A Satellite with A View: Timelapse of Earth rising over the Moon.

NICK GILLESPIE: Billionaire Michael Saylor Believes in Bitcoin More Than Ever.  The recent price slide hasn’t deterred the CEO whose bitcoin holdings dwarf Tesla’s.

BEFORE THE BABYLON BEE: Orwell’s Humor. The British writer confronted totalitarianism with determination but also with wit and irony.

I’VE SEEN THE LOCKDOWNS AND THE DAMAGE DONE: A Record Number of Drug-Related Deaths. According to new CDC numbers, the death toll rose 15 percent last year after jumping 30 percent in 2020.

WHEN YOU JUST KNOW YOUR OPINIONS ARE TRUE, WHY ALLOW DISSENT? How Disagreement Became ‘Disinformation.’ Barton Swaim explains in the WSJ how academics and journalists went from abhorring censorship to loving the new Disinformation Czarina (and revering authoritarians like Anthony Fauci). The Daily Skeptic offers a non-paywalled excerpt.

THE PANIC PANDEMIC: The Failure of Mask Mandates, Public Health and Central Planning. Ian Miller, the data analyst who has charted the futility of Covid policies in Unmasked (he destroys the case for mask mandates in one graph), chats with me on his podcast about Fauci, Hayek, The Power of Bad, and the corruption of public health.

BRING BACK THE GAS LINES: Price Controls?! Democrats look to resurrect a completely discredited economic policy.

WE PREFERRED CHARLATANS LIKE FAUCI: The Public Health Prophet We Did Not Heed. The late Donald Henderson, a giant in the field of epidemiology who directed the successful international effort to eradicate smallpox, published a landmark paper in 2006 warning against just about everything that Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx inflicted on America during the pandemic.

This paper reviewed what was known about the effectiveness and practical feasibility of a range of actions that might be taken in attempts to lessen the number of cases and deaths resulting from a respiratory virus pandemic. This included a review of proposed biosecurity measures, later utilized for the first time during covid, such as “large scale or home quarantine of people believed to have been exposed, travel restrictions, prohibitions of social gatherings, school closures, maintaining personal distance, and the use of masks”.

Even assuming a case fatality rate (CFR) of 2.5%, roughly equal to the 1918 Spanish flu but far higher than the CFR for Covid, Henderson and his colleagues nevertheless concluded that these mitigation measures would do far more harm than good.

They found the most helpful strategy would be isolating symptomatic individuals (but not those who had merely been exposed) at home or in the hospital, a strategy that had long been part of traditional public health. They also cautioned against reliance on computer modeling to predict the effects of novel interventions, warning that, “No model, no matter how accurate its epidemiologic assumptions, can illuminate or predict the secondary and tertiary effects of particular disease mitigation measures.” Furthermore, “If particular measures are applied for many weeks or months, the long-term or cumulative second- and third-order effects could be devastating socially and economically.”

Read the whole thing, which includes a copy of Henderson’s paper.

BY THE BIGGEST FOOLS ON THE PLANET: “The Biggest Global Power Grab We Have Seen in Our Lifetimes.” The Biden administration proposes to let the WHO dictate health-care policy in America and everywhere else.

GREENS’ GIFT TO AMERICA: A Summer of Blackouts? Thanks to hasty closures of fossil-fuel and nuclear plants, coupled with shortfalls in renewable-energy production, Americans will face increasing power outages.

TRANSGENDER THERAPY: A Cause, Not a Cure. Despite media claims, a new study provides further evidence that “gender-affirming” therapy creates or prolongs the very problem it purports to solve.

HOME SWEET HOME: Remoting. Survey data suggest that more than half of the American workforce is working from home either all or part of the time.

EXPOSING THE COVID CON: Won’t Get Fooled Again. How can Americans be convinced they were conned into believing that lockdowns and mask mandates were “the science?” It won’t be easy, because they’ve been through a two-year-long version of Hell Week, with Anthony Fauci and Democratic governors playing the role of fraternity presidents humiliating the pledges — and once people endure a painful hazing ritual, they’re loath to admit it was all pointless.

In theory, a federal Covid Commission could reveal the futility of lockdowns and mandates, but the public-health establishment and the mainstream media would keep doing its best to suppress the facts, as I write in City Journal. The best hope for a public airing could be a presidential campaign by Ron DeSantis, who could run on his success fighting Covid while sparing citizens, students and businesses from lockdowns and mask mandates. Florida’s cumulative rate of age-adjusted Covid mortality is below the national average, and its overall death toll — the rate of “excess mortality” from all causes — is lower than that of California, which imposed singularly strict measures and suffered one of the nation’s worst surges of unemployment.

The rate of excess mortality among young adults has been consistently lower in Florida than in California, where the strict lockdowns presumably contributed to deaths from other causes. If California’s cumulative rate of excess mortality equaled Florida’s, about 5,000 fewer Californians would have died during the pandemic. And if California’s unemployment rate equaled Florida’s last year, 500,000 fewer Californians would have been out of work.

Those are the hard truths that Americans need to hear.

HE’S A MENACE TO PUBLIC HEALTH: We Must Find a Way to Prevent Bill Gates from Preventing the Next Pandemic. 

WELL, AT LEAST FOR THE ONES STILL CAPABLE OF RATIONAL THOUGHT: A Simple Cure for Maskaholics. Over and over,  journalists and public officials have made fools of them proclaiming the success of mask mandates in some state or nation — whereupon Covid would promptly surge to unprecedented levels among the masked population. Some of these maskaholics will never learn, but they should at least be required to look at a graph prepared for City Journal by Ian Miller. It compares the  trajectory of  Covid throughout the pandemic in states with mask mandates versus the states without mandates — and shows that the masks made no difference. He also compares Germany, where almost everyone wore high-quality masks, with Sweden, where few citizens bothered to wear anything on their faces. Again, no difference in the Covid toll.

If you know someone still suffering from maskaholism, do them a favor and show them the graphs.

NICHOLAS WADE: End Merit As We Know It. President Biden hired Eric Landers to lead a research program to “end cancer as we know it,” but his expertise wasn’t enough to protect him from attacks by feminists. Now that they’ve driven him out, the administration is considering replacements with inferior qualifications — except that they’re the right gender.

A TREATMENT FOR COVID DERANGEMENT SYNDROME: Understanding the Covid Odds. If you know someone still cowering from Covid but still capable of rational thought, try sending them this article. It notes that among nearly 700,000 healthy Americans under 65 who were vaccinated and monitored last year, precisely zero had a severe case of Covid. Among those of any age with fewer than three chronic conditions, the odds of dying were 150,000-to-1. Those are roughly the same odds that in the course of a year you’ll die in a fire, or perish by falling down stairs. You’re more likely over over the course of your lifetime to die in an earthquake or be killed by lightning. And the Covid risk to children is even lower whether or not they’ve been vaccinated.

LOCKDOWN SCIENCE: No Benefit, Many Costs. After reviewing thousands of studies, researchers at Johns Hopkins conclude that lockdowns had “little to no effect on Covid-19 mortality.”

AN EPIDEMIC OF CHILD ABUSE: Kids Full of Life, Adults Obsessed with Death. The insanity of masking children — by the numbers. In Florida and the other states without mask mandates, 99.999 percent of children did not die of Covid — the same rate as in California and the other states that forced masks on students.

THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE SUPREME COURT: Biological Endowments. When it comes to selecting a Supreme Court justice, Joe Biden uses a system similar to that of the infamous Roman emperor Elagabalus. The emperor also made high-level appointments based on genitalia, although he focused on size, not color.

BUT THEY WERE A GREAT SUCCESS AT RUINING LIVES: Lockdowns Did Not Save Lives, Concludes Meta-Analysis.

JACOB SULLUM: Why Can’t the CDC Admit There Is No Solid Evidence to Support “Universal Masking” in Schools?

NICHOLAS WADE: The New Lysenkoism. Scientific American’s broadside against E. O. Wilson fits a fashionable, science-denying trend. It’s the same woke trend that led to terrible coverage of science during the pandemic by SciAm and other once-reputable publications. 

A NEW YEAR’S TOAST TO THE ELIXIR THAT MADE US WHAT WE ARE: How Alcohol Saved Civilization.  Why are humans the only species that deliberately, systematically, and regularly gets drunk? Edward Slingerland offers a witty, erudite and novel explanation to this old evolutionary puzzle: Because alcohol has always been an essential lubricant, trust-builder and stimulant enabling large-scale societies to flourish. I review (and highly recommend) his book: Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization.

IT WAS NEVER ABOUT SCIENCE: Covid’s Three Blind Mice. Scott Atlas’s memoir of his time at the White House offers appalling revelations about the bureaucrats who hijacked the nation’s governance during the pandemic. The troika of Anthony Fauci, Deborah Birx and Robert Redfield had scant interest in scientific research or debate — and zero concern for the calamitous effects of their edicts.