We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

Daily Sceptic administers a kicking to Sp!ked

Myers clearly regards Bridgen’s claim that the mRNA vaccines may be doing more harm than good to be nonsense, but in fact it is well-supported by evidence. For instance, British Medical Journal Editor Dr. Peter Doshi along with Dr. Joseph Fraiman and colleagues examined the data from the vaccine clinical trials and found that, compared to controls, the Pfizer and Moderna mRNA COVID-19 vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 10.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Pfizer and 15.1 events per 10,000 vaccinated for Moderna. When combined, the mRNA vaccines were associated with an increased risk of serious adverse events of 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated, or 1 in 800. Note that the adverse events they looked at included those from COVID-19 itself, meaning the findings imply that among trial participants the vaccines were doing more harm than good.

Similarly, Dr. Kevin Bardosh and colleagues – hailing from the Universities of Harvard, Oxford, Johns Hopkins, Edinburgh and Washington, among others – found that for every COVID-19 hospitalisation prevented by boosters in previously uninfected young adults, 18 to 98 serious adverse events occurred, including 1.5 to 4.6 cases of booster-associated myocarditis in males. That’s more harm than good, at least for healthy young adults.

Will Jones

Nice fisking, read the whole thing.

Seeing as it is May 4th…

Samizdata quote of the day – watermelon edition

Those who would change every aspect of our economic lives are using environmental collapse as the excuse.

Tim Worstall

THE WEST – Episode 4

Well worth your time…

How to disable emergency government alerts on your mobile phone

Android users (may be somewhat different on different makes of phone).

iPhone users.

Because if the Covid years have proven anything, only a crazed conspiracy theorist would believe governments would think nothing of using heightened fear to induce mass formation psychosis, thereby hugely increasing its power over every aspect of life, right?

I predict it will eventually be illegal to turn off such ‘warnings’ and phone makers will make it impossible, but then I am just a crazed conspiracy theorist 😉

Samizdata quote of the day – Beyond Grievance

The race lobby would have us believe that Britain’s minority population is oppressed and victimised. An entire industry now exists to sustain and perpetuate this claim. Many in that lobby seem to believe they will be rendered irrelevant if they ever acknowledge the undeniable progress made by Britain on matters of race and integration. This is one reason why this survey’s data has been given such an overwhelmingly negative spin. A mature anti-racism movement would acknowledge the good news, while working to tackle discrimination where it still exists.

What a shame that these academics felt the need to trash Britain’s record on race relations – especially when their own research tells us that there is so much to be proud of.

Rakib Ehsan

Pushing back against state overreach

Together was formed in response to the catastrophic overreach of government and authorities during the pandemic. The consequences of that episode need no repetition here, but the government’s smearing, censure and censorship of criticism, and the attempts to use psychology (fearmongering – as you have observed well) to assert its agenda was a grotesque departure from the norms of democratic society. Together launched a very successful campaign to reassert democratic control and freedoms, demanding the reinstatement of care workers sacked for their non-compliance with vaccine mandates. And they have since started a campaign to challenge some of the aggressively anti-car policies that local authorities have installed under cover of lockdowns, which will have a detrimental effect on freedoms, incomes, and health, despite seemingly being formulated in the interests of public safety. Climate Debate UK was launched at the end of last year, with the intention of informing debates relating to the Net Zero agenda. And so there was considerable overlap, and a joint project seemed like a good idea. I hope to be working with Together much more in the future.

Ben Pile in discussion with Laura Dodsworth.

Pushing back against state overreach is a perpetual battle of attrition that must be fought on many fronts.

THE WEST – Episode 2 & 3 are up

Well worth your time…

US Grand Strategy: NATO, Alliances, & Ukraine – how alliances underpin American influence

Another excellent presentation by Perun…

Samizdata quote of the day – taxing ourselves into poverty

For at least two of those three we have no domestic production at all. Rice and bananas simply do not grow on or in our sceptered and silver girt isles. So why does it take some grand and vast international agreement to stop taxing ourselves into poverty on these items?

Now that we have left the European Union such import tariffs are our own decision – as evidenced by this deal itself. But how did we end up with a polity that hasn’t, doesn’t, make us richer by doing the obvious thing that we’ve now the power to do? Make us all richer by abolishing import tariffs?

Answers on a postcard to Ms. Badenoch please.

Tim Worstall

The West

This is well worth a watch!

Highly recommended.

Samizdata quote of the day – parallel universes edition

To the majority of people who believe lockdowns were right and necessary, the Covid era was no doubt distressing, but it need not have been cause to re-order their perception of the world. Faced with a new and frightening disease, difficult decisions were taken by the people in charge but we came together and got through it; mistakes were made, but overall we did what we needed to do.

For the dissenting minority, the past three years have been very different. We have had to grapple with the possibility that, through panic and philosophical confusion, our governing class contrived to make a bad situation much worse. Imagine living with the sense that the manifold evils of the lockdowns that we all now know — ripping up centuries-old traditions of freedom, interrupting a generation’s education, hastening the decline into decrepitude for millions of older people, destroying businesses and our health service, dividing families, saddling our economies with debt, fostering fear and alienation, attacking all the best things in life — needn’t have happened for anything like so long, if at all?

Freddie Sayers