Source: spiked
by Joanna Williams

“National attention is now turning to school anti-vax protesters. Home secretary Priti Patel wants the police to ‘do more’ to crack down on these demonstrations. ‘Freedom to protest is a fundamental part of our democracy,’ Patel says, ‘but it is completely unacceptable for children, teachers or parents to be intimidated and harassed outside their school by protesters peddling misinformation and dangerous lies about the life-saving vaccine programme.’ Labour leader Keir Starmer wants the government to go further. He wants local authorities to have the power to establish ‘exclusion zones’ outside schools preventing anti-vax protests from taking place. … Both Patel and Starmer need to get a grip. School Covid protests are idiotic and a major inconvenience, but they do not necessitate granting sweeping new powers to local authorities.” (10/25/21)

https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/10/25/even-anti-vaxxers-deserve-the-right-to-protest/

Source: Cato Institute
by Corey A DeAngelis

“President Joe Biden and Gov. Ralph Northam both decisively won Virginia in their last elections by about 10 percentage points. Yet with Election Day approaching, polling shows former Democratic Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin neck and neck in the race to succeed Northam. What accounts for the shift? Put plainly, Democrats are getting schooled in the importance of educational freedom.” (10/25/21)

https://www.cato.org/commentary/democrats-teachable-moment

Source: Christian Science Monitor
by Mark Sappenfield

“Once you see the word, you start seeing it everywhere: resilience. If 2020 was the year of turmoil, 2021 might well be the year of resilience. There’s the need for individual resilience amid the pandemic or natural disasters, and there’s a push to build a broader resilience in communities and countries: helping them weather climate change, political dysfunction, or economic shocks. In that spirit, our newest project is called Finding Resilience. You may have already seen stories or attended our webinar discussion earlier this month. The intent is to seek out where resilience is operating and chronicle how people are finding it in themselves and their neighbors.” (10/25/21)

https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/From-the-Editor/2021/1025/Finding-what-more-we-can-all-do

Source: Eunomia
by Daniel Larison

“A military attack to ‘prevent’ Iran from acquiring something they are not seeking is many things, but it is not a last resort. Attacking Iran to ‘prevent’ a possible future threat is obviously not defensive. It is unprovoked aggression against another country based on an unproven assumption that the targeted government intends to build these weapons. It is worth adding that it would still be an act of aggression even if the Iranian government were actually trying to acquire those weapons, so it would be even more egregious if they were not. This is the same demented logic that led to the invasion of Iraq, which was an illegal war of aggression.” (10/25/21)

https://daniellarison.substack.com/p/dressing-up-unprovoked-aggression

Source: Brownstone Institute
by John Tamny

“The supply lines of February 2020 were impossibly complicated structures that no politician could ever hope to design. Think billions of individuals around the world pursuing their narrow work specialization on the way to enormous global plenty. Put another way, the shelves in economically free countries were heaving with all manner of products based on economic cooperation that was staggering in scope. Brilliant as some experts claim to be, and brilliant as some politicians think they are as they look in the mirror, they could never construct the web of trillions of economic relationships that prevailed before the lockdowns. But they could destroy the web. And they did; that, or they severely impaired it. In which case let’s please not insult reason by talking about ‘shortages’ or ‘inflation’ now. Let’s instead be realistic and talk about central planning.” (10/25/21)

https://brownstone.org/articles/governments-broke-the-supply-chains/