The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Death of Informed Consent By  Stella Paul Here's what  never  happened in the hospital during COVID: a doctor sat down next to a patient and said, "You have a choice.  We can give you Remdesivir, which killed  53%  of the patients in an Ebola trial.  It was so bad the trial had to be shut down.  And you'll notice here in Remdesivir's fact sheet, it says, ' Not a lot of people have used Remdesivir.  Serious and unexpected side effects may happen. '  Or we can give you  ivermectin , a safe and effective drug that's been successfully used for decades, and send you home.  Which do you prefer?" The reason that conversation never happened is that it would have cost the hospital too much  money .  If the hospital gave you ivermectin and sent you home, the federal government paid the hospital $3,200.  If the hospital gave you Remdesivir, the federal government paid the entire hospital bill, plus a 20% bonus.  So the hospital executives' choice was to

Blatant Blarney: Derangement as Default Setting Omar Khan Poet, essayist, author, teacher, B.W. Lowe, reminds us, " We become slaves the moment we hand the keys to the definition of reality entirely over to someone else, whether it is a business, an economic theory, a political party, the White House, Newsworld or CNN.” Of course, there are depths to our enslavement. To offer ourselves to CNN is truly to free fall into vacuity and innuendo incarnate. Desmet’s “Mass Formation” is about paucity of inner lives, shriveled social bonds, the anxiety kicked loose by these vacuums and the aggression that builds from the concomitant frustration and despair. And then, here cometh a unifying narrative, someone to compose the confusion, to offer “belonging” (masks, distancing, manic sanitizing and other earnest rituals however divorced from efficacy), and off we go. We’ve been reminded that outright gibberish, discredited, factually bereft gibberish, repeated often enough, delivered from cita