Artificial intelligence may make books even more important, because they preserve a footnoted historical record that an AI-powered internet edits, erases, and obscures in real time. This is why I dedicate hard-earned family funds to buying physical books worth keeping, such as Sen. Rand Paul’s Deception: The Great Covid Cover-up.
Although a part of me wants to join many Americans in pretending lockdowns are all in a misty, distant past, I can’t do that, because to forget would dishonor the suffering. It would deliberately discard what we learned at so great a price. I want to see and preserve evidence of the evils our political class and Democrat voters continue to inflict. Remembering may be the only way to help prevent or dilute repeated mass psychoses.
This is why I read An Abundance of Caution, a book out in April by the left-leaning journalist David Zweig, who has bylines in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal. Zweig meticulously inspects a linchpin of the surreal U.S. lockdowns, extended school closures, against good evidence available not just weeks after they began but well before.
The End of Credential Credibility
Abundance of Caution documents how America’s disaster response disqualified the vast majority of America’s credentialed class. For example, three out of the four most accurate groups of people modeling Covid cases, hospitalizations, and deaths were outside of the public health field. Several were “random” stats guys.
“A team from a management consulting firm, along with — to be frank, two random guys — McConnell and Karlen, outperformed teams of researchers from Johns Hopkins, MIT, Duke, Columbia, the University of Michigan, the famed IHME, and the US Department of Energy’s elite Los Alamos National Laboratory, among others.” Zweig writes. “It is hard to imagine a more damning indictment of public health ‘experts’ than this outcome.”
As a longtime fact-checker for major publications and a father of two children shut out of school, Zweig also had internal motivations to question his political tribe’s hysteria during a presidential election year.
“[S]chool policies emerge as a window into the larger conversation around COVID-19 and, broader still, a prism through which to approach fundamental questions about why and how individuals, bureaucracies, governments, and societies act as they do in times of crisis,” Zweig writes in his introduction. “Ultimately, this is not a book about COVID. It’s about a country ill-equipped to act sensibly under duress.”
Hellbound and Down 