Tea at Trianon: Follow the Scientism

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 1, 2025

Follow the Scientism

When science becomes a religion. From Human Flourishing:

Because we would all prefer to forget the Covid crisis and move on, the following may have already faded from our collective memory. Only a few years ago Australia rounded up citizens exposed to Covid, including asymptomatic people, and shipped them involuntarily to detention facilities against their will. Videos of Australian quarantine centers made their way onto social media before tech censors, at the behest of governments, dutifully scrubbed them from the internet. Many provincial governors in Australia abused their emergency powers: while not every Australian state chose full-throated authoritarianism, several of them did. Canada likewise built detention facilities for infected persons, and the state of New York fought an ongoing legal battle to do so.
Authoritarian measures during the Covid crisis went beyond forced detainment of suspected or actual cases. The Medical Indemnity Protection Society (MIPS) in Australia, which provides medical malpractice insurance to all the country’s physicians, published twelve commandments for physicians on their website to avoid disciplinary “notifications”—an Orwellian euphemism for investigations overseen by the Australian Health Practitioner Regulatory Agency, the governing entity overseeing all physicians. The MIPS Commandment #9 instructed Australian doctors as follows:
Be very careful when using social media (even on your personal pages), when authoring papers or when appearing in interviews. Health practitioners are obliged to ensure their views are consistent with public health messaging. This is particularly relevant in current times. Views expressed which may be consistent with evidence-based material may not necessarily be consistent with public health messaging.
Read that last sentence one more time: “evidence-based material” refers to peer-reviewed scientific papers or other sources of credible medical information. So, if Australian doctors mention findings of a published study which are not consistent with “public health messaging”—i.e., the approved views of the public health bureaucrats in power—these physicians could potentially lose their ability to practice medicine. Notice that this applies also to physicians “authoring papers,” meaning that if a doctor conducts research and his findings contradict “public health messaging,” he’d better think twice before publishing the results. (Read more.)

The mirror of Erised. From Brownstone Institute:

The “deadly” first dose. Mortality of individuals with a single dose (dark blue bars) was frighteningly higher than that of the unvaccinated population, both before March 2021 and again from summer 2021 onwards. Is this evidence of vaccine-related mortality? Probably not. In early 2021, when vaccines were scarce, the frailest individuals in care homes and ill people were vaccinated preferentially. This “indication bias” probably explains the pattern in early 2021.

Once mass vaccination in that cohort started, the ACM plummeted because the frail were “diluted” by the influx of the healthy. However, over a few months, most people healthy enough went on to receive the second dose. Only a small fraction of the cohort was left behind – probably those too sick to get another dose. Were they sick because of the first dose? Who knows? In any case, the ACM of those who stayed with “dose 1” status again shot up because the ACM of the doubly vaccinated plummeted. (Read more.)

Some good news. From The Vigilant Fox:

Imagine this: you go to your doctor, and they give you ten minutes. You say, “Hey, Doc, I got a problem. How do I fix it?” The doctor writes you a prescription, you take it to the pharmacy, and then you take that pill for life—until you die. This is what most people experience when they see a doctor.
But RFK Jr. is changing that with a bold new vision to improve the doctor-patient relationship for good.
He announced that he’s leading a team at HHS to overhaul the medical education system and finally put a focus on what’s been ignored for too long—nutrition training. (Read more.)