Better than a fictional murder mystery, the murder of researcher Bing Liu beats any Agatha Christie plot. Christie doesn’t reveal the most pertinent information about the motive for murder until the end of the book, which is both irritating and a deterrent to reading her books. In contrast to
As civil resistance (or, at the very least, social media grumbling) to COVID–19 lockdowns grows louder, the bootlicking types are scrambling to defend the Soviet-lite technocracy we’ve suddenly found ourselves living under. “Listen to the experts!” they bleat. “Trust the science!” “Science” is the great fetish of modern
We used to have a democracy, long ago, with institutions robust and whose advice, although not always reliable, was reasoned and open to scrutiny. We had excellent epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists carefully preparing reports displaying methods, workings and conclusions, citing references numerous. One such example was “Potential Health Impacts
Simon Thornley covidplanb.co.nz With much journalistic ink spilled over COVID-19, it is easy to forget that our policies of lockdown and social distancing are based on a belief about the lethality of the virus and its spread. This belief comes from interpreting evidence. Currently, two main ideas predominate.
Dave Pellowe davepellowe.com Jane Caro – novelist & social commentator – typed a piece yesterday titled “Our Leaders Agree With Science When Science Agrees With Them“. In it, she gives credit to the conservatives (among other national and state leaders) who have heeded the doomsday predictions of discredited pandemic models and
Along with other BFD writers, I have for the past week raised the question of whether New Zealand’s draconian lockdowns had actually achieved anything significant. The conclusion even then was: no. Jacinda Ardern has trashed and burned New Zealand’s economy for nothing. As more and more data becomes
Daphna Whitmore rdln.wordpress.com Since I wrote Corona fevers and the madness of models, criticising the lockdown in New Zealand, there have been many comments and some objections to the article. Some of these have been discussed in other forums but here I will try to respond to a
Alex Davis theemperorsrobes.blogspot.com On March 17th, eight days before New Zealand entered lockdown, Professor John Ioannidis, one of the world’s most cited medical researchers, published an article warning that the world was rushing into a series of panic-stricken responses to COVID-19 on the basis of data that
UK television and radio media are just as left-wing as they are in New Zealand. The Spectator highlights two interviews, each carried out very differently, on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. Health Secretary Matt Hancock, of the Conservative party, got a roasting – as one would expect. The National Party,
On March 4th this year, a buddy of mine returned from the UK to live in New Zealand. He had employment set up in Queenstown working in the aviation industry with tourists and locals alike. When he arrived, he had a bit of a cold and hadn’t been able
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Let’s suppose that CO2 actually does control the average global temperature. It would thus be critical that the whole carbon cycle was extremely well understood in order for climate models to be accurate in their prediction of how mankind’s puny CO2 outputs are going to affect the future
In a delicious irony that may challenge the belief systems of those opposed to genetic engineering and also tobacco sponsorship, it looks like BAT (British American Tobacco) may have won the race to provide the first vaccine for COVID-19: The world’s second-biggest cigarette maker claims to have made a
Ina Skosana The Conversation The global crisis triggered by the spread of the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, continues to take fresh and dramatic turns, causing havoc in dozens of countries around the world. Stock markets remain volatile, having recording historic collapses in share prices. As the disease continued to spread
Covid-19 is wreaking fear and havoc around the globe but very little is said about its colourful history, which includes the suspected murder of a Canadian scientist and its alleged theft in Canada by Chinese scientists. The new Coronavirus first appeared in 2012 in Saudi Arabia when an unknown virus
Operation Paperclip was the American mission to smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe after WWII and take 88 brilliant Third Reich scientific minds to America to drive technological advancement in rocketry, space search and biological weaponry. Writer Annie Jacobsen wrote about that mission, and a dozen or so of
