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mandates – XtremeCuztoms

Category: mandates

Sharing and Collecting COVID Stories: For Those Who Were Burned

Commentary Traumatic times in human experience are often best understood, across cultures, through the sharing of stories. I have a few personal stories from the COVID restrictions. As a mother, daughter, and human, they illustrate to me that something is deeply wrong. First, I was furious that the daycare centers, playgrounds, and local libraries were…


3 Years With COVID-19: The Real Story and Its Connection to the Erosion of Democracy

In Pieter Bruegel’s painting “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” the canvas is dominated by workers going about their daily routines. A person looking at the painting must strain to find the legs of Icarus as he plunges into the sea—having flown too close to the sun—resulting in the melting of his wings, made of…


The Manipulation of the Public Mind

Commentary In the world of Business Analysis there is a discipline called Process Modelling. Its output would be familiar to most people, consisting of diagrams to show how a business process, like say fulfilling an order, is supposed to work. As a discipline it strives for clarity and simplicity, through a complex syntax and method,…


Pandemic Fantasies Hit Hard Reality

Commentary This weekend, under the auspices of Brownstone Institute, two dozen writers and scholars—lawyers, doctors, essayists, scientists—gathered to come to terms with what happened over three years. At some point, all of us realized that no one in the room is today doing anything like what we were doing three years ago. Most everyone there…


What Was the Point of Denying Natural Immunity?

Commentary On Nov. 13, 2020, just as the vaccine was being rolled out (surely a sheer coincidence that it was just after the election), the World Health Organization (WHO) made a hugely significant change to its website. It pertained to the section on herd immunity—the concept theorizing how a new pathogen goes from pandemic to…


Who Benefitted From This Chaos?

Commentary Two years ago on this day, I posted a piece that was very hard to write. It concerned precisely who was benefiting from the lockdowns, masking, and all that was associated with it, including school and business closures and travel restrictions. As much as we would all prefer for everyone to be concerned about…


The Continued Wrecking of New York City

Commentary It’s been nearly 11 months since the end of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s “Key to NYC” vaccine mandate and public-school masking requirements. And President Joe Biden recently announced an end to the pandemic-related state of emergency on May 11. Yet many private businesses, cultural institutions, and schools continue to cling to COVID-era restrictions. The…


So Many Questions About the COVID Response

Commentary About 18 months ago, there was some chatter in Washington about a COVID commission that would examine the wild response and evaluate its good and bad features and make recommendations for the future. From the looks of it at the time, it seemed pretty obvious where it was going. In effect, it was going…


How the Bureaucracy Wrecks International Travel

News Analysis Like all truly great bureaucracies, unelected U.S. government staff members revel in adhering to nonsensical, inefficient procedures to create some semblance of order and limit autonomous decision-making. When it comes to U.S. international travel policy, President Biden’s bureaucratic army has come out in full force to accomplish absolutely nothing and avoid all responsibility….


The War on Doctors and Patients

Commentary Whenever I republish my newspaper op-eds on my Substack, I tend to introduce them with some comments on “how I really feel,” instead of the more staid language and arguments used in those pieces. In this one, I essentially argued that the new Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government should be ground zero…