The Post-Partisan Emporium

Living in the Age of Covid: "The Power of the Powerless" Michael Rectenwald A specter is haunting the world: the increasing prospect of a new totalitarianism under the extended covid response. Unlike the specter of communism, or the specter of “dissent” to communist dictatorship that Václav Havel ironically identified in his groundbreaking essay “The Power of the Powerless,”[1] this specter originates from those in power and not from the revolutionary or the powerless.[2] And rather than haunting only Europe or Eastern Europe, this specter casts its long shadow across the future of all humanity, such that one wonders how one might plan, if at all, for this future. Mixed into this spectral fear are grave doubts promoted by some about the intentions of world leaders and a medical and technocratic elite apparently bent on new lockdowns, masking, and mandatory mass vaccinations. Heterodoxies burgeon in the shadows. The mere mention of these heterodoxies will rank one among the he

Horror as Kabul Falls to a Regime More Liberal Than Australia’s You can attend mass in Kabul but not in Sydney The Taliban are so horrible they aren’t even clamping down on funerals if they exceed 10 people! Horror! Afghanistan has been overrun by a regime so barbarous and cruel that under its rule people are allowed to step outside without a passport, may even enter government offices, museums, and stores without said passport, and where — gasp (!) — men may walk outside without face coverings! This is simply too barbaric to even contemplate! Why can’t the Taliban be more like us?? It’s time to enter the 21st century, fellas! On the other hand, the Taliban do at least ban concerts, cinemas and night clubs so there is still hope they may yet join the civilized world and offer progressive governance, with more clampdowns on anything that makes life worth living, just as the West has done for the past year and a half. Fingers crossed! The dystopian life under the Taliban: The Free West:

The Right to Bodily Integrity: Nobody Wins and We All Lose in the COVID-19 Showdown By John W. Whitehead & Nisha Whitehead August 18, 2021   “We’ve reached the point where state actors can penetrate rectums and vaginas, where judges can order forced catheterizations, and where police and medical personnel can perform scans, enemas and colonoscopies without the suspect’s consent. And these procedures aren’t to nab kingpins or cartels, but people who at worst are hiding an amount of drugs that can fit into a body cavity. In most of these cases, they were suspected only of possession or ingestion. Many of them were innocent... But these tactics aren’t about getting drugs off the street... These tactics are instead about degrading and humiliating a class of people that politicians and law enforcement have deemed the enemy. ”—Radley Balko, The Washington Post Freedom is never free. There is always a price—always a sacrifice—that must be made in order to safeguard one’s freedoms.

Counterintuitive Dynamics Threaten the End of the Pandemic Scientists model the factors influencing the risk of creating a vaccine-resistant virus strain While vaccination campaigns against the coronavirus promise to end the pandemic, scientists raise concerns about creating an environment that allows vaccine-resistant strains of the virus to thrive. An international team of researchers around Simon Rella created a model in which, at the very end of the vaccination campaign, the risk of a vaccine-resistant virus becoming dominant increases dramatically. Their findings are now being published in  Nature Scientific Reports . Understanding the dynamics of a complex and global phenomenon like the coronavirus pandemic is hardly an easy task. Scientists combine tools from epidemiology – the study of how diseases spread – and population genetics – looking into the spread of genetic traits – to create mathematical models that describe the pandemic. Simon Rella, researcher at the Institute of S

I’m guilty of going against The Science: a defence of my condemned, censored ‘dangerous’ speech to parliament George Christensen Politicians condemned me. Big Tech censored me. The mainstream media said my views were a danger to public health. Why? Because I spoke out against The Science TM  in the Federal Parliament. What exactly is The Science TM ?  The Science TM  is the prevailing orthodoxy in Australia on how to handle this pandemic and I have to tell you that it is wrong. Very wrong. I went against The Science TM  when I asked parliament how many freedoms we would lose due to fear of a virus which has a survivability rate of 997 out of 1000. Where did that figure come from? Certainly not from The Science TM. Actually, it came from an official World Health Organisation Bulletin which published a paper by epidemiology expert Dr John Ioannidis entitled “Infection fatality rate of COVID-19 inferred from seroprevalence data”. That paper surveyed data across 51 countries and found that