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.

NO, IT DIDN’T START WITH TRUMP: Fight Club: Rivalries in the White House form Truman to Trump. While reading Tevi Troy’s excellent history of infighting at the White House, I found myself thinking of John Bolton, the new media darling now that he has turned on Trump. Troy describes how Eisenhower’s secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, alienated Harold Stassen and other foreign-policy colleagues with his unremitting arrogance: 

According to Stassen, “My best summary of Dulles is that he always knew he was absolutely right. Further, he knew that anyone who disagreed with him was, of logical necessity, always wrong. And finally, he could not understand how anyone could dare question the fact that he was always right.” It wasn’t just Stassen who had a problem with the priggish Dulles, though. As Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once said, “I’m not sure I want to go to heaven. I’m afraid I might meet John Foster Dulles there.” Some U.S. allies had misgivings about Dulles as well. Harold Wilson, a British member of Parliament and future prime minister, once mocked Dulles’s propensity to try to be everywhere all the time: “I heard they are inventing an airplane that can fly without Dulles! They hope soon to get it into production.” Winston Churchill himself once famously mocked Dulles via declension: “Dull, Duller, Dulles.”

Read the whole thing.

AN L.A. COP SURVEYS THE DAMAGE: Demoralizing the Police. As cops become objects of derision and scorn, violent crime soars in American cities.

THE ESSENCE OF ENVIRONMENTALISM: False Gods for Lost Souls. In the Wall Street Journal, I review Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, a new book from a refreshingly sane environmentalist, Michael Shellenberger. He sees nuclear power as the cleanest and safest source of energy — and the only practical way to drastically curtail carbon emissions. So why do greens oppose it? He details the financial benefits that Jerry Brown’s family and green groups have reaped by opposing nuclear power.

“Every major climate activist group in America,” he writes, including the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Sierra Club, “has been seeking to close nuclear plants around the United States while taking money from or investing in natural gas companies, renewable energy companies, and their investors who stand to make billions if nuclear plants are closed and replaced by natural gas.”

Shellenberger’s debunking of green myths will be familiar to readers of Ronald Bailey’s The End of Doom and Gregg Easterbrook’s It’s Better Than It Looks, but maybe it will be more convincing to devout greens because of his own record as an activist. He understands the irrational appeal of the movement.

 “I was drawn toward the apocalyptic view of climate change twenty years ago,” he writes. “I can see now that my heightened anxiety about climate reflected underlying anxiety and unhappiness in my own life that had little to do with climate change or the state of the natural environment.”

For him and so many others, environmentalism offered emotional relief and spiritual satisfaction, giving them a sense of purpose and transcendence. It has become a substitute religion for those who have abandoned traditional faiths, as he explains in his concluding chapter, “False Gods for Lost Souls.” Its priests have been warning for half a century that humanity is about to be punished for its sins against nature, and no matter how often the doomsday forecasts fail, the faithful still thrill to each new one.

“The trouble with the new environmental religion is that it has become increasingly apocalyptic, destructive, and self-defeating,” he writes. “It leads its adherents to demonize their opponents, often hypocritically. It drives them to seek to restrict power and prosperity at home and abroad. And it spreads anxiety and depression without meeting the deeper psychological, existential, and spiritual needs its ostensibly secular devotees seek.”

Someone should give the book to Greta Thunberg and the journalists working so hard to publicize her inanities. It might even cheer them up.

PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE: Will the Real Justice Gorsuch Please Stand Up? “Gorsuch’s contorted analysis of the act’s text is sophistry that any freshman English teacher would flunk—and that Jefferson would contemptuously dismiss as squeezing out a meaning against the text, with a whiff of bad faith.”

WHO’S NOT AFRAID OF BLM?: On the College and Silence: A Letter from Hillsdale College. Yes, there is one college president who still has a spine.

MORE NUKES, PLEASE: Dangers of Nuclear Energy “Much Less Than Previously Thought.” The regulations strangling the nuclear-power industry are based on deceptive and fatally flawed (and even fraudulent) studies that vastly overestimated the effects of small levels of nuclear radiation. If greens really wanted to reduce carbon emissions, they’d be out marching for new regs and new nukes.

CHILD ABUSE: Open the Schools. Keeping kids out of classrooms indefinitely will do them considerable harm.

ANTIFA’S UTOPIA: The State of CHAZ. Christopher Rufo details the violence, robbery, and blatant racism in Seattle’s new nation, which accords political rights and power according to a “reverse hierarchy of oppression.”

At one evening event, an indigenous-rights activist with a purple bandana wrapped around his face announced a campaign for immediate small-scale reparations: “I want you to give $10 to one African-American person from this autonomous zone,” he said to a large crowd gathered on a baseball field. “White people, I see you. I see every one of you, and I remember your faces. You find that African-American person and you give them $10.”

Andrew Gleeson has another report on CHAZ, including the full text of the mayor’s inane observations on the “block party” in Seattle’s “summer of love.”