Category Archives: government
The NAS Report on COVID-19
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 18th July 2023The National Association of Scholars has released a report Shifting Sands: The Confounded Errors of Public Health Policy Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the third report of a series which examines the interface of science and government. The realization that science, medicine, the government, and both the professional and lay media performed badly during the…
› Read the full entry
Transgender Care and the JAMA
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 25th May 2023The Journal of the American Medical Association already on a woke high of intergalactic dimensions has published Standards of Care for Transgender and Gender Diverse People – its full text is below. The document’s contents would until a short time ago have been considered delusional. I don’t wish to discuss the subject beyond saying that…
› Read the full entry
Too Much Bread
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 31st January 2023Man does not live by it alone, but too much makes him obese. Not just physically fat, but mentally flabby as well. Until about the last 80 years the main human activity was devoted to survival. Hobbes famous declaration that in a state of nature – ie, one without government – life would be solitary,…
› Read the full entry
The Price of Time – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 26th January 2023Edward Chancellor’s book , subtitled The Real Story of interest, starts with Hammurabi and continues to the present. He shows that interest is older than money and that the compulsion of governments to manipulate it is equally ancient. Interest has been seen as immoral by many religions, but has persisted because commerce is impossible without…
› Read the full entry
Prescription Opioids and Death
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 8th January 2023Effect of Prescriber Notifications of Patient’s Fatal Overdose on Opioid Prescribing at 4 to 12 Months is the title of a short paper on the JAMA Open Network. It describes what happens when a physician or physician extender receives a letter from the county medical examiner informing him that his patients has died from an…
› Read the full entry
The Bottom of the Slippery Slope
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th December 2022Warnings about the slippery slope have been around as long as deranged thinking. As an all purpose cathartic it quickly devolved to a cliché. But no one seems to be interested in what happens when you get to its bottom, or even how you can tell that you’ve arrived at its destination. Well, I think…
› Read the full entry
National Health Service in Trouble – Again
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 16th December 2022The UK’s NHS is now hit with a nurses strike, though only for a day. The nurses say they are overworked and underpaid. They are. They want an increase in pay of 5% above inflation. That works out to 15.7%. The independent pay board which sets their salary recommended a 4% increase. The nurses’ pay…
› Read the full entry
Mencken on Intelligence – A Century On
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 1st September 2022HL Mencken (1880-1956), often called the Sage of Baltimore, though Curmudgeon would have worked as well had he not been mostly right about the debased condition of his countryman as well those residing in the rest of the world. A century ago when he was in his prime there was no lack of deranged thinking…
› Read the full entry
The Last King of America – Book Review
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 24th March 2022Biographer Andrew Roberts recently published The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. The book is a detailed biography of the monarch who lost America. It’s so detailed that it likely contains more than some readers will care know about the King. Roberts had complete and unprecedented access to the royal archives…
› Read the full entry
The Gordon Riots – 1780
Written by Neil Kurtzman | 22nd March 2022Andrew Roberts in his biography of George III, (The Last King of America) which I’ll get to in a subsequent post, describes the Gordon Riots of 1780 as the worst catastrophe to befall London during the interval between the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz which began in 1940. Those who saw the disorder…
› Read the full entry
