This week, Biden upped the pressure on vaccine refusers, and Republicans freaked out about it. The new-case numbers finally started going down. We marked the 20th anniversary of 9-11. The Justice Department started fighting back against the Texas abortion law. And a big Robert E. Lee statue came down in Richmond.
This week’s featured post, though, backs up a little to address a more general question: Whether or not ordinary people should “do our own research” on the issues of the day. It’s easy to shake your head at the people eating horse paste to guard against Covid and say “Obviously not.” But the issue is actually more nuanced than that. This blog, for instance, is an example of someone doing his own research up to a point. I don’t run my own clinical trials, but if I totally trusted mainstream journalists to turn my attention in the right directions, there’d be no purpose in most of what I do.
So “On Doing Your Own Research” is a bit more sympathetic to the populist view than you might expect. It should appear around 10 EDT.
The weekly summary discusses the developments mentioned in the first paragraph, with particular attention to the legal basis for Biden’s “mandate” order, and for DoJ’s lawsuit against Texas. I’ll also go off on historical tangents about General Lee’s weakness as a strategist, and the similarity of the Thermopylae and Alamo myths. Let’s say that posts around noon.
The Weekly Sift 