WHY DAVOS LOVES COVID: Against the Great Reset. The World Economic Forum’s totalitarian scheme for “resetting” the world’s politics and economy may sound like a ridiculous fantasy from the Davos globalists, but it’s already underway, as you can see in this new book edited by Michael Walsh. It includes essays by Michael Anton, Jeremy Black, the late Angelo Codevilla, Victor Davis Hanson, Roger Kimball, Douglas Murray, and a dozen others. I’ve got one examining the Covid lockdowns and mandates as a trial run of the Great Reset — and a disaster, of course. The economic consequences are summed up in an essay by David Goldman, the deputy editor of Asia Times: 

The Great Reset is not a scheme for implementation in the distant future. It’s happening now, in the form of the most radical transformation of world economic policy in modern history, with the possible exception of World War II. The economic landscape that has emerged after the COVID-19 recession of 2019–2021 is radically different from what preceded it. The world economy has already been reset, and the perpetrators of the Great Reset want to make these changes irreversible.

One-fifth of the industrial nations’ GDP shifted to the balance sheet of governments during the COVID-19 pandemic, by far the biggest and fastest transfer of financial resources to governments in world history. Except for a few communist revolutions, no such transfer of economic power to governments from the private sector ever has occurred and never on a global scale.

Read the whole thing.

FOR A CHANGE, CAMPUS ACTIVISM IN A GOOD CAUSE: Fighting Fordham’s Vaccine Mandate. The university wants to force students, faculty, and staff to receive a second Covid booster shot—but it’s meeting resistance.

MIKKO PAUNIO: The World Economic Forum is a Dangerous Religious Cult. For decades, the environmental policies of the UN, the Club of Rome and the WEF have been based on nature pantheism, esotericism, and occultism — i.e., nonsense.

THE ENDLESSLY REWEWABLE SUPPLY OF GREEN IDIOCY: The Recyling Hoax. Elliot Resnick discusses environmental follies — recycling, plastic-bag bans, the “energy crisis”, the “population crisis” — with me on his latest podcast.

FRANK CAPRA WOULD APPROVE: Mr. Paul Goes to Washington. Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was accused of being both too corny and too cynical in its portrayal of a brave senator singlehandedly defending the public good against the thoroughly corrupt political and journalistic establishments. But we’ve seen a version of that plot for two years now, thanks to Senator Rand Paul’s lonely battle against Anthony Fauci, the CDC, and the mainstream press.

Invoking Hayek’s “fatal conceit,” Paul has repeatedly exposed Fauci’s blind arrogance, shabby tactics, and disastrous policies. My City Journal piece shows how Paul has asked the questions that Fauci’s fan club in the press should have been asking.  Paul has delivered consistently better scientific guidance than Fauci or the CDC  — and he has vowed to hold them accountable if Republicans regain the Senate majority.

BUT THEY SERVED THEIR PURPOSE: Satellite Temperature Data Show Almost All Climate Model Forecasts Over the Last 40 Years Were Wrong. Of course, the computer modelers erred on the high side  — just like the Covid modelers.

THE FDA’S LATEST ASSAULT ON PUBLIC HEALTH: Needs More Salt. The Food and Drug Administration plans to pressure food companies into reducing sodium content, but its guidance hasn’t passed scientific peer review and could actually lead to an increase in  cardiovascular disease and death for many Americans — not to mention ruining the taste of foods.

PAYPAL’S LATEST ASSAULT ON FREE SPEECH: PayPal Demonetizes the Daily Skeptic. The site has offered some of the best analysis anywhere of Covid data, science and politics (and other topics that the woke would rather not discuss). As Toby Young explains, PayPal is even shutting down the personal accounts of donors to the Daily Skeptic.

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY: Has Anyone Seen My Toes? Buckley is at the top of his game in his latest comic novel. It’s the story of an aging screenwriter — working on an absurd screenplay about Hitler kidnapping FDR — losing his waistline and his mind during the Covid pandemic. And it’s hilarious.

GALILEO COULDN’T PASS PEER REVIEW AT NATURE TODAY: And Yet It Moves. Once the most respected scientific journal in the world, Nature announces that it now places political correctness above the search for truth. The Left’s war on science proceeds.

STEVEN MALANGA: School Choice Rising. Parental discontent with public education has sparked new momentum  in state legislatures across the country.

DAVY CROCKETT EXPLAINS WHAT’S WRONG WITH BIDEN’S STUDENT LOAN GIVEAWAY: Not Yours to Give. In 1867, Harper’s Magazine published an article recounting a speech by Davy Crockett three decades earlier, when the frontier icon represented Tennessee in Congress. The House of Representatives  was preparing to unanimously pass a bill awarding $20,000 to the widow of a naval hero, but then Crockett rose to oppose it.

Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. . . .

Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.”

No one took him on his offer to donate a week’s pay, but he did succeed in getting the bill voted down.

Read the whole thing, including Crockett’s explanation of how his position was inspired by an eloquent farmer in his Tennessee district who convinced him that he’d previously violated the Constitution by voting to give away money that “was not yours to give.”

WORST DOCTOR EVER: Good riddance to Fauci and his calamitous, costly career. Never in the history of the public-health profession has anyone been so richly rewarded for doing so much harm to the public’s health. Fauci violated the fundamental principles of science, but got away it by deploying the skills honed during five decades in Washington: bureaucratic infighting, media manipulation and fearmongering.

STEVEN MALANGA: Trump Derangement Won’t End with Trump. Already, progressives are branding the GOP’s next generation as “a threat to democracy”—sound familiar?

MAN BITES DOG, CALIFORNIA DOES SOMETHING SANE: Diablo Lives! How grassroots activism saved California’s only remaining nuclear power plant.

CHRISTOPHER RUFO: How Gender Radicalism Conquered California Schools.

LOCKDOWNS AND MASKS FOREVER: Fauci and Walensky Double Down on Failed Covid Response. My piece in the WSJ on the plans by the CDC and WHO for a “more stringent” response to the next pandemic.

It was bad enough that Dr. Fauci, the CDC and the WHO ignored the best scientific advice at the start of this pandemic. It’s sociopathic for them to promote a worse catastrophe for future outbreaks. If a drug company behaved this way, ignoring evidence while marketing an ineffective treatment with fatal side effects, its executives would be facing lawsuits, bankruptcy and probably criminal charges. Dr. Fauci and his fellow public officials can’t easily be sued, but they need to be put out of business long before the next pandemic.

Jeffrey Tucker at the Brownstone Institute exposes the details of the CDC’s power grab and proposes a better solution.

Meanwhile, the CDC itself is being reorganized. But don’t be fooled by any appearance of contrition. They still have a legal appeal in process that would put a mask back on your face when traveling. The new agency to which some its pandemic responsibilities will be transferred will have a 1,000-person staff to start, people paid the big bucks to sit around coming up with new ways to whip up disease panic and start another crackdown.

A better solution would be to abolish the CDC. States can handle all its responsibilities. It did not even exist until 1947. Its purpose was mosquito control, spraying a now-banned chemical (DDT) everywhere. These days we handle that by going to Home Depot.

The CDC as an agency grew out of the 1944 Public Health Services Act that permitted nationally ordered quarantines for the first time. The legislative history of that thing remains a mystery to me. Regardless, it is nowhere justified in the US Constitution. This act needs to go too. So too all the federal agencies to which it gave rise. This is the only real solution.

The Spanish Flu of 1918 was a far deadlier virus than Covid-19, but America handled it much better because the CDC didn’t exist.

OFTEN WRONG, NEVER IN DOUBT: Political Experts Aren’t Really Experts. And their track record proves it.

BUT AT LEAST THEY’VE BEEN SPARED THE HORRORS OF FRACKING: Energy Bills in Britain to Double Next Year. 

JEFFREY ANDERSON: Masks Still Don’t Work. More than two years on, the best scientific evidence says that masks don’t stop Covid—and public health officials continue to ignore it as they impose mandates at schools, colleges and military bases.

Masks are physically uncomfortable, make it harder to breathe, and profoundly compromise human social interaction. But none of that matters to the mask zealots, who are convinced that benefits far outweigh any potential costs. So, where is the proof?

Nowhere — not in the data from the pandemic, and not in the scientific literature (including that zealots’ favorite study from Bangladesh). Read the whole thing.

JOHN TAMNY: Air Conditioning Is An Inconvenient Truth for Inequality Nail-Biters.

RAFAEL MANGUAL: What George Soros Gets Wrong. His Wall Street Journal article defending his support for “reform prosecutors” is a shallow, essentially data-free collection of platitudes and misleading assertions that offers nothing to the victims of violent crime — who are disproportionately members of the minority groups he purports to care about.

JOHN STOSSEL: Covid taught 1 million parents there are alternatives to failing public schools.

INCONVENIENT FACTS: Race, Crime and Data. Rafael Mangual of the Manhattan Institute discusses his new book, Criminal (In)Justice: What the Push for Decarceration and Depolicing Gets Wrong and Who It Hurts the Most.

I wrote this book largely because I was tired of reading stories about heinous crimes carried out by offenders who had no business being out on the street—stories the data make clear are not outliers—and I wanted to do something about it.

That desire only grew as I watched 2020 unfold. In the wake of George Floyd’s death and the unrest and political grandstanding that followed, politicians and activists pushed policies aimed at systematically lowering the transaction costs of crime (by making prosecutions and substantial punishments less likely) and raising the transaction costs of law enforcement (by placing new restrictions on police discretion and limiting the resources at their disposal). . . .

I was unsurprised when, in 2020, homicides spiked 30 percent across the U.S. (the largest one-year increase in generations). And I remained unsurprised by the fact that between 2020 and 2021, more than a dozen cities set all-time records for homicides, and more than a dozen more flirted with their 1990s peaks.

Read the whole book.

HE WAS AN ENTERTAINING ONE: Is Penn Jillette Still a Libertarian? The louder half of Penn & Teller talks with Nick Gillespie.