LET THEM EAT MASKS: The Coming Post-COVID Global Order.  Lockdowns in the West could leave billions of people in the developing world stranded in a “neo-feudal future.”

BUT OF COURSE THIS CAN’T BE SAID BEFORE THE ELECTION: The American response to Covid has been far better than critics acknowledge.

NO, HE’S WOKE: Is the Pope Catholic? Francis’s new encyclical reads like a UN mission statement. He demonizes capitalism, and his ecological fundamentalism is more pagan than Catholic.

BUT IF IT SAVED JUST ONE LIFE: Lockdown’s Lethal Toll. The Daily Mail tallied up British casualties from the lockdown. The findings are summarized at the Lockdown Skeptics website:

• Delays in treatment are set to cause a 20% rise in deaths among newly diagnosed cancer patients in England – 6,270 excess deaths this year
• Treatment for strokes fell by 45% during lockdown and there were more than 2,000 excess deaths in from heart disease
• More than 50,000 operations for children were cancelled
• Organ transplants fell by two thirds, with the number of those who died on the transplant waiting list almost doubling
• Total waiting lists for routine orthopedic and eye operations are at record levels
• Calls to child abuse helplines rocketed
• As rates of depression and anxiety doubled, thousands of recovering alcoholics have relapsed.

Andrew Cuomo is no doubt too busy selling his book to comment. But he’ll surely give the British a run for their money.

THE LOCKDOWNS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES: New York’s Year from Hell. The city lost 16 percent of its jobs, twice the national rate.

New York is faring far worse than the rest of America. By late July, the nation had lost 8.1 percent of its jobs. But locally, industry after industry isn’t just in recession; it’s virtually nonexistent. New York is missing 53 percent of its 471,800 pre-Covid leisure and hospitality workers. The arts and entertainment field has lost 65,200 jobs, or more than two-thirds, and the restaurant and hotel field has hemorrhaged 184,500 jobs, or 49.2 percent. Retail outlets have laid off 45,300 people, or 13.2 percent. All these declines outpace national losses.

Apparently, this still isn’t enough to satisfy New York’s leaders. This month Mayor de Blasio imposed still further restrictions in “hot spots,” and Governor Cuomo added three more states to the 34 already on the list of states whose travelers must quarantine for 14 days if they visit New York. Who needs tourists?  Meanwhile, restaurants in the city are still limited to 25 percent capacity.

THE TRUTH ABOUT SLAVERY IN 1619: Uniquely Bad — But Not Uniquely American. For much of history, slavery was as fundamental to society as agriculture. While slavery was a global multiracial phenomenon, “the abolitionist movement was a white Western invention.”

GET WOKE, GET SICK: Fighting Racism Instead of Disease. The intrusion of critical race theory into medicine and public health threatens the well-being of all Americans—especially nonwhites. More evidence that the public-health profession has become a hazard to public health.

A HOLIDAY FROM CANCEL CULTURE: Don’t Defend Columbus–Celebrate Him. Dozens of cities have taken down their statues of Columbus, but he and the Italian immigrants who paid for those statues deserve tribute, not blame.

END THE LOCKDOWNS: Five Charts That Show Sweden’s Strategy Worked. 

NEVER LET A PANDEMIC GO TO WASTE: Lab Coat Tyranny. California is using “public health” as a rationale to push progressive political goals.

END THE LOCKDOWNS: A White House Voice for Science. Scott Atlas, a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, tweeted support for the Great Barrington Declaration: “Top scientists all over the world line up with the #Covid_19 policy of @realDonaldTrump. Protect the vulnerable and OPEN schools and society. That is the science!”

Nearly 175,000 people have signed the Great Barrington Declaration, which calls for a “focused protection” strategy instead of lockdowns.

A TREATMENT FOR LOCKDOWN MANIA: Is Vitamin D a Silver Bullet? Mikko Paunio, a Finnish epidemiologist, suggests an alternative to lockdowns: encourage everyone to take vitamin D supplements.

I consider it scientifically proven that high levels of vitamin D provide both protection against severe COVID-19, but even more importantly there is strong evidence that high vitamin D levels slow markedly virus circulation and might even provide ‘herd immunity’ to populations, according to a study published a month ago. It is as yet non-peer-reviewed but already can be considered a milestone study. It is a remarkable matched case control study of 52,405 COVID-19 cases and 524,050 matched controls picked up from Clalit Health Services (CHS), which provides comprehensive health services to over 4.6 million members in Israel.

His article appears at Lockdown Skeptics, an oasis of rationality amidst Covid hysteria.

AN OPTIMIST’S FORECAST: New York’s Dynamism Will Triumph. Yes, people are fleeing now, but when social-distancing is a distant memory, the city could bounce back: “While smaller cities may have charm and some unique offerings, larger, global cities can do things that smaller ones cannot, such as attracting the finest talent and providing a more diverse array of services. In this way, large cities are a kind of self-perpetuating machine.” Unless, of course, you have a mayor like Bill de Blasio — but he’ll be gone before the virus is.

