens) as potential insurrectionists who cannot be trusted with weapons.
Of course, White House Press Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre could defend all of this by paraphrasing the NRA that the “only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun [case] is a good guy with a gun [case].”
Australia's drug regulator, the TGA, has admitted it has no idea how many of the adverse events reported to its database are actually caused by the Covid vaccines, despite assessing this being one of its key duties.
It seems like heavy subsidy of a project would almost ensure that a sub-optimal business plan is used. The incentive is to get the free money rather than put together an optimal or even just a functioning business plan.
New York State Built Elon Musk a $1 Billion Factory. ‘It Was a Bad Deal.’
New Tesla facility in Buffalo was supposed to house a huge solar-panel operation, but the project hasn’t turned out as planned.
DBx: To be clear, if government were to throw enough subsidies and other special privileges at particular plants, firms, or industries, the results will often be ‘successes’ – ‘successes,’ that is, of the privileged plants, firms, or industries but not of the economy as a whole. The reason the economy-wide results cannot be classified as successful is that the reduced outputs, employment, and wages elsewhere are unseen, and hence unreckoned (except by a handful of retrograde “market fundamentalists” or “neoliberals” who haven’t gotten the memo that Hayek’s ‘knowledge problem’ isn’t really as insurmountable as Hayek’s ‘disciples’ believe it to be – but no serious person pays attention to them).
Yet while in many cases throwing enough special privileges at particular plants, firms, or industries might meet with such ‘successes,’ precisely because politicians and bureaucrats throw money around for political rather than economic reasons, the number of failures – such as the one documented in the above-linked Wall Street Journal report – of industrial-policy projects will nevertheless be substantial and relevant.
After the spectacular collapse of his sweetheart deal with the Justice Department in court, Hunter Biden’s lawyer angrily told the prosecutors in open court to “just rip it up.” It appears, however, that the defense team does not want to shred one part of the deal: the diversion agreement to avoid any charge over his false statement to obtain a gun permit. The defense is now arguing that, since the two sides signed the agreement before the implosion in court, it is final and complete.