ONE MORE REASON TO LEAVE CALIFORNIA: The Reparations Racket. California, which entered the Union as a free state, establishes a task force to explore paying reparations to descendants of slaves. What could go wrong?

END THE LOCKDOWNS: A Failed Experiment. The lockdowns are the most risky experiment ever performed on the public, and the results are horrendous. Study after study has failed to detect significant benefits beyond what was achieved from voluntary social distancing, as I document at City Journal. Now that the lockdowns appear much deadlier than the virus, particularly for the poor, there is no ethical justification for continuing this experiment.

HEATHER MAC DONALD: Against Fear. President Trump’s handling of his coronavirus diagnosis models positive masculinity—rational and unbowed. So of course it offends today’s media elite:

Under today’s safetyism mentality, sacrifice and risk-taking become unthinkable. The martial virtues of courage and stoicism have been sidelined and pathologized. . . . Under our feminized ethos, showing resoluteness during a crisis, reassuring the public about one’s well-being, are no longer positive traits in a leader; they are violations of maximal risk aversion.

Read the whole thing.

VIRTUE SIGNALING IS EXPENSIVE: As City Budgets Shrink, It’s Time to Rethink Recycling Programs. For the benefit of the environment as well as citizens.

FACTS V. NARRATIVE: Learning from Breonna Taylor. There are lessons, but they’re not what you’ve been hearing.

MORE EVIDENCE AGAINST LOCKDOWNS: Explaining Sweden’s Covid Cases. The mortality rate in Sweden, while lower than in the U.S. and Britain, has been higher than in neighboring Nordic countries, which critics claimed was proof that it should have emulated their lockdown policies. But a new analysis points to another explanation: Sweden had far more vulnerable elderly people (“dry tinder,” as researchers call it) than its neighbors because its previous two flu seasons had been milder than theirs. “My results,” Jonas Herby concludes, “illustrate that plain coincidences may be important when understanding the COVID-19-death toll in a country compared to national lockdown policies.” His conclusions jibe with a previous analysis of Sweden and its neighbors.

LET’S HOPE THIS IS CORRECT: Why Democrats won’t ditch the filibuster. The filibuster gives personal power to senators of both parties, and they won’t give that up to please progressives.

PRACTICE, PRACTICE: Battle of the Preppers. A brief history of the pros who prep the candidates for presidential debates.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The How of Happiness. At 5 pm Eastern time today, in a Zoom symposium at the Aspen Institute,  I’ll be interviewing the social psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky about her research into what makes people happier (and what doesn’t). Any suggestions for what I should ask her? You can post them here, or click on the link to join the symposium and ask her yourself.

SWEDEN TOOK THE VIRTUOUS PATH: The Moral Case for Reopening Schools — Without Masks. If you’re a public-minded citizen committed to reducing the death toll from Covid-19, what is the morally correct way to behave? Start by ignoring the advice from the media and the scientific and political establishments. Unless you’re elderly or otherwise at high risk, you shouldn’t be wearing a mask all day — or shaming others for going unmasked. You should be careful not to endanger the vulnerable, but otherwise you can best promote the common good by exposing yourself to the slight risk from the virus in order to promote herd immunity.

That strategy is working in Sweden, and it would work elsewhere if we heeded sensible epidemiologists like Sunetra Gupta instead of the fearmongering and destructive advice from most public officials and school administrators. Unmasked students deserve to be praised, not expelled.

THANK YOU FOR NOT RECYCLING: Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society. Why did the most affluent society in history turn into a mass of neurotic hoarders? I’ve been writing for decades about the folly of the recycling movement, but I didn’t fully appreciate its stupidity — or the inanity of the anti-plastic movement — until I looked into the history of the supposedly evil “throwaway society.” From Dixie Cups to Cellophane to plastic grocery bags, disposable products were embraced because they made life better. As I write in City Journal:

Disposable products aren’t merely more convenient than the alternative; they’re also safer, particularly during a pandemic but also at any other time. And they have other virtues: the throwaway society is healthier, cleaner, more economical, less wasteful, less environmentally damaging—and yes, more “sustainable” than the green vision of utopia.

These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.

If you’re guided by history or “the science,” it’s clear that agonizing over what goes into the trash is not a universal moral imperative — and it’s not exactly a sign of spiritual enlightenment, either.

BUT AT LEAST THE MAYOR PAINTED A BLM MURAL: Wave of Violence Overwhelms NYC. Contrary to what Bill de Blasio and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez suggest, criminal behavior is not an economic phenomenon. Nor is it deterred by a BLM mural in front of Trump Tower